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 documents distortion of the history of science, blowing up out of proportion the achievments of female and racial minority scientists and deingrating white men. It also mentions as the inclusion of extraneous material on American Indian myths. These are bad things, don't get me wrong. The first distorts history, and the second wastes classroom time. But it is not promotion of junk science.
The last part of the article deals with errors in books, but the errors it mentions are clearly not deliberate or politcically motivated. They're unacceptable, to be sure, and undoubtedly concern about political correctness wastes resources that would otherwise be deployed to weed them out, but the article does not show any evidence of modern textbooks distorting science itself in the name of political correctness.
my entire yard could go bamboo and I'd be happy as all get out - my lawn is a shambles no matter what I do, as I have many mature oaks and long-needle pines on the property and relatively poor sandy soil.
Chain saw...Bonfire...Round up.
Smiling.
in all fairness: just about anything having to do with environmental science must be looked at with extreme skepticism, as it *has* been very badly corrupted by greenies, anti-capitalism, and PC.
In what post did I say the textbooks continued to carry inaccurate drawings.
Sorry, I had you confused with TASMANIANRED.
One year I got enough grapes to make a vin santo--
Here ya go:
Even a warehouse full of broken clocks can be right twice a day.
on the same note: in this age of insane obesity, wiring jaws shut has disappeared - despite the fact that it works.
This would not surprise me, though I wonder how many middle and high schools teach environmental science at all. It seems too specialized for children that young. But I"m sure some public school districts teach PC infested environmentalism.
When I was in middle and high school, we concentrated on physics, chemistry, geology, and biology. Such hard sciences are pretty hard to infect with PC, and from what I've seen, they haven't been.
That's not to say public schools are doing a good job teaching them, of course, 'cause they're not. Political correctness may be indirectly responsible for this, though, as it tends to denigrate hard subjects. They're bad for children's self esteeem, don't you know.
Eeew. Product placement.
The squirrels are running a secret vinter!
Round up works well with leafy plants but you still hafta kill the root.
Things that can send up sprouts from the root like grape vines and poke you gotta starve the root and then poison it.
Round up works.
Compulsive eating is an awful thing to watch.
Even on a thick old vine with no leaves? Well, I'll try it. I'm trying to clear a walking path through the woods. I'm scared of roundup because I might miss the muskies and hit the laurel.
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