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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."
They won their PhDs fairly. They weren't honorary. The nature of science (for good or for ill) is that unless someone can disprove your work then yours is as good as anyone elses.
- This and all my posts are public domain. I am a Physicist. I am not your Physicist. This is not Physically advice
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.
One interesting element about these three chaps is that when they had their great ideas there was no way to make money from it so no-one is interested. What we are talking about here are experimental scientists where there is a direct effect of their work. "Blue sky" scientists were less prone to these problems in the past because companies tended not to fund them. With the rise of "corporate universities" and corporate science the drive has been to be more accountable.
Einstein didn't get funding for his research 100 years ago, what would happen if the next Einstein comes along and demonstrates that cold fusion is possible, clean and safe... but is sponsored by Exxon ?
The corporatisation of science means the ethics of corporations now apply. Science will have an "Enron" scenario within the next few years.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I appreciate this man's writing, he is thorough and insightful. His statements about the science world give you an idea about the "empirical" knowledge going around in the scientific community today, some slightly false and some completely fabricated.
I agree with his opinion on scientists under stress, for a paid scientist is just like any other working individual; mindful of their family and bills. He has done an excellent job of humanizing the average Joe scientist.
At that, I literally clapped when I got to the part about physics. He said what I've been saying all along, Physics is the Open Source of the science community.
Keep posting articles from this man, whoever is reading, I would like to see more of his work.
Of all the Universal Constants, here's one I know: Nice guys finish last
From the article: "For a research investment to be justified, it must produce value equal to or greater than that of the investment."
I find this extremely questionable. History is full of scientific discoveries and ideas which were not able to produce equal or greater value for long time. Can anyone enlighten me about the value produced by Einstein's research?
So what happens when you get your PhD through these means, and then someone says "Well, nice work, but everything you've done is utter garbage, and you've made fools of an entire community." as was the case in this scenario?
As performance artists though, I give them the highest regard.
Does engineering eat science's crumbs, or does science serve engineering's beck and call?
Of course the two are inderdependent. To a huge majority of people, most of whom have some kind of say in how resources are allocated, the goals of the scientist, however, often seem esoteric and even blasphemous.
However, the goals of the engineer are very clear: envision, design, implement, sell. Cars, computers, bridges, perfume bottles, guns.
Which is more important, Ms. Voter, the Scientist or the Engineer? Now, don't go thinking too much!
(disclaimer: I'm an engineer)
Machines take me by surprise with great frequency. -A. Turing
There you have it ``innovation'' == ``dishonesty''
Over to you, Microsoft ... :-)
--
What short sigs we have -
One hundred and twenty chars!
Too short for haiku.
from the department-of-redundancy-department.
Why bother.
In the seventies, I was a graduate student in zoology. I thought I saw a distinct change in culture occurring.
On the one hand you had people typified by older zoologists, who were gentlemanly academic putterers, studying animals and publishing papers. Their ambitions seemed to be a full professorship, continuously funded grants, support for their graduate students, and a bit more lab space.
On the other hand you had people typified by younger molecular biologists, who were hard-driving, competitive, and occasionally arrogant. Some of them gave me the impression that commercial success was in the back of their minds--maybe not even far in the back.
I don't mean to suggest this was a zoology-versus-molecular-biology thing. It was more a change in the zeitgeist. During the years I was a grad student I was certain that I was seeing science becoming more and more competitive.
You could see the "methods" sections in papers becoming shorter and more perfunctory, for example. I was aware of at least some cases in which scientists guarded some of their techniques because they WANTED to be able to get results that others could not get.
As anyone who's read "The Double Helix" knows, competition in science was not new. It was, of course, hard to be sure, then and now, how much of this perception was accurate and how much was just my growing awareness of what had always been there.
Naturally, this was a frequent topic of spirited conversation.
I remember saying, "Well, IF my perceptions are correct, one of the things we should expect to see over the next decade or so is an increasing number of scandals involving faked data."
And I really think this is what we've seen.
(Of course I don't have numbers to back this up--faked data is not new, either).
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
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 say, let the corporate sponsors own all the half-assed, under-researched, falsified, or otherwise suspect IP.
Let the scientists use this money to fund real reasearch in which they freely share ideas.
Everybody wins. The corporations have never cared if something really works, only if they can market it. They have their IP, and we have