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PR Firm Fakes Online Posters to Stunt Research
revmuddswife writes: "I always suspected that some of the soapbox lunatics I was arguing with online weren't what they made themselves out to be, but now British columnist George Monbiot has raised the issue about how Internet discussions may be undermined by Invented PR People *cue scary organ music*. The article relates to a biotech paper written by two University of Calif., Berkeley scientists, Quist and Chapela, that was retracted in Nature last month, partially on the basis of allegations on a listserver and online discussion. Monbiot looks into the identities of some of the individuals leading the criticism, and finds out that what we all know is true: nobody could be what they seem online. In fact, they might even be slimier than we suspect."
I don't think the problem is with anonymous posters, it's with interested parties claiming to be other people. This is a good reason to GPG sign everything. Seriously, what good is a discussion if it's polluted by lies under false pretenses?
If we were ants living on a Rubik's cube, differential geometry would be a little more confusing.
By the same rules that govern evolution, the strong survive. If the modified organism is "stronger" then it's competitors within the enviroment, it may in time completely eradicate the competitors. The real problem comes when some disease appears that only afflicts the modified organism. Whitout boidiversity, the whole population will likely perish.
Nature withdrew the article not because of anonymous or pseudonymous rabble-rousing, but because the article itself was flawed. A number of well known and fully identified scientists launched scathing criticisms which convinced the editor of Nature to take this unusual step. The use of PCR alone, which is known to be prone to false positives, means that the results are unconfirmed and highly questionable. Additional tests are needed to check PCR results, and the authors apparently neglected those steps.
In the end, the interests of truth and scientific accuracy were served by the withdrawal of the article based on peer review and scientific criticism. If some secret PR intervention was involved, then the only lesson we can draw from this story is that it is a positive force in the world and should be applauded.
If this is an unpalatable conclusion, then consider the alternative: that this is an attempt by anti-biotech forces to spin the embarrassing withdrawal of their story from Nature by focusing on the sins of the other camp. They are trying to distract attention from the inadequacies of the original paper, frantically pointing to misdeeds by the corporate PR forces. In short this article is nothing but competing PR itself, an attempt to re-spin the spinners. Hopefully we can be clear headed enough to know when we are being manipulated.