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Truth, Ownership, and the Scientific Tradition
number6x writes "The Physics Today website has an article by Robert Laughlin titled "Truth, Ownership, and the Scientific tradition". The article deals with some recent blunders in the scientific community like the falsification of data at lucent covered here on slashdot. The article is mainly about the conflict between the free exchange of ideas that the scientific community needs to survive, and the demand for property ownership that commercial sponsors demand."
From the article:
This is especially true vis-à-vis the life scientists, who have more money, less oversight, and much more tolerance for imprecision than physicists. Rather than allow ourselves to be defined by the property we generate, I suggest we take the high ground and turn ourselves into the gold standard of truth. This is the way to make physics relevant and important in this "age of biology."
Do I see some bitterness in the physics community? It is seen nowadays as very important for humanity to spend more money on the life sciences and less on physics. And the physics guys do not like it!
Tough.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
what would happen if the next Einstein comes along and demonstrates that cold fusion is possible, clean and safe... but is sponsored by Exxon?
Obviously, Exxon would then shift their focus to Cold Fusion, lock everone out of the industry via way of patents and bs intellectual property, and they would pretty much have a monopoly on energy production in the end.
Dispite what most people think the oil industries AREN'T out to kill all other forms of energy production. They just want to make sure that by the time the oil DOES run out they are the ones that own the new source.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
First- I didn't read the article...
Second - I think you have slightly missed the point of that sentence. The sentence is pointing out that research for research's sake isn't very welcome in the CORPORATE environment where a greater return on investment is desired. (The point being, that science is BECOMING too corporate-centric as opposed to more "expanding the boundaries of human knoweldge" centric as it was in the past.) So, you aren't really in dispute.
There's a big pressure now for people in the Biological sciences to produce something useful. When you put science under pressure like that, you're bound to see lots of people cutting corners, falsifying data, and generally doing things against the great principles of science.
That's a big side effect of corporate funding for science; if some corporation is giving you money to research, say, some new gene, they want viable results and they want them soon. They don't understand that you can't rush science; if you do that, you get an inferior (and often dangerous) product. Hell, just watch an ad for any new allergy medication; the side effects take up most of the ad time.
The real problem is that there needs to be more funding from different sources (government funding, mehtinks?) so that particular labs won't represent the goals of one lone corporation; if you have to answer to many people, you're bound to take your time.
It's a big nasty mess, and one that really needs to be resolved. We can only go on like this for so long before someone fucks up royally and everyone pays for it.
"It never got weird enough for me." - HST (RIP)
I found it fascinating that at only one place in the article, buried at the end of a long and complex paragraph did the author use the terms lies. He frequently used euphemisms such as "creative", but only once he did directly refer to dishonesty. Yet in the end, this sort of scientific smoke is simple dishonesty at its core. Only when a man chooses to surrender his personal integrity, do these problems occur. Our attempt to color them with quiet shades of pastel only makes the behavior more likely.
What does this say about our culture in general and the effect on our scientific community?
With the rise of "corporate universities" and corporate science the drive has been to be more accountable.
Corporate universities are a byproduct of today's corporate society where the emphasis is on money - earning, spending, getting, justifying spending other people's, etc.
The problem has filtered down to universities - because they spend public money (ie. taxes), that money has to be justified. You simply can't justify academia in monetary terms, and so universities have had to change. But that change has been brought on by the public demand that government be accountable and transparent (and so it should be).
The other big problem is that more and more government funding is being cut. The only other avenue for funding is sponsorship by corporate entities who won't sponsor research that doesnt have a product they can make money from (because the companies are accountable themselves), and the problem will continue to spiral downwards.
The real problem here is the money counters trying to put a monetary value on research [output]. In a similar vein, the reason that publication is so out of control now (ie. the emphasis is on getting as many publications as possible) is that people thought this was a good way to measure academic output.
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)
You could see the "methods" sections in papers becoming shorter and more perfunctory, for example.
Along the same lines:
In my experience, it is extremely rare to find a journal/conference publication that includes enough information in the methods section to allow others to either check or verify the work or use the findings themselves. Vital information is almost always missed out - it's an artifial intellectual property control, and, as the parent post says, makes it easier for data to be faked.
