Slashdot Mirror
Physicist Reputations Tarnished
ruszka writes "An article at PhysicsWeb goes over a growing concern in the physics community: their reliable image. This isn't a case of jumping the gun, as seen with cold fusion, but over fabrication in data results. Bell Labs and Berkeley are both recovering from cases where their own employees falsified data."
Many chemists will say that they have tried to reproduce experiments from scientific articles and have sometimes failed. They will argue that some PhD students and postdocs (in particular) are put under so much pressure to "publish or perish" that some results are sometime fabricated. It's been happening for a very long time in science and it will happen in the future. End of story.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
The pressure to get results, so you can get funding for research is huge, its not surprising that results get falsified.
Very little research is done with no vested interest now, companies want to make money from it, so they'll only put money into research which is going how they want it, or is worth gambling on as the gains would be so enormous if they were to come to fruition.
And this is why one of the fundamental rules of science is that your results have to be reproducible by someone working independently.
I can't see this being a major problem over here (UK) because
a) Scientists understand that results need to be reproducible, and thus won't be hugely thrown by a single lab producing something like this
b) The general public don't really know much about science anyway, and they mistrust it already for a completely separate reason, namely the way the government presents any scientific research as supporting whatever policy they've already decided on (see BSE / foot & mouth / GM food / etc)
Yes, the pressure to produce can be overwhelming, but there are other ways to survive in academia. I find that a lot of researchers fall into a trap of only wanting to publish in the absolute best journals - and then either don't publish or get pressured into cutting corners. In the meantime, they could have chipped away at a project and over time make substantial progress publishing in second tier (but still well regarded) journals, to then gradually work their way up to the more "key" findings. In my opinion, this approach generally leads to more innovative research.
I think another possibility is that they feel their research isn't important enough that other people will try to verify it. I can imagine them saying, "Well, it almost works. Let's just publish to get get the department head off our back. I'm sure other people will have the time to go through our work more thoroughly." Sometimes they'll just be wrong, and further research will not bear out their claims. Of course this doesn't explain cases where researchers have falsified groundbreaking or surprising research (e.g. elements 116 and 118, cold fusion, etc.). It's still the wrong thing to do, though.
Steven N. Severinghaus
For a growing number of years, science in academia and business has grown increasingly more corrupt. Part of this has to do with the profit-potential of controlling a particular scientific advancement. Look at all the companies who want to patent parts of the human genome for whatever reason. They want to be the only people who can benefit from it. This is mostly, but not entirely limited to the business science community. In the academic science community, the reason is much more simple: Ego.
Right now, we have a generation of scientists who've grown up in the wake of the most rapid scientific expansion in the history of man. That expansion has mostly petered out, but hasn't stopped entirely. Rather than expanding science, current scientists are working a lot more on applying the science we already have. (IMO, we'll probably have another period of rapid expansion once we start harnessing quantum effects for computation and communication.)
For the time being, there aren't going to be any earth-shaking breakthroughs in science like there were in the late 1800's and early-mid 1900's. Science is so complex that very little of it is going to come from single minds. The Higgs boson, for example, is almost certainly going to be disovered and observed by a team if it really exists, and not an individual. What glory there is in science is going to be spread more and more thin, even if we do have another period of expansive discovery in the near future.
While it would be nice to think that most scientists are in the field because they geniunely want to discover and help society, many of the people in the field are not. Worse, many of the people in the field are businessmen or are funded by businessmen who pressure them to produce.
In the worst case, you have a field populated by individuals who's livlihood is tied not only to their reputation, but also to their 'production level'. In this situation it starts working to the scientists' best interests to artificially inflate their own reputations and accomplishments and attack the reputations and accomplishments of other scientists.
There is a lot of work going on right now studying a possible relationship between anti-gravity and superconductivity that is completely dismissed by 'established' science as pop-science and unscientific nonsense. The reason that 'accepted' researchers are dismissing this work is not because they genuinely think it's bogus, but because it threatens them and their reputations. This sort of thing goes on all the time to greater and lesser degrees
How can this be fixed? Scientists have always had huge egos and the damage to the scientific process will take a long time to go away, but I think that a lot of corruption could be eliminated by forcing business out of academia.
