First the Wakefield scandal on a bogus link between MMR vaccine and autism, then the Chang scandal where a program error led to several erroneous x-ray crystal structures and five retractions. The first one caused by greed, the second by sloppiness.
(I'm trying to start the year on a good note, but it's hard.)
PS I was chatting with BTM and some other local "structure people" about the Geoffrey Chang. Apparently he was a prodigy ... assistant prof at 28(?), won the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. That's the type of award that is presented to you at the White House. I wonder what will happen to him and his lab ...
For more on the MMR scandal visit Brian Deer's page. Also see what BC and Orac have to say.
For more on the Chang scandal visit Sandra Porter's blog.
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Drama and science, who'd 'a thunk it?
Could a crystal guru please say whether simply doing a ramachandran plot would have exposed the symmetry problem.
and
why doesn't everyone use O? I don't do crystallography, so this is an honest question, if it works well for the ribosome...
/haven't read the Science paper yet.
Re: wakefield - can you imagine identifying a transcript using Q-PCR and primers targeting a single region and not sequencing the amplicon? Quack: See this, the line goes up, so you're infected with Measels. QED.
I think you are doing Chang a disservice by mentioning his honest mistake, honestly corrected in the same sentence as the
odious and shameless Wakefield.
Honest but sloppy. I mention them together because in the past couple of days there was quite a bit of buzz surrounding these two affairs and I wanted to see what others out there had two say. Both, as BC mentioned, involved quite some drama. I feel sorry for GC. I wonder what will happen to him. It was a major setback for him and for the x-ray crystallography community (that is acording to the structure guys in the lab).
I'm with csrster on this. Chang's gaff was a gaff, not a scandal.
As a former crystallographer, I have questions as to whether it was an 'honest' mistake. This should be further investigated by Scripps.
BC, 'O' is primarily for looking at and modifying structures, along with electron density. Other software has to be used for data processing and refinement, such as the CNS or CCP4 packages. Note that in his papers, he apparently didn't report using the software he now says created the original error. I say 'original' there, because his refinement from then on would have had to be riddled with problems, to get where he did, and may have had to include falsifying statistics or data. Leaving out parts of the methods, and not submitting all the data to the imdb, are points of concern in this case.
That's where an independent investigation has to come in, to either clear his name or boot him out of the field.