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.
No one said that self-correction was FAST!
LC sans coffee placemark
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but they seem to be declining in number. Someone over there comes up with some pretty interesting archeology stories as well.
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I had the same happen to a large apple tree, but I know NOT the culprits!
Two trees, 12 feet tall, loaded with apples, and ONE is stripped!
Nothing on ground at ALL, and to me, both trees appear to be the same type (I've only had this property a year.)
The other tree - just fine!
We are baffled!
And how did it change the meaning in that particular paragraph?
You are mistaken.
See, you don't have to accuse people of lying :-)
ARRGH!!!
Story Problem Alert!
(One; if he's got the runs!)
Problem: You're assuming that those with differing number of chromosomes than the average are going to be abnormal because information is missing or duplicated, as with Down's syndrome. This is a faulty assumption. Many of the cases of differing chromosome count shown above are due to combining two chromosomes or by splitting one into two. All of the information is still present, it's just organized in a different manner. These chromosomal addition or division events can initiate the dawn of a new species if the end result is offspring reproductively isolated from the parent population.
It doesn't seem to faze THIS fellow.....
NIV Psalms 139:11-17
11. If I say, "Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,"
12. even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.
13. For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb.
14. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.
15. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth,
16. your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.
Crickets.... so far.
What you are demanding in that post is the privilege to make a derogatory claim (i.e. a group is a bunch of liars) then be exempt from any challenge "(a request to ask for specifics) shall be malicious."
Why not just not call people liars?
You are RIGHT!
wow... that is wierd.
it'd make sense if you had rode tha lightnin'...
because we have been instructed *not* to call fellow posters liars.
If *you* wish to petition the Almighty Mods to grant me permission to answer your challenge without fear of the promised repercussions, and successfully gain me that permission, I will gladly provide you with a sample of atr least three exemplars of each of the three types of common nonsense I detailed earlier, with full citation.
Otherwise, I fear you will simply have to look through the crevo threads yourself. It wouldn't really take you too long - the endlessly reiterated (and corrected) fallacies and deliberate falsehoods are rather abundant and difficult to miss.
So why did you?
I didn't call any FReeper a liar - I followed the letter of the law.
"Dispute? I comment; you decide."
I decide that you are trolling, because this has nothing to do with what I was talking about. This isn't one of the links I was commenting on. Like your bible-quote-spam, you here posted something completely divorced from the conversation. Elsie, you are truly a snore.
" And how did it change the meaning in that particular paragraph?"
You made it look like Darwin didn't have an answer when he did.
" See, you don't have to accuse people of lying :-)"
Yes, ignorance will often be the answer too. Not that that was an issue, because in that paragraph I never said you had lied. You were mistaken, about a great many things. :)
And why should I take what you say seriously?
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