Rather than see Universities taking grants from businesses in exchange for access to and control over the scientific process, I'd much rather see businesses pay a 'R&D' tax to the government which was in turn used to fund science programs at universities. Universities would, in turn, make any discoveries publicly available. It's not a perfect solution, but it would go a long way towards making the process less compromised and more trustworthy.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Scientists are like any other profession, there are good ones and there are bad ones. Physicists should be happy, their image has a long way to go before they get to the level of politicians or lawyers.
I think we need to look at how we educate as a cause for false results. My two cents:
High School Chemistry Experiments
Expected results are known
A if you get expected results F if you don't
Crappy equipment and sad lab partners
Do you:
1>Turn in the results you got even though they are wrong and take the F.
2>Doctor the results and get an A.
Most 'college prep' students choose #2. What have we preped them for?
SD
âoeWho knew something as harmless as willful ignorance could end up having real consequences?â
This reminds me a bit of a story told by an old science teacher I had. They told us about their final exam in a college chemistry class. The procedure they had to carry out was simple: mix HCl (hydrochloric acid, a very powerful acid) and NaOH (sodium hydroxide, a very powerful base) to produce NaCl (sodium chloride, ordinary table salt) and H2O (erm...duh...).
The test didn't end there though. The professor required the students to *drink* some of the solution in order to prove they were confident in their own ability to carry out the procedure properly.
Now, would you drink something that could potentially kill you if you weren't truly confident you know what you were doing?
You make some good points, albeit a bit harsh for my taste at times; you certainly don't seem to think altruism in science is pervasive and neither do I! :) Your indictment of "corrupted science" enumerates a lot of accused parties, but I wish to concentrate on my favorite guilty party. I blame the schools. Yep, I do. Let me expound on that and, along the way, comment on some of what you said.
You said:
WRT the above, I would like to say two things:
I submit for your consideration that traditional educational institutions and approaches are not serving us as well as they could in preparing budding scientists for the herculean task of integrating all of the newly available information; instead, it seems we are cranking out a stream of scientist lookalikes whose primary concern is justifying their activity to their benefactors using the language and values of business. Further, I submit the following, also for your consideration:
To summarize: Good Science requires Good Scientists, and until we make some much-needed changes to our academic curricula, our pedagogical methods, our conception of the educational experience, and the cardinal values of our profession that we teach to young scientists, we will have to endure the embarrassment caused by low enrolment, a$$hole educators, cheating researchers, and bullshit grants.
So, why don't the schools do something about it all and start turning out Good Scientists?
Well, I suspect that good educators feel trapped in the current situation. It does not seem possible to make a distinction between students of different degree programs because there is now such an overriding emphasis on the double duty of introductory science courses (taught mostly to engineers) as the bread-and-butter of physics and mathematics departments that it would be professional suicide to insist on a separate curriculum for your own department's students. It does not seem possible to make a distinction between students having different aptitudes because there is such an overriding emphasis on the notion of education as a paid generic service, modeled after drive-thru car washes and buffet-style cafeteria food, that it would be professional suicide to speak of this or that student as being somehow deserving of special treatment. How will you explain to a tenure board leveling against you an accusation of favoritism (supported by fresh student evaluation forms, no less) that you felt morally compelled to loosen deadlines for those two students whom the dean had put on probation but who you knew were going to be excellent mathematicians one day? How would your department chair and dean react to a radically different curriculum that would turn out better physicists but render most of the offerings suboptimal for students who did not intend to take a degree in Physics?
[The case of bad educators is not worth dwelling on: a professor who does not wish ever to be surpassed by her students lest she lose her aura of superiority, or who hinders talented students out of resentment, or who rewards students who grease her ego is very unlikely to be concerned with the general problem of how to provide a better formative experience for aspiring scientists, as it is much easier for her to trip them up than to improve her own skills.]
