Posted on 04/17/2012 12:28:14 PM PDT by neverdem
Naoki Mori, the Japanese cancer researcher who has had 30 papers retracted by scientific journals, was asked to give his side of the story. In an e-mail, he acknowledged that his colleagues “were lax in certain regards in the preparation of papers,” but he denied having committed a grave offense.
The studies were retracted because they used pictures from older papers, rather than from the experiments described in the studies. “I think this reuse is not a scientific misconduct,” Dr. Mori wrote.
He and his colleagues studied the response of human cells to infection by bacteria and viruses. To measure that response, the researchers put molecules from the cells in a slab of gel and used electric current to draw them from one end of the slab toward the other. They then took photographs to show how far the molecules traveled; different types of molecules travel different distances.
To be sure that all the slabs contain the same amount of material from cells, scientists run a test on them using certain standard proteins. Dr. Mori claims he recycled only pictures of these so-called loading controls, which had no direct bearing on his results. “The central conclusions of the retracted papers have been demonstrated by other investigators,” he wrote.
But Dr. Ferric C. Fang, the editor in chief of Infection and Immunity, which retracted half a dozen of the Mori papers, dismissed that explanation. “It is very disappointing that Dr. Mori continues to maintain his innocence,” he said.
He noted that loading controls in one experiment say nothing about the results in another experiment. And he pointed out that Dr. Mori reprinted other kinds of figures, too, sometimes claiming they showed results from different species of bacteria. “This is a flagrant example of scientific misconduct,” Dr. Fang said.
Still, Dr. Mori’s...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
At first, I thought this might be an article about the “hockey stick”. But then, I saw that it was from the NYT.
The title disgusts me. These are not "mistakes". Scientific fraud is an intentional crime against science and is never justified, innocent, or forgivable.
They’re preparing to “walk back” the anthropogenic global warming hoax.
They’re “setting the table” with a narrative about “mistakes.” By doing this, they’re hoping to save the careers of some of the ringleaders, and protect the future viability of their graduate students. Give some ground today, fight again tomorrow.
Thanks for the link.
Throwing out all science because a few scientific findings were in error or deliberately false is like throwing out all your money because some bills in the past have been counterfeit.
Nobody on this thread has called for “throwing out all science”. Instead we need to raise our standards and come down hard on scientists who lie/cheat. There are federal fraud statutes, but they should also lose their tenure, jobs and pensions. Make it high risk to lie/cheat in scientific papers and watch the design of experiments tighten up quickly.
The fate of scientists caught up with fraud is about as close to total exile as exists in this world. With the notable exception of the global warmists.
Does “exile” allow them to keep their ill-gotten gains?
Thanks neverdem.
I think they did that to Ward Churchill - not a scientist by any but a fevered stretch of the imagination - but definitely academic fraud.
He wrote a paper under a ‘sock puppet’ name citing the wonderful research of one Ward Churchill. That upped his supposed relevance in the field of navel-gazing racial grievances. Nobody else would read that crap - let alone cite it in their own work; so he had to do it himself!
I think the problem is much deeper than people think. First, there are nations that work a system of state-organized intellectual fraud, such as china. You have fake scientists writing fake papers for fake journals etc. And it's hard to check because it's all in china and we just have to take their word on it. Likewise with graduate students (and undergrads) who come from china: their credentials are often fake, exaggerated and unverifiable. And yet they are accepted in our schools, displacing westerners. The story is similar in other asian countries. What passes as research in some asian unis is total crap, but as long as everyone pretends, then it's a pass. We in the west buy into this fraud, this ridiculous show. We believe them. It's the multicultural mindset at work.
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