I am talking about this study:
They basically did not stick to the agreed protocol, took a huge amount of money, and produced a very Merck friendly paper. Merck is a major sponsor of many universities, and pays the top dogs in the field nice “consulting” fees. Go figure what happened.
This conclusion
expression levels of AR-dependent genes in skin did not differ among groups
is absolutely not possible given what the Di Loreto paper had already found (namely overexpressed AR).
Something is seriously fishy about this study. I don’t want to go on further about this in public and risk facing retaliation of some sort. Just want to say, I don’t want a repeat of this disaster.