You said:
In reading that remark of yours, I can't help thinking of how the scientific establishment is teeming with people who got into it for the wrong reasons (e.g., "I can play this game, or at least let on that I can, plus I like having other people think I'm smarter than they are") and with the wrong goals (e.g., "I wish to be celebrated and run a little research empire and go to lots of conferences ans junkets"), competing for limited resources with people who got into it for the right reasons (e.g., "I don't suck at this, honestly I don't, and there's nothing else I'd rather be doing and it gives me a warm-fuzzy") and with the right goals (e.g., "I hope the effort I put in today means that, tomorrow, we may all know more about the way things work"). [Please, pardon all of that parenthetical garbage; I was just trying to make my meaning clearer.] I mean, who cares if the glory is spread thin? We should be happy that we manage to work out the answers to important questions and that everybody is going to benefit from the new knowledge; actually, anybody for whom that isn't enough should probably think twice before becoming a scientist in any capacity. I think that there is a difference between recognition ("I know you did this, and I like it") and glory ("I'd like you to sign my copy of your latest book, as well as my very lowest back, if you please"), but it certainly seems some people wouldn't care to have the former without some of the latter.
You said:
I agree sort of. I think it's OK for a company to fund education, but I don't think it's OK for a company to expect that this investment yield directly attributable profits in the form of patentable technology; that is, in science as in other fields, companies should fund education as an investment in the formative experience of the people they may one day hire. Having made my clarification, let me augment your proposition. I propose:
Well, that's what I think, anyway. And I do apologize for the long post, but this (the quality of science education) is a primary concern of mine, and I have a hard time restraining myself. :)
I'm currently doing a PhD in chemistry, and personally I feel that it would be very easy to make up results. This is especially true if the research is giving unsurprising results.
It is actually quite differcult to reproduce many chemical reactions which have been published in the science lit. So when you can't repeat someone's work, do you raise a stink (only to find out that everybody but you can reproduce it), or do you find another workaround to the problem that you are trying to solve?
Warning: Some ideologies on the Net are smaller than they appear.
This notion of independently reproducing results is very good, but that's often easier said than done.
One reason is that if the major factors that brought about the original experiments results are not well known (even though the original investigators thought they did), then REAL results maybe difficult to reproduce...even by those that originally did the work!
Also, one typically doesn't just reproduce results but tries to "reproduce and extend." But here's the rub, this attempt may alter poorly understood processes so much that a replication doesn't occur. A small change can even do this in "choatic / nonlinear systems.
When dealing with statistical results like testing drugs on human subjects. Some experiments show great promise but others don't, even when patient populations seem to be similar (i.e. you pre-blocked and randomized with say 1000 or more subjects and checked that the baseline groups all started the same) and treatments were standardized and blinding was adequate.
Populations can NOT generalize!
Much repeated testing may need to be done to repeat these results.
This and other things provide a sufficient loop-hole to even entirely make-up bogus data.
From personal experience, I've seen this happen and it does happen much more often than admitted by science or the press.
I'm sure that many scientists don't fudge data but from personel experience much more than admitted DO fudge data to get grant money or keep it rolling in for a few years.
They can always cross their fingers and hope the initial stuff turns up or different results appear and they can run with. If nothing occurs, well that happens all the time so no big deal and at least they got the funded;-)
I once reproduced a famous "blocks world" in the AI literature. Got a copy of the original code, on paper. Paid someone to type it in. Discovered it was in a wierd, obsolete LISP dialect called Conniver. Found the original Conniver manual on microfilm. Wrote appropriate emulation code in Common LISP. Ran original program. Debugged original program. Discovered that basic approach was flawed. Contacted famous professor. Professor very unhappy.
I work for a startup biotech company and we have fired 3 phds (about 15% of our phds) in the last 2 years for fudging data. They weren't bad people either, but management only rewards success and not failure. Unfortunate.
The difference between failure and success is doing a thing nearly right and doing a thing exactly right.
--Edward Simmons