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.
It's forgivable though.
That's a college text. The concerns are directed at the middle and high school texts and there doesn't seem to be any dispute that they are legitmate concerns.
Creationists are really looking silly being self-righteous about this when their own house is in such disorder, veracity wise.
When state ed. departments start buying creationist textbooks, I'm sure they will be more than scrutinized.
efficiency when combined with the notion of "special creation" would predict that the human embryo would not develop features which would not be present in the child (gillslits and tails, for example), as doing so squanders energy and biological activity for no utility.
so, again, these ontogenic processes do *suggest* common descent.
eh?
I thought it was "Klaatu Barada Nicto"
unless you are Ash, in which case it would be "Klaatu Barada Ngh-cough!"
It's not the first report that I have seen.
I have also had the benefit of flipping through my teenaged neice and nephew's textbooks.
I wouldn't allow them in the fireplace in my house.
Can you articulate any of these lies, distortions etc.?
Grapes only grow on new wood.
If you want them to be productive, you have to prune,prune,prune.
"Can you articulate any of these lies, distortions etc.?"
Ichneumon did a good job here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1590429/posts?page=150#150
How about you personally from what you seen while lurk or post on crevo threads? Can you cite lies told by creationists?
And it continues to be a very long wait.
Writer hypothesizes widespread scientific fraud
"I'm here to talk about the relationship between scientific evidence and the truth. There has never even been a scientific study to see how often scientific fraud happens. I find it shocking that scientists haven't even done a study to answer that," said Gareth Cook, Boston Globe writer and Pulitzer Prize winner.
And I would wager donuts to dollars that the results would show a heavy skew towards fraud in the biological sciences.
This page has a real audio segment in which an editor from "Science" makes this revealing comment. ...but we are not prepared mentally to believe that facts are false. Since I am not about to transcribe the whole thing, you must listen to it to get the context. BTW, I'm not prepared in any fashion to believe that facts are false, that is why I check things.
Haha, that's very funny. Haha.
I don't want them to grow - I want them to DIE
I have these wild muscadene(?) grapevines in my backyard, against which I have been fighting what amounts to a holding action.
I want to know how to kill them off entirely, as they are wasting space I'd rather have something nice and purty and useful growing in... like bamboo.
Con Men in Lab Coats [how science corrects itself]
Should read "Evolutions in straight jackets"
Cut them off near the base and soak the stump with Round up.
Don't put Round Up on the roots, they wont take it up.
The sad thing about the crevo debate is the fanaticism with which evo critics are attacked, and not necessarily because they are creationist. Fred Hoyle never got a Nobel Prize and some think that was because he was an evo skeptic.
You must be using a Southern Dialect.
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