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.
What exhaustive set of links?
Of course. Synteny, though, is not contiguous and jumps from chromosome to chromosome.
The precise details of the nature of the phylogenetic separation of humans from the African great apes has remained uncertain. Genetic studies indicated that humans and chimpanzees are the most closely related pair for much of the genome [1–4]. However, for some fraction of the genome, they are not [1, 3, 4]. Such data are consistent with a model in which alleles segregated differently among the three eventual lineages [1, 4, 19–21]. Some alleles that were polymorphic in the common ancestor of gorilla, chimpanzees, and humans became fixed within the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees before the latter two lineages separated. This, along with new mutations in the human-chimpanzee common ancestor, accounts for the higher genetic relatedness of chimpanzees and humans that appears to encompass the majority of the genome [1, 3, 4]. However, at positions in the genome where allelism was maintained throughout the period of existence of the human-chimpanzee common ancestor, some of the same alleles that became fixed in the gorilla lineage may also have been fixed in only one of the human or chimpanzee lineages. The HERV-K-GC1 provirus provides a compelling piece of evidence for such a model, as it is the clearest example to date of a specific locus within the genome where chimpanzees and gorillas are more closely related to each other than either is to humans. Moreover, since neutral alleles are maintained in a population for only a limited time that depends on the size of the population [4, 19–24], the data presented here imply that the separation of the Homo, Pan, and Gorilla lineages occurred within a period of time that was sufficiently short for such allelism to be maintained. The significance of the work presented here is the demonstration of the utility of HERV-K as a marker for studying human evolution, the conclusion that HERV-K was active at about the time that the three lineages were evolutionarily separating, and the very strong experimental evidence that, in some fraction of the genome, chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas are more closely related to each other than any of them is to humans. HERV-K and other retrotransposable elements should contribute to determining what that fraction is.
Barbulescu, M.; Turner, G.; Su, M.; Kim, R.; Jensen-Seaman, M.; Deinard, A.; Kidd, K.; Lenz, J. "A HERV-K provirus in chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas, but not humans." Current Biology, 2001, 11:779-783.
You so funny! One clicks on the link and there it is in its entirety and in its context.
You are not dealing with an honest person here. Anyone who says a link to the original source is "out of context" is incapable of being truthful.
Excellent post sir.
Why is that?
Very interesting...
And I swear, I thought you were you know who
From conversations with a number of scientists I have an understanding that when it comes to their's and other's work, they are not afraid to tear apart the work of even their friends if it looks susceptible to criticism. In fact it seems a rite of passage to present a paper at a conference and successfully deflate the rather pointed questions from the assembled crowd of fellow scientists. This is far from a conspiracy and seem to work well in filtering out poorly produced research.
Generally the organization that funded the dig. However, casts, photographs and inventory of not just the fossils but the dig are always available to others for inspection and if I understand the scientists I've spoken to correctly it is quite possible to get permission to examine the originals as long as you have valid credentials/associations.
There is no conspiracy to 'hide' the fossils.
"I have these wild muscadene(?) grapevines in my backyard, against which I have been fighting what amounts to a holding action.
"I want to know how to kill them off entirely, as they are wasting space I'd rather have something nice and purty and useful growing in... like bamboo.
If you lived in a nice Canuck location like, say... Saskatchewan, you wouldn't have that problem.
AIG is on my "must check" list...
Then try kerosene.
I'm sorry, but one cannot draw such conclusions; it would be akin to saying that, if telephones exist, it disproves email.
Where this has not been done, especially for what would otherwise be a landmark find, alarm bells have gone off. Example: Sanjay Chatterjee and a find called "Eoavis," which creationists tend to accept uncritically because it supposedly undermines Archaeopteryx. It is apparently what creationists otherwise call even the best fossils, a seriously crushed pile of disarticulated bones which may be from more than one individual and perhaps more than one species. Whatever it really is, Chatterjee last I heard was still keeping it to himself.
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