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.
Atheist science is the Soviet experience dressed up in white lab coats.
Here's the clue, PH: the system itself is rotten. Cheering because the high priests of atheist science occasionally clean away a little filth from between the toes does mean the decaying creature attached to the toes is somehow thereby made wholesome.
They are in no particular order.
Pharyngeal slits - a series of openings that connect the inside of the throat to the outside of the "neck". These are often, but not always, used as gills.
Dorsal nerve cord - a bundle of nerve fibers which runs down the "back". It connects the brain with the lateral muscles and other organs.
Notochord - cartilaginous rod running underneath, and supporting, the nerve cord.
Post-anal tail - an extension of the body past the anal opening.
Here's a Weekly Standard article that address errors, and P.C., in science textbooks.
In what post did I say the textbooks continued to carry inaccurate drawings.
They didn't wait.
The drawings were found to be fraudulent in 1874. Haeckel confessed that they were in 1909. That constitutes a wait.
"the usual cowflop" placemarker
*ten* digits on each extremity?
:)
NEW post 181 by JCEccles on 05 Mar 2006. Atheist science is the Soviet experience dressed up in white lab coats.
thanks.
hrmn... does it irk you in a particularly piercing manner when religious whack-jobs manage to convince their cults that they have determined the exact date of the Day of Judgement... and the day passes completely uneventfully?
lol, not too much of a drinker myself, but I'm thinking of planting some pinot grapes, perhaps pinot gris.
if ever you plant grapevines on your property, be certain they remain under control.
some grapevines can go postal and become some of the worst weeds imaginable.
yes, I know that, thanks.
good. you are welcome.
do you, by any chance, *know how to kill such weeds off*?
A Textbook Case of Junk Science
From the May 9, 2005 issue: What our children is learning?
by Pamela R. Winnick
05/09/2005, Volume 010, Issue 32
Page 2 of 2 < Back
Addison-Wesley, another imprint of Pearson Education, is so keen on political correctness that it lists a multicultural review board of nonscientists in its Science Insights: Exploring Matter and Energy, published in 1994 but still in use. Houghton Mifflin says it overemphasizes minorities and women to "encourage" students from these groups. A spokesman for Pearson Education blames the states for demanding multiculturalism.
If it's the states that impose multiculturalism, however, they're only doing the bidding of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1995, the academy published the National Science Education Standards, which, according to academy president Bruce Alberts, "represent the best thinking . . . about what is best for our nation's students." The standards (which explicitly place religion on a par with "myth and superstition") counsel school boards to modify "assessments" for students with "limited English proficiency" by, for example, raising their scores. They tell teachers to be "sensitive" to students who are "economically deprived, female, have disabilities, or [come] from populations underrepresented in the sciences." Teachers should especially encourage "women and girls, students of color and students with disabilities."
This "best thinking" of the nation's scientific elite is being used by nearly all the 50 states as they centralize their science standards. With 22 states now requiring statewide adoption of textbooks, big-state textbook markets are the prizes for which publishers compete.
A study commissioned by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation in 2001 found 500 pages of scientific error in 12 middle-school textbooks used by 85 percent of the students in the country.
Link is posted in a later post.
Woops........
No wonder I get so darn many typo's....Too many fingers on the keyboard.
Klatoo Nicto Barada.
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