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.
As others have pointed out, a biochemist -- not Wells -- actually was the one to publicize that fact.
Meanwhile, the huge number of errors and misrepresentations in creationist Wells' own book have been exposed by many others:
Do Biology Textbooks Pit Evolution Against Theism? - A response to Jonathan Wells (Comparing specific textbooks' actual passages against Wells's charges against them -- Wells found to be dishonest.)...and many more.ICONS OF EVOLUTION? Why much of what Jonathan Wells writes about evolution is wrong
The Talented Mr. Wells Mything the point: Jonathan Wells' bad faith
And yet, the creationists *continue* to repeat Wells's flawed claims, long after the gross errors in them have been shown to them. There's a huge irony here -- Wells was trying to attack what he said were "icons of evolution", but even though almost all of his arguments have misfired badly and been found to be grossly flawed, the incorrect claims in his book have become favorite "icons of anti-evolution".
You yourself have already been made previously aware of the many inaccuracies in Wells's book several times, such as in this post made to you last November.
Really? Do you recall the context?
I've posted my photo montage a dozen times or so and not one creationist has ever tried to identify the embryos. If the embryo drawings are flawed in some way that would be obvious to the layman or high school student, the photographs ought to make that evident.
In a biology book? Of course not. As some kind of evolution form common descent? I don't think so.
In a biology book? Of course not. As some kind of evolution form common descent? I don't think so.
Wow, that's the most ludicrously transparent and laughably inept straw man I've seen on these forums in weeks, and that's really saying something.
And for the record, no, embryonic development is not like "folding a paper crane" either, so you if you're going to try to dishonestly attack biology using a straw man argument, you should at least attempt not to f*** up even the easy stuff.
Why don't you save your bitter bogus attacks for rubes who might actually not be able to point out the enormous flaws in them? Your own frequent victious (yet clumsily inept) attacks on biology are far more blatant examples of fraud and error than any of the rare stumbles from biology itself.
But then, that's par for the course for the anti-evolutionists. They have far more spite than actually valid material to work with.
Bees Pacific.
He linked the ping list as proof.
surely the DUmmie mentioned our fetish for kittens?
Interesting. And a small confirmation of what we're doing with these science threads -- although I'm not concerned with impressing DU. But that was probably not the response that was hoped for.
No, but remember liberals have NO sense of humor so I'm not surprised they understand why we like the Viking Kittens.
I did name my new cat "Zot"
I can't believe that Scientific American published an editorial that actually makes sense. When it comes to pure science journalism, they can't be beat but when it comes to their editorials...bleagh.
Well, I'm sure you aren't, but impressing mentally deranged liberals probably isn't hard to do.
Sort of like entertaining small children with a sparkler
An embryonic marsupial has an egg tooth which is later reabsorbed, just as its reptilian ancestors did.
So Haeckel's recapitulation theory was based on facts. He generalized too far, and made some bad claims, but the theory was not just speculation.
References: See Talk Origins 2.4, examples 1 and 5
Ontogenetic and phylogenetic transformations of the ear ossicles in marsupial mammals (Journal of Morphology)
I know. It surprised me too. I figured I should post it, because it's pretty much a refutation of all the crazed claims that creationists like to make about how science functions. To a creationist, all of science is done by jerks like Hwang. (Given their experience with creationist websites, it's understandable, as all creation "scientists" are like Hwang.)
This fraud was outed by a Korean pajamahadeen, not the precious system.
A confession of fraud from an insider or finding duplicated images is likely to be faster than the process of trying to reproduce the results in other labs. If you're trying to reproduce someone else's work and the experiment doesn't work, your first thought is that you did something wrong, not that the work in the other lab was a fraud.
Indeed, in this case, the peer-reviewers didn't--it was a Korean version of our own Buckhead.
There's also Gerald Schatten, who sought to ride Whang's coattails without looking too closely at his meal ticket.
What this story shows is that scientists are as flawed as you or I, as are the peer-reviewers.
Remember the rhetoric about stemcell research going up to the last prez election? All the fundmentalists that threatened the priesthood of science and its holy temple?
Like an echo chamber of the evo threads.
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