Well, just maybe:
Posted on 02/24/2006 1:06:12 PM PST by DeweyCA
Last May, a Korean report in Science magazine prompted headlines around the world by declaring it had made tremendous advances in the heretofore disappointing field of embryonic stem cell (ES cell) research. It has now prompted much soul-searching in media land. “How could we have been fooled?” reporters are asking themselves in print.
Well, wake up guys, because the major science and medical journals have been fooling you for years. And what appeared to be a trickle when I first wrote on it in 1999 has become a torrent.
In fairness, for many submitted papers it’s quite difficult for journal editors and assigned peer-reviewers to spot data manipulation. This is especially true for that generated from a single lab. But not so if it’s pulled from some public source.
Consider a report by three environmentalist authors back in 1988 in Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), analyzing male-female birth ratios between 1970 and 1990. The authors found male births declining, and predictably blamed man-made chemicals. Yet public data going back to 1940 showed gender ratios are always changing, for no obvious reason. Years that disproved their thesis were simply sliced out.
Fast forward to September 2005, right after Hurricane Katrina. Activists – including those in white lab coats – saw a grand opportunity to tie the exceptionally violent hurricane season to global warming. A study in Science declared, “A large increase was seen in the number and proportion of hurricanes reaching categories 4 and 5.”
But again, the researchers simply cut off their data at 1970, although public statistics go back to 1850. As with the gender ratio study, using the full data set would have reversed the conclusion. Why did the editors and peer-reviewers at both JAMA and Science not insist on use of the full data set? Because slicing off inconvenient data is a time-honored tool of advocacy science.
Yet published studies at least are subject to debunking. Try reading between lines that don’t exist because journals refuse to publish them.
Such was the case this month when Science killed a paper at the very last minute by respected British scientist Peter Lawrence. It criticized “the cult of political correctness” that insists men and women are born thinking alike. Editor-in-chief Donald Kennedy explained it didn’t “lead to a clear strategy about how to deal with the gender issue – as if Science hasn’t published countless papers on global warming with no strategy on how to deal with it.
In fact, among the hundreds of articles on global warming in Science and its British counterpart, Nature, trying finding one that doesn’t take the doomsayer party line.
Some journal editors are completely unabashed about their chicanery. In 2004 The Lancet released ahead of publication and right before the 2004 U.S. presidential election an outrageous report claiming 100,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed since the U.S. invasion. Yet other calculations showed a range of 15,000 - 24,000 – and even bin Laden claimed just “over 15,000.”
No matter, the Lancet’s editor took the opportunity to blast “democratic imperialism” and said "the evidence we publish today must change heads as well as pierce hearts.”
Even Science’s awful stem cell embarrassment wasn’t purely a matter of fraud. I have written repeatedly on how both Science and Nature have turned themselves into cheerleaders for any supposed advance in ES cell science, while opening their pages to laughable attacks on what many see as both medically and ethically superior – namely using adult stem cells.
Perhaps the best explanation for why the Korean paper slipped by is that the editors so desperately wanted to believe it was real that they missed all the warning signs of fraud.
If you think I’m cherry-picking, consider I’ve only cited papers from three of the world’s top four medical and science journals. Nothing here from the Annals of Aneurisms. Further, the problems with all these papers were readily apparent before publication and all reports were on politically-charged issues.
Bottom line: First, there needs to be an outside body of peer-reviewers not picked by the journals themselves. Second, the media need to stop treating medical and science journals as somehow sacrosanct. Like seemingly everything in today’s world, they’ve gone political.
Michael Fumento is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., the author of BioEvolution.
Too often science is being manipulated to achieve political ends (usually liberal).
That's better.
Well, just maybe:
JAMA has become useless.
BTTT
It's been going on for more than 35 years!
Why is this news?
"Discover" is a science magazine aimed more @ the layman. I subscribed for years, & devoured every issue, until liberal propaganda began trickling in. Eventually I stopped subscribing. Same w/ "National Geographic."
This lead paragraph certainly isn't plain to me. Is it missing a word or sentence? Are we to have prior knowledge that the Korean report turned out to be fraudulent? Were they fooled by not realizing that prior results had been "disappointing"?
While scientific fraud certainly happens, I happen think it is pretty rare. Perhaps I'm just a foolish optimist though.
It's way too common. I've seen a credible scientist outwardly threatened with never getting another peer review if he didn't change his findings so that the group could keep the money coming. He caved.
There was over a billion in funding involved, not to mention a green stranglehold on tens of millions of acres of land that the bureaucrats are condemning to an eventual catastrophe. You're way too optimistic.
Well you've got the ad hominem method mastered. Now, do you have anything of substance to say about the content of the article?
About Michael Fumento:Michael Fumento is an author, journalist, and attorney specializing in science and health issues. He is a regular contributor to Townhall.com, and a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. He received his undergraduate degree while serving in the Army, where he achieved the rank of sergeant. In 1985 he was graduated from the University of Illinois College of Law.
He has been a legal writer for the Washington Times, editorial writer for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, and was the first "National Issues" reporter for Investor's Business Daily. In 2005 he reported from Iraq as an embed with the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force in Fallujah.
Mr. Fumento was the 1994 Warren T. Brookes Fellow in Environmental Journalism at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., a fellow with Consumer Alert in Washington, D.C., and a science correspondent for Reason magazine.
Mr. Fumento was a nominee for the prestigious National Magazine Award. His articles have appeared around the world, including Readers' Digest, The Atlantic Monthly, Forbes, The New Republic, USA Weekend, The Washington Monthly, Reason, The Weekly Standard, National Review, Policy Review, The Bulletin (Australia), BioScience News & Advocate (New Zealand), and The American Spectator. He's published in such newspapers as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, The Sunday Times of London, The Sunday Telegraph of London, the Jerusalem Post, the Apple Daily (Hong Kong), the Los Angeles Times, Investor's Business Daily, Washington Times, and the Chicago Tribune.
His television appearances include Nightline; ABC World News; ABC News 20/20; numerous programs on CBS; NBC; CNN; and Fox; PBS; MacNeil-Lehrer; CNBC; the BBC; the Canadian Broadcasting Network; C-SPAN; the Christian Broadcasting Network; Donahue; This Week with David Brinkley, ESPN, and many others.
Mr. Fumento has lectured on science and health issues throughout the nation and the world, including Great Britain, France, the Czech Republic, Greece, Austria, China, and South America. He has authored five books:
The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS
Science Under Siege
Polluted Science
The Fat of the Land
BioEvolution: How Biotechnology Is Changing Our WorldMichael Fumento lives in Arlington, Virginia with his wife and two cats.
Yup. A real pathetic kook.
"Bottom line: First, there needs to be an outside body of peer-reviewers not picked by the journals themselves. Second, the media need to stop treating medical and science journals as somehow sacrosanct. Like seemingly everything in today’s world, they’ve gone political. "
Now there is -- the Internet, which is the most-demanding of peer-reviews not cherry-picked and limited to only those predisposed to see things the way they do -- assuming the same premises which is usually the flaw of why they arrive at the wrong conclusions together. Job number one has to be questioning the assumptions and premises because once they are invalid, logic cannot override a false conclusion -- but will confer legitimacy.
It's happening not only in science but all the realms of reporting -- how it is revealed that the reporting is deficient and there is no "objective," godlike viewpoint because of their journalism or mass communications training. The difference is that nobody else goes around claiming "objectivity," but these journalists -- and once they start without their presumption about these things, there's a chance that they can realize their own limitations in the understanding.
That is the weakness -- the presumption (overestimation) of one's understanding which journalists are trained to conceal. The real contribution to science and understanding is learning those inflection points at which the presumed known is really the great unknown -- and then entire worlds of inquiry open up. But if one reports on the presumed known as though they were absolute certainties, that precludes further inquiry and thought on the matter -- and that's the fatal flaws in the understanding that when finally re-examined, produce breakthroughs.
That's the problem of academic writing -- that it seeks to exclude the audience rather than inviting the largest audience possible. In this way, academics have cut themselves off from the general, larger audience -- and so their pronouncements are irrelevant and unread. The AP style is becoming similarly unreadable because of the more engaging style of communications manifested by Internet writing that observes no protocols and thus are free to question everything. Internet writing subsumes all others; that is the march of evolution -- in science and understanding. It doesn't just present another alternative to add to all the clutter -- it replaces all the other with a better, more useful language -- that is also the thought process.
Well any at all is way too common for my liking. All I am saying is that I have been a part of, or collaborated on, quite a few papers and I have never seen or even suspected any dishonesty. That said, the vast majority of this didn't deal with big money grants (primarily in academia and internal reports on apolitical topics). More the type of research people do because they have genuine concern/interest rather than some political or monetary ambition.
You cannot be a green without being blind.
There is a difference between being green and being a watermelon. Conservation is a conservative principal!
'Science' cannot be manipulated. The demotic public is too ignorant to discern science from hucksterism. The science wars have been going on for at least a generation. For a cartoon of the conflict, read Alan Sokal's essay, 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Qunatum Gravity'. For a balanced look read the genre epitomized by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt's 'Higher Superstition' or 'The Flight From Science and Reason'. Tagline...
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