What do unicorns owe us?

A thing about Theranos is that while it was doing all the alleged frauds that made it famous, it was also not publishing the details of its allegedly fraudulent technology in scientific journals. Had it done so, goes a fairly compelling argument, someone would have sniffed out the scam.

But is publishing your science actually important for startups? According to a new paper from researchers at Stanford University, not when the metric is money. Looking at unicorns — private companies with valuations exceeding $1 billion — the researchers found no correlation between how much they’re worth and how many papers they’ve published.

The unquestioned assumption is that publishing your work is good and that “stealth research,” as the authors call it, is bad. But as the medicinal chemist Derek Lowe points out, since when did publishing become a primary function of fledgling companies whose limited resources are probably better spent on pipettes than peer review? And, going back to Theranos, there's no guarantee the process of open science would have saved the day if the company had published. Peer review is a good way to spot inconsistencies in science, but it’s not always adept at catching outright lies, which people tell all the time.