For John, BLUF: There seems to be a lot of fraud out there in science land.
Here is the link to an article on bad scientific research. The source is The Washington Post and the reporter is Peter Whoriskey. The story centers around Johns Hopkins University, but Reporter Zhang Jie contributed from Beijing. Here is the lede and the following few sentences:
The numbers didn’t add up.This article goes on for a while. Here is an item on the larger issue of retracted scientific articles:Over and over, Daniel Yuan, a medical doctor and statistician, couldn’t understand the results coming out of the lab, a prestigious facility at Johns Hopkins Medical School funded by millions from the National Institutes of Health.
He raised questions with the lab’s director. He reran the calculations on his own. He looked askance at the articles arising from the research, which were published in distinguished journals. He told his colleagues: This doesn’t make sense.
“At first, it was like, ‘Okay — but I don’t really see it,’ ” Yuan recalled. “Then it started to smell bad.”
His suspicions arose as reports of scientific misconduct have become more frequent and critics have questioned the willingness of universities, academic journals and the federal government, which pays for much of the work, to confront the problem.
Last year, research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the percentage of scientific articles retracted because of fraud had increased tenfold since 1975. The same analysis reviewed more than 2,000 retracted biomedical papers and found that 67 percent of the retractions were attributable to misconduct, mainly fraud or suspected fraud.This thing about bad articles (both wrong in terms of the research and plagiarized) is of sufficient size it has its own blog, Retraction Watch.
I love science and it has done quite a bit to advance civilization (although I think engineering has done more), but when there are questions about the research, one wonders what we can trust and not trust. This goes down for our visits to our primary care physician. Who knows if (a) he or she has the latest dope, and (b) if the latest information being used actually makes any scientific sense.
And, one wonders if the pressure of "publish or perish" is part of what leads otherwise good people to go astray.
Regards — Cliff
3 comments:
In my view, "engineering" is little more than "applied science." Thus, engineering gets off the hook for much of the "wrong pathway" error. Of course, human pride provides engineers plenty of opportunity to walk all over their respective scwhanze...and they rarely miss those opportunities.
Science, and much of what gets removed later is, IMHO, an outcome of the zeal of pushing the boundaries and the blindness that one experiences when one thinks they are on to something revolutionary. In the fighter business, it is called target fixation.
Beyond that, there is of course greed and the fear of failure (largely an outcome of the patently ridiculous requirement to publish or perish). As it stands, jealousy among scientists is legion and legendary. Ignaz Semmelweis was shunned by the entire medical science community for advancing the principle of washing hands between patient examinations in order to stop the frequency of puerperal fever, aka, childbirth fever.
That said, I would then posit that much of the crowing today about the decline in purity of scientific findings is, well, as bogus as much of the criticism that it exists. We have become a society of voyeuristic sensationalists.....always at someone's expense.
Science is limited by scientists. As one, I realize, we are flawed, as all others.
But, there is a remedy for human flaw, experiment.
Apples didn't just fall on Newton's head. They fell everywhere. When a theory is offered, one must also include the prescribed experiment, which can be duplicated by any like scientist with comparable equipment.
The more proprietary science becomes, the ability for 'peer review' becomes hobbled.
Yes, the bumps reside on the event horizon. Such science is fantastically expensive.
We rely on engineers to 'scale up.'
I group the pharmaceutical giants in with they tightly funded colleges and researchers .... When the rules are written in such ways that a requirement for continued funding requires one publish to demonstrate that a benefit is an outcome of the funding and to keep the flow going you must produce...it begs for fraud...
In the same light a drug company routinely falsifie data to get a drug to market to reap billions, only years later do we see the Jim sokolovs of the world advertising a lawsuit due to the deadly effects of the latest wonder drug, after a statistical number of patients die..same cause and effect here...
Ritchie T
Post a Comment