tribe of science
jstemwedel | September 16, 2009As promised, I've been thinking about the details of Chandok v. Klessig. To recap, we have a case where a postdoc (Meena Chandok) generated some exciting scientific findings. She and her supervisor (Daniel F. Klessig), along with some coworkers, published those findings. Then, in the fullness of time, after others working with Klessig tried to reproduce those findings on the way to extending the work, Klessig decided that the results were not sufficiently reproducible.
At that point, Klessig decided that the published papers reported those findings needed to be retracted. Retracting a…
jstemwedel | September 10, 2009You may remember my post from last week involving a case where a postdoc sued her former boss for defamation when he retracted a couple of papers they coauthored together. After that post went up, a reader helpfully hooked me up with a PDF of District Judge Joseph M. Hood's ruling on the case (Chandok v. Klessig, 5:05-cv-01076). There is a lot of interesting stuff here, and I'm working on a longer examination of the judge's reasoning in the ruling. But, in the interim, I thought you might be interested in the statements made by the defendant in the case, Dr. Daniel F. Klessig, that the…
jstemwedel | September 2, 2009I'm used to reading about cases of alleged scientific misconduct in science-focused publications and in major media outlets like the New York Times and the Boston Globe. I've had less occasion to read about them in law journals. But today, on the front page of the New York Law Journal, there's an article titled "Scientists Defamation Claims Over Colleagues Efforts to Discredit Her Research Are Dismissed". (The article is available to paid subscribers. This may be a good time to make a friend with access to a law library.)
The legal action the article describes was brought by a scientist…
jstemwedel | September 1, 2009Eugenie Samuel Reich is a reporter whose work in the Boston Globe, Nature, and New Scientist will be well-known to those with an interest in scientific conduct (and misconduct). In Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World, she turns her skills as an investigative reporter to writing a book-length exploration of Jan Hendrik Schön's frauds at Bell Labs, providing a detailed picture of the conditions that made it possible for him to get away with his fraud as long as he did.
Eugenie Samuel Reich agreed to answer some questions about Plastic Fantastic and…
jstemwedel | August 31, 2009
Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World
by Eugenie Samuel Reich
New York: Palgrave Macmillan
2009
The scientific enterprise is built on trust and accountability. Scientists are accountable both to the world they are trying to describe and to their fellow scientists, with whom they are working to build a reliable body of knowledge. And, given the magnitude of the task, they must be able to trust the other scientists engaged in this knowledge-building activity.
When scientists commit fraud, they are breaking trust with their fellow scientists and…
jstemwedel | August 21, 2009This week the New York Times reported on the problem of drug company-sponsored ghostwriting of articles in the scientific literature:
A growing body of evidence suggests that doctors at some of the nation's top medical schools have been attaching their names and lending their reputations to scientific papers that were drafted by ghostwriters working for drug companies -- articles that were carefully calibrated to help the manufacturers sell more products.
Experts in medical ethics condemn this practice as a breach of the public trust. Yet many universities have been slow to recognize the…
jstemwedel | August 19, 2009At Philosophers' Playground, Steve Gimbel ponders the pedagogically appropriate way to label William Dembski:
I'm wrapping up work on my textbook Methods and Models: A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science and have run into a question. ...
The evolutionary biology track's final piece deals with William Dembski's work on intelligent design theory. Therein lies the question. The way the exercises are laid out is in three parts labeled The Case, The Scientist, and Your Job. The second part is a brief biographical sketch (a paragraph, just a couple sentences about the person's…
jstemwedel | August 18, 2009Recently, Steinn brought our attention to some of the difficulties involved in getting a scientific journal to publish a "Comment" on an article. He drew on a document (PDF) by Prof. Rick Trebino of the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Physics detailing (in 123 numbered steps) his own difficulties in advancing what is supposed to be an ongoing conversation between practicing scientists in the peer reviewed scientific literature. Indeed, I think this chronology of exasperation raises some questions about just what interests journal editors are actually working towards, and about how…
jstemwedel | August 7, 2009For those of you who have been following the various online reviews of and reactions to Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's book Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, you may be interested in the Firedoglake Book Salon discussion of the book. The discussion takes place Saturday (tomorrow), 5-7 pm Eastern (2-4 pm Pacific; those of you in other time zones can probably calculate your local time equivalent better than I), will include author Chris Mooney, and will be hosted by yours truly.
