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.
[Nature, Sept 1, 2005]
I'm not sure what the problem is supposed to be here.
Have they actually found ERVs at the same locus that don't follow the phylogenetic tree? If so, please highlight whewre they say so.
Sometimes ignorance can be quite tenacious.
I'm afraid you don't know just how right you are.
You are discussing apples and oranges. The insertions you listed were made after the split and are not found in the same regions of DNA. The ones RNW mentioned were made before the split and are found in identical regions of the DNA.
By their perpetual silence, the Creos seem to endorse such.
I've been on these threads for nearly eight years. Believe me, I've seen ignorance even more unassailable than yours.
When you figure out how the sky can give birth to a bacteria get back to me
You didn't read PH's note at the top of thread
did you?
How is this relevant? Did the DNA change over the last seven years? If you have a problem with the data itself then say so.
If germ line infection is this common -- which it seems to be -- seeing or not seeing comonalities in organisms sharing common descent is not as important as stressed by the evangelists at to.
It is not common at all apparently (compared with other selfish DNA elements).
But even if it was common, you would seriously expect to see insertions at the same position? For Multiple ERVs?
Remember we are talking about 3 billion base pairs!
Note, ignorance != stupidity. If I had used the latter, you would be justified in citing an ad hominem attack. However, I do not consider you stupid, simply willfully ignorant.
PH,
You truly live in, a most blissful world.
Regards,
Boiler Plate
Perhaps for those who revere Harley Earl. (Who didn't design the Harley-Davidson.)
marker
However, I do not consider you stupid, simply willfully ignorant.
You know for some reason I feel the same way
about you.
It is in the post you replied to.
They suggest it must be due to separate germline insertions. They were surprised to see this.
First reply yet that made any sense.
I'm getting seriously confused.
Where do they say these are in the same position on the various chromosomes?
Thanks
Now *this* is something that might perhaps raise an eyebrow. But they do not mention anything with respect to chromosomal location.
That is his intention.
I think they were surprised because they found a new element.
That is the suggestion.
If true, and I am not arguing against the suggestion, it is indicative, as I said, that such commonalities are in fact more common than made out to be in arguments for their being evidence of common descent.
The reason the suggestion is made in the chimp genome paper that these are separate germ line insertions is becuase it was surprising to see them.
My point is only that it is not as pat and simple and cut and dried as the evangalists at t.o. make it appear.
Genomic science is fascinating and shouldn't be filtered with pre-conceived notions whose main purpose in the first place was as a form of evangelisim.
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