DAVID SHAYWITZ and Mathai Mammen’s suggestion to create “open innovation communities’’ for drug development sounds like a very bad idea (“The next killer app,’’ Op-ed, Jan. 30). I have little doubt that a lot of nonsense would emerge in such online communities, and some of it would actually cause harm.
Such an environment amplifies any anecdotal notion that catches the fancy of the crowd, without regard to whether it is true.
The great physicist Richard Feynman said it best when he noted that science is a way of trying not to fool yourself — and that you are the easiest person to fool.
Lawrence J. Krakauer
Wayland 
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