Given that I'm pretty convinced I have the best commentariat in the…
jstemwedel | July 23, 2009Recently, I wrote a post about two researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) who were caught falsifying data in animal studies of immune suppressing drugs. In the post, I conveyed that this falsification was very bad indeed, and examined some of the harm it caused. I also noted that the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) meted out somewhat different penalties to the principal investigator (ten year voluntary exclusion from government funding and from serving in any advisory capacity with the PHS) and to her postdoc (three year voluntary exclusion from government funding…
jstemwedel | July 17, 2009As promised, in this post I consider the treatment of the science-religion culture wars in Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum. If you're just tuning in, you may want to pause to read my review of the book, or to peruse my thoughts on issues the book raised about what the American public wants and about whether old or new media give the American public what it needs.
In the interests of truth in advertising, let me state at the outset that this post will not involve anything like a detailed rehash of "Crackergate", nor a…
jstemwedel | July 15, 2009In this post, I continue working through my thoughts in response to Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's new book, Unscientific America. In this post, I focus on their discussion of the mainstream media and of the blogosphere. You might guess, given that I'm a member of the science blogosphere, that I have some pretty strong views about what blogs might accomplish in terms of helping the public engage with science. You would be correct.
A fair portion of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (reviewed here) explores conditions of American life that make it…
jstemwedel | July 13, 2009In the post where I reviewed it, I promised I'd have more to say about Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. As it turns out, I have a lot more to say -- so much that I'm breaking it up into three posts so I can keep my trains of thought from colliding. I'm going to start here with a post about the public's end of the scientist-public communication project. Next, I'll respond to some of the claims the book seems to be making about the new media landscape (including the blogosphere). Finally, I'll take up the much discussed issue of the book's treatment of…
jstemwedel | July 11, 2009
Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future.
by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum
Basic Books
2009
In this book, Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum set out to alert us to a problem, and they gesture in the direction of a solution to that problem. Despite the subtitle of the book, their target is not really scientific illiteracy -- they are not arguing that producing generations of Americans who can do better on tests of general scientific knowledge will fully address the problem that worries them. Rather, the issue they want to tackle is the American public's…
jstemwedel | July 11, 2009At his lounge, the Lab Lemming poses an excellent hypothetical question about manuscript review:
Suppose you are reviewing a paper. Also assume, that like most papers these days, that it has multiple authors, each of whom applies his expertise to the problem at hand. And finally, assume that you are an expert in some, but not all of the fields used to solve the particular problem being reported in this paper.
What do you do if one of the key points in the paper that is not your area of expertise seems fishy. For example, if the paper is on your field area, what if some of the lab results…
jstemwedel | July 8, 2009In my last post, I mentioned Richard Gallagher's piece in The Scientist, Fairness for Fraudsters, wherein Gallagher argues that online archived publications ought to be scrubbed of the names of scientists sanctioned by the ORI for misconduct so that they don't keep paying after they have served their sentence. There, I sketched my reasons for disagreeing with Gallagher.
But there's another piece of his article that I'd like to consider: the alternative strategies he suggests to discourage scientific fraud.
Gallagher writes:
There are much better methods of subverting fraud. There is little…
jstemwedel | July 7, 2009In the current issue of The Scientist, there's a pair of interesting pieces about how professional life goes on (or doesn't) for scientists found guilty of misconduct by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI).
Alison McCook's article, Life After Fraud, includes interviews with three scientists against whom the ORI has made formal rulings of misconduct. A big concern voiced by each of these scientists is that after the period of their debarment from eligibility to receive federal grants or to serve on a Public Health Service (PHS) committee has expired, the traces of their punishment…
jstemwedel | June 19, 2009As a brief follow-up to my post thinking about Dr. J's view that cats are a special class of being that ought not be used in research, I would like to assert that:
Some deontological approaches may be grounded in rational arguments while others are grounded in assertions. Kant, for example, offers something like an argument that your valuing anything requires that you value the rational capacity in yourself and in others. Kant's rational argument could provide a basis for the claim that you shouldn't lie to others. But you could also believe that you shouldn't lie to others because lying…
jstemwedel | June 16, 2009Today, at R.E.S.E.A.R.C.H.E.R.S., Dr J. posted a picture of a charming looking cat with the following text:
As little as I can do to push back against the sick minded evil mo-fo bastards who think animal testing on cats is ok....from now on I will post occasional photos of cats as a reminder that these animals are infinitely better than the low life scum that would put them in a lab and murder them, or would sit on an animal experiments committee and authorize their use in any such way, or cite papers involving their research or in anyway devalue them...I think you are debasing and damaging…
jstemwedel | June 13, 2009
You may recall a couple years ago when the Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique started issuing badges.
Now, the Science Scouts have a spiffy new webpage and many new badges ... and there are rumors (or should I say rumours) that actual, physical badges, suited for stitching onto sashes or lab coats, will be available.
So it seems like a good time to review the badges I have earned thus far as a Science Scout.
The "talking science" badge:
I don't need to explain this one, right?
Even before I had a blog about matters scientific, I talked science. At…