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.
Credibility goes out the window when science allows itself to be coopted by politics.
Still, Miller & Levine are not the only textbook authors & I wouldn't be surprised if some district somewhere is using a book that still has them.
And, sadly, I wouldn't be surprised if a publisher is still making such a book.
I think that's a fair statement. Peer review can catch low-quality fraud but the key to catching high-quality fraud is seeing whether the experiments can be reproduced in another lab.
Most of the links given her go outside the AIG website.
The business based on information theory is just silly. When you play 20 questions, information is provided by yes or no answers. When you reproduce with variation, information is provided by differential reproductive success. The source of information is not magic.
I stand corrected. What AiG really said not to use was
"‘The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics began at the Fall’. This law says that the entropy (‘disorder’) of the Universe increases over time"
They didn't explicitly disavow the erroneous thermodynamic argument against evolution (which is in fact an argument that life cannot exist)
If only AiG, DI, etc held themselves to the same standards that scientists do!
Or just submitted the studies to scientific review
I wonder if the creationists realize how much their impugning of the scientific process of self-correction resembles the "Bush lied, soldiers died" chants of the far-left moonbats.
I'm not arguing about anti evolution...
Any mammal with 4 extremities and a head with a forward face is going through the same developmental stages up to a point.
You have to get from 1 cell to a complex organism through some process.
The problem with captioning is I don't give a fig about species. I care about date....
Human can be differentiated from other species from 1 cell dependent on the chromosome count.
Not all humans have the same chromosome count. Not all humans with different chromosome counts are retarded or sterile.
Horses do not all share the same chromosome count.
they would probably have some qualms with your assertion that "Any mammal with 4 extremities and a head with a forward face is going through the same developmental stages up to a point."
let alone the similarities between human and non-mammalian embryos.
You are making my point...
Captions are necessary because a mouse is born at 21 days.
True it is bare and blind but it is air breathing and suckling.
A human at 21 days is what.......
So it should be easy to separate the mammals from the non-mammals in post number 58.
You must be younger than me.
A 21 day old human?
Larger animals have longer gestations. So what? Are elephants higher than humans on some scale other than one than measures mass?
The text book industry just like the education industry is dominated by the left.
Agenda's mean far more than truth.
They will publish any indoctrination theory that fits their agenda best.
Bingo.
You are using freaks, statistical outliers to support your position.
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