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.
They may be wrong, but I've been asking for over a year, and no evolution critic has been able or willing to say exactly what is wrong about them or how the unspecified wrongness is crucial to some thought or another.
The response to my photos suggests they just don't want kids to know that early embryos are difficult to distinguish. The fact that a textbook has gone to the trouble of selecting a series of photos that emphasizes differences by spreading out the timeframe pretty much clinches this.
;^)
"Argumenta." Mea culpa.
If you don't have a local copy maybe you could ping the list and see if anyone has a copy cached. I don't here but I'll check on it when I get home.
WFT? I have been on topic all along, it's you who's all over the map.
The "actual topic" is that you said most embryonic stem cell investigators don't think their work will eventually yield revolutionary medical treatments implying that most are charlatans and hucksters like Hwang.
"Rebuilding my about page after SOMEBODY came along and deleted it...".
Found it on Google too. Crisis averted!
I didn't know about = I didn't know about them.
No problem. See 452.
Thanks, but it won't be necessary.
You can't assume anything about people getting back to you. I'd restore first and edit later. If you get banned, I'll apologize.
If you get banned, I'll apologize.
LOL. But seriously, that's what subsequently happened to the poster I referred to who was trying to rebuild his homepage.
It makes no sense to go into an area of research that you don't think will work. In order to get grants extended you would need to falsify evidence. If you're in an area that attracts a lot of interest, like stem cell research, others will attempt to reproduce and build upon your results. If no one else can make your procedures work, you will soon be under heavy scrutiny. At worst the fraud will be uncovered, at best you're at risk for loss of funding. Science cares about valid results. If your research isn't producing results, it's not going to get funded.
Most scientists who end up committing fraud such as this were working on something that they thought would work, they would prefer if it actually did work (much safer and simpler), and they only commit fraud when their grants are up for renewal and they are desperate for results.
After this happened my advisor made sure to tell us all that he didn't want any type of "help" like this from us, and that if we falsify results we'll be out of the group and certainly not getting a degree. We take scientific misconduct seriously.
Yeah. $3Billion is just chump change.
A lot of the evidence they cite is nit-picking ignoring the big picture. For instance, the Miller-Urey experiment is thought as definitive in the public imagination. Wells shows that the scientific consensus is that the atmosphere was not right to create amino acids as per Miller-Urey.
He's blasted for pointing out that the photographs of peppered moths in textbooks were staged. (They were and it was dishonest to do so)
Also, TO says: The strangest aspect of the book is the bizarre view of mainstream science Wells presents: The idea that a secret gang of "Darwinists" controls the teaching of evolution and uses coercion and deceit to suppress all disagreement! Does Wells present any evidence to support his claim of a Darwinist conspiracy that mercilessly persecutes any scientist who dares criticize the dogma?
I don't think there is any doubt that happens.
All of your "objections" are simple restatements of Wells's demolished points. The link deals with them adequately.
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