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)
if you carefully read lauglin's essay, one of the things he laments is the secrecy behind which coorporate sponsored research takes place. i suppose it would be redundant to mention that the elimination of this secrecy is what patents and copyrights were originally designed to prevent.
patents, exclusive licenses to new inventions, are granted for the sole purpose of encouraging inventors to publish, in full detail, their inventions. without patent protection, for example, texas instruments and fairchild semiconductor may not have ever told anyone how to make an integrated circuit. they would have made the first chips under a cloak of secrecy, sold them as black box devices, and bury the chips in epoxy to protect the secret.
unfortunately, industry, the lawmakers, and even the courts have forgotten the whole idea of patents is to publish. industry wants to call patents property that should belong to the holder and anything that weakens the patent is the equivalent of a 'taking'. congress and the patent office are all to happy to agree. and the courts have screwed the matter up further by taking the position that engineers and inventors are not legally qualified to decide if they are infringing on a patent, and so are not allowed to even look at one when trying to come up with new inventions.
when religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, governments will resort to real opiates.
And they want to make sure they make a killing until then. Just like farmers make more money when food is scarce, oil companies will profit immensely if there is an energy crisis. OTOH, a gradual, smoothly managed transition will just bring extra costs for the new infrastructure needed for different energy sources, with no extra profit to be squeezed out.
That it will make it that much harder to believe the real scientific breakthroughs. I mean, if you've got some scientists working a month of after-hours in a lab, and suddenly he comes through with cold fusion or a cure for AIDS. The next day, he's on the phone yammering about how he's done it, but because of the stress/caffeine/lack-of-sleep he can't remember the exact steps to making his project, and it's not quite working today. The scientific communicate will just hum and haw, ignoring his finding until they can be fully substantiated.
Unfortunately, not all experiments are a 100% reproducable result. Sometimes there are outside factors that one doesn't think of (hey, the moon was full and the tide was high), that make an experiment very hard to produce. If scientists aren't trusted and can't immediately able to produce results, they won't be able to get the additional funding that may be required for further research (it worked, but doesn't now, but it worked, so why?).
ok dude, i like your opinions about the value of scientific purity, and openness. but i think that your head is buried in a lot of historical sand.
the Military-Industrial complex of the last 50 years has been driven by university research, and there was no "tradition" of giving without expecting a return. there is always a return, at minimum some gov. controls (see stem cells) at maximum, total control (see manhattan project @ U Chicago).
please limit you traditions to historical fact.
this comment is the result of what i call Academic Demetia. typical professor here, thinks that they give him all that money solely for the purpose of his enjoyment of the truly kewl geek toys that normal people can't afford (well, cept for the atom smasher i installed in my Volvo).
wake up fella, the government owns more whores like you than you could find if you put LA, Amsterdam and Tel Aviv together and shook it up, and declared perpetual night. which is apparently, the sum of your historical knowledge, lemme guess, you didn't like "memorizing facts"????
end disgruntled history major rant.
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
You could see the "methods" sections in papers becoming shorter and more perfunctory, for example.
and... Along the same lines:
In my experience, it is extremely rare to find a journal/conference publication that includes enough information in the methods section to allow others to either check or verify the work or use the findings themselves. Vital information is almost always missed out - it's an artificial intellectual property control, and, as the parent post says, makes it easier for data to be faked.
and...
Probably depends on the field of research. Working in physics, I've never had that problem.
It can often appear to be the case that enough details are not included in articles, but it really depends on the field, and upon the research group. Part of the driver for this is the "number of publications per year" metric used to evaluate the value of scientific work. What happens is that a group may be using a technique that is pretty standardized, either within their individual lab or within their field of expertise. A person "skilled in the art" can often get enough detail to duplicate the work. And, since the game is to publish every little new thing, it would be a waste of paper to fully detail the experimental technique in each and every publication. It would also eat up a lot of the space in which researchers would rather publish their hot new results. A common practice of good research groups is to occasionaly write one big paper describing the details of the technique, and to refer to that in subsequent papers.
And this is a good thing. In the end, lots of short papers tends to keep everyone at the same pace in the development of a topic. If everyone published only a magnum opus every five years, the result would be a significant amount of dispersion in research directions, possibly in directions that were not fruitful (in terms of being based on good assumptions and a of the state of the art, the current mind on the topic).
It's "two heads are better than one." With short papers, everyone must keep tabs on one another, and short papers help keep everyone focused.
I'm not saying that important information isn't intentionally withheld from the papers. It is. But, science is a race, and you don't want other groups to get the jump on you by giving away your secret. If a reader follows the publication record of a good group, s/he will find that these details eventually come out, in later publications. It's a sort of short-term trade secret approach. Optimally, one keeps a detail secret long enough to do some strong fundamental work in an area. The secret is later (a year or two) released, so anyone can expand on the ideas. If the work was good and is widely read, in the end it gains the researcher the advantage of being a heavily referenced source on the topic (another metric used to evaluate the value of scientific work).
Disclaimer: I am a materials scientist, and this is the field from which I am drawing on for these observations, although I do believe they probably apply in other fields where several groups are working in a particular area.
I agree that corporate pressure is going to force some people to falsify documents, make false claims, etc., but those are the same people that would have done it under other pressure (e.g. Cold Fusion).
Science doesn't have the "corner" on honest people that will sacrifice everything for the truth. Neither does engineering, computer science, whatever. People are going to do bad things no matter what field they're in and the field is supposed to have ways (e.g. peer review) to alleviate and correct those problems.
I could just as easily say that the media causes these problems by publishing stories that have not gone through even minimum peer review - because in the media, accuracy is always second to newsworthiness and speed.
I will paraphrase Ernest Rutherford, since I can't find a definitive version of his quotation on the Web right now. He said something to the effect of, "All science is either physics or stamp collecting."
More generally, research can be lumped into two broad (and overlapping) camps: phenomenology and investigation. Phenomenology involves making more and more detailed reports of the world, but does not require one to perform experiments or formulate hypotheses. Investigation includes attampts to gain a "deeper" sort of understanding of problems--it is not merely stamp collecting.
Unfortunately, much of biology was trapped in phenomenological models until relatively recently. Until the development of tools to pursue the study of molecular biology and genetics, we were limited to a basic acceptance that heredity existed, and some handwaving about evolution and so forth--and we could label all of our stuffed specimens, because taxonomy just takes a sharp eye and some good guesswork. (Even so, many species are now being reclassified as genetics tools are brought to bear on them. The taxonomic kingdoms I learned in school are not the ones being taught now.)
In physics, you can look at a system and in principle describe all of the interactions at work. If it is a simple system, you can perform calculations that predict how it will evolve over time.
In biology, take a single cell. We still can't describe everything that goes on in that little cubic-micron space, though we're getting closer. We're finally starting to understand the way many of the more important chemical pathways within cells operate. We can fold simple proteins in simulation. Some of the genetic tinkering we can do actually has predicatable effects.
So of course biology is changing as a field--it is graduating from stamp collecting to science. That will attract new attitudes, new people--and new funding.
~Idarubicin
Ultimately, it is science if the hypotheses (or conjectures, if you prefer) they develop can in principle be experimentally disproven, and can be used to make predictions.
If you aren't testing your hypothesis with real experiments, you're not doing science!
I suppose the question becomes, "Is Stephen Hawking a scientist?" The evaporation of black holes is something that we are not currently able to simulate in the lab. Nevertheless, the idea is a natural (brilliant, elegant, and inspired, but natural) extension of concepts of entropy and quantum mechanics. (I grossly oversimplify, but there's lots more about it on the web for those that are interested.) Furthermore, it makes predictions about what should happen to a black hole, which meets my second criterion. These predictions cannot be tested at this time, but will in principle be testable in the next generation of supercolliders. Until such time, Hawking's ideas still can spark lively debate--which is exactly as it should be.
Does this mean that we should not be allowed to consider theoretical physicists and cosmologists real scientists until technology matures to the point where their hypotheses can be tested? I submit that scientists are people who put forth rational hypotheses based on whatever incomplete information is available, and are prepared to test their hypotheses--or allow others to do so--when technology and funding allow. Real scientists should be able to recognize the difference between a hypothesis and an accepted theory and trust the two accordingly.
~Idarubicin