Con Men in Lab Coats [how science corrects itself]

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.

This is how it is supposed to work, but I question this. It works in fields where there is a lot of parallel research and interest, the "hip" science, but in other fields I don't see a willingness to verify other's work, or dig into the data in another paper. It is especially bad when the paper supports the prevailing belief, such as global warming.

Well said. But in the case of this Korean scientist, it didn't work at all because there was absolutely no check or real peer review.

This was a total political driven published article. It was published without any real review because it had political implications.

This article that started this thread is misplaced. Kennedy needs to lose his job. In this case it was plain and simply the editor and publisher that caused it.

Self correction in science is not correction of overt fraud. It is "correction" of theory and knowledge. What is being corrected is not fraud or pseudoscience but serious science done previously that falls short as ill any science done but was fine at the time.

This episode has nothing to do with the self-corrected nature of science because no science was done that needs to be corrected. Fraud is fraud, not science.

Darwin recanted on his deathbed.

He didn't, and the first person who made it up was likely lying. But those who cite it here are probably not. Anyway, rather than calling them liars why not just correct them by linking them to this AIG site?

Darwin is often quote mined here saying that he can't explain the eye and it gives him chills, when he goes on to say how evolution solves this *problem*. He is quite often quoted like that; take a rhetorical question/problem he raises and neglect to show how he actually answered it, trying to make it look like Darwin had no answer.

Quote mining is not necessarily lying. Of course TalkOrigins is another matter.

Here's what T.O. says about the Darwin and the eye:

Charles Darwin acknowledged the inadequacy of evolution when he wrote, To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. (Darwin 1872)

Source:

Huse, Scott. 1996. The Collapse of Evolution. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, p. 73.

Response:

The quote is taken out of context. Darwin answered the seeming problem he introduced. The paragraph continues,

Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound. (Darwin 1872, 143-144)

Darwin continues with three more pages describing a sequence of plausible intermediate stages between eyelessness and human eyes, giving examples from existing organisms to show that the intermediates are viable.

Now here's some of what they left out in the next "three pages". I won't post it all but I'll link to it to avoid the charge of "quote mining". The next paragraph:

In looking for the gradations by which an organ in any species has been perfected, we ought to look exclusively to its lineal ancestors; (CAN'T DO THAT) but this is scarcely ever possible, and we are forced in each case to look to species of the same group, that is to the collateral descendants from the same original parent-form, in order to see what gradations are possible, and for the chance of some gradations having been transmitted from the earlier stages of descent, in an unaltered or little altered condition. (CAN'T DO THAT) Amongst existing Vertebrata, we find but a small amount of gradation in the structure of the eye, and from fossil species we can learn nothing on this head. (In this great class we should probably have to descend far beneath the lowest known fossiliferous stratum to discover the earlier stages, by which the eye has been perfected.

THE NEXT PARAGRAPH -- The eyes of the Articulata.

THE NEXT PARAGRAPH -- He who will go thus far, if he find on finishing this treatise that large bodies of facts, otherwise inexplicable . . .(sorry quote mining :-)

THE NEXT PARAGRAPH -- It is scarcely possible to avoid comparing the eye to a telescope. We know that this instrument has been perfected by the long-continued efforts of the highest human intellects; and we naturally infer that the eye has been formed by a somewhat analogous process. But may not this inference be presumptuous? Have we any right to assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of man? , , ,

When all else fails say God did it :-) Anyway Darwin had no good answer concerning the eye. I mean "Further we must suppose that there is a power always intently watching each slight accidental alteration in the transparent layers" is not real definitive.

The allegation that early evolutionists latched on to evolution not because of the evidence but because of it's ramifications for sexual morality. They usually quote Julian or Aldous Huxley, though neither said anything like that

Can't say I've seen that one.

Claiming that there is no evidence for evolution.

Evolution is a word sometimes ill-defined in the debate. If one says one does not believe in common descent, and cites the lack of transitionals prior to the Cambrian Explosion, one is not necessarily lying. And if you say there were transitionals yet one should reject what you claim them to be, one is not necessarily lying either.

Your refusal to even look at the dozens of lies regarding quotations chronicled at TalkOrigins attests to your unwillingness to face the facts.

I often look at TalkOrigins. They are blinded by a bias far more unreasoning that anything at ICR, AIG or even DU.

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