Posted on 03/05/2006 10:14:03 AM PST by PatrickHenry
Five decades after it was revealed as a forgery, the Piltdown man still haunts paleoanthropology. Now, thanks to the disgraced stem cell researcher Woo Suk Hwang, cell biology has a high-profile scandal of its own to live down. Few recent papers in biology have soared as high in acclaim as Hwang's 2004 and 2005 announcements of cloning human embryonic stem cells -- or plummeted as fast into infamy with the discovery that they were rank fakes.
Embryonic stem cell (ESC) research is no less promising today than it was before Hwang's deceit was revealed; most investigators continue to believe that it will eventually yield revolutionary medical treatments. That no one has yet derived ESCs from cloned human embryos simply means that the science is less advanced than has been supposed over the past two years.
Still, Hwang has badly sullied the reputation of a field that already has more than its share of political and public relations problems. Some longtime opponents of ESC research will undoubtedly argue that Hwang's lies only prove that the investigators cannot be trusted to conduct their work ethically, and the public may believe them. This is one more crime against science for which Hwang should be ashamed. (A minor footnote to this affair is our removal of Hwang from the 2005 Scientific American 50 list; see the retraction on page 16.)
In recent years, fabricated data and other fakery have been uncovered in work on materials, immunology, breast cancer, brain aneurysms, the discovery of new elements and other subjects. As the volume of publication rises, fraud will probably rise with it. Because of the growing financial ties between university researchers and corporations, not to mention the jockeying for leadership among nations in high-stakes areas such as stem cells, some scientists may feel more pressure to deliver results quickly -- even if they have to make them up.
These affairs have something in common with the Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass scandals that not long ago rocked mainstream journalism: all these scams exploited the trust that editors extend to submitting authors. The editors and peer reviewers of scientific journals cannot always verify that a submitted paper's results are true and honest; rather their main job is to check whether a paper's methodology is sound, its reasoning cogent and its conclusions noteworthy. Disconfirmation can only follow publication. In that sense, the Hwang case shows how science's self-correcting mechanism is supposed to work.
Yet it is important not to brush off the Hwang case as a fluke without considering its lessons for the future. For instance, Hwang's papers had many co-authors, few of whom seem to have been party to the cover-ups. But what responsibilities should co-authors have for making sure that papers bearing their names are at the least honest?
We should also think hard about whether Hwang's deceit went undetected for months because so many scientists and science journalists wanted to believe that ESC research was progressing rapidly, because that would hasten the arrival of miraculous therapies and other biomedical wonders. Extraordinary results need to be held suspect until confirmed independently. Hwang is guilty of raising false expectations, but too many of us held the ladder for him.
captions would obviate the point of the post, Red: a challenge to the antievolutionist fraud-screamers to discriminate between one species' embryo and another.
He batting 1000 on this thread isn't he? /sarc
It was a whistle-blower in Dr. Hwang's lab who informed the South Korean television network MBC of problems in his work, and that led South Korean journalists to begin to investigate.
But for the whistle-blower, Dr. Hwang might well be continuing his meteoric career on the wings of his reports in Science and Nature.
Your logic is flawed. Noticing a difference is a delta, not an absolute.
He got praise from DU, and they got a FR platform to bash conservatives, so I guess he's happy.
You're right that reviewers don't try to replicate the results, but I wouldnt say CAN'T detect fraud. Reviewers and editors have found problems in figures that turned out to be fraudulent. See Nature 439, 520-521 (2 February 2006) "Forensic software traces tweaks to images"
That only states that 2 books have been corrected.
They aren't the only publishers of text books.
He = He's
So give a few examples. I'm not aware of any time a CRIDer has uncovered scientific error, much less fraud.
For that matter, I'm unaware of anytime a CRIDer has called out a fellow CRIDer on error or fraud, eg: doctored quotes, conveniently forgetting counterexamples, misapplying the laws of thermodynamics (actually AiG has disowned that one, finally)
Scientists are no better than anyone else, no more moral. No halo with that white coat, just the same doom to frailty and failure.
As I said, the chances of detection, and the severity of punishment, act as a deterrence.
Complimentary article in today's NYT Book Review grumping about the fact that science fiction has become more science and less fiction. Science, New England Journal of Medicine, etc. seem to have become more fiction and less science. Maybe Galaxy and Science passsed in the night. Anybody remember Worm Runner's Digest and Irreproducible Results?
But if the fraud artist is smart, he can ensure that such things are not going to show up.
One thing that must be noted is that different species begin to show different forms at different rates. If you take all the photos at the same day of gestation you will emphasize differences.
Yeah, and I'm sure they've apologized for previous teachings.
The trouble with all these pseudo-sciences like cosmology, evo, archeology, anthropology--they are ultimately unaccountable. They are interesting, entertaining. But when a "better explanation" comes along to replace "previous better explanation"--the previous one need not issue any apology. It just fades away.
No deterrance in these fields of fancy.
Yes, and fairly quickly. The damning thing was our textbooks carried what he did as fact for decades afterwards.
That is the funniest argument I have read in a long time.
In my developmental biology textbook in college, we had photographs, not drawings. iirc, that held true in the section on embryology in the basic bio text as well.
OK, Ichy so you stand by the claim that the textbooks *are* clear about the provisional nature of phylogenies, and do *not* teach them as "definitive" as your lie claimedwhich you have repeatedly failed to support or retract, or demonstrate that they were *ever* "distorted" in the way you claim at ANY time, by ANY textbook.
And, just to be sure, you are not going to take it back?
Sure, but that's the other big problem - when "science" is taken over by "politics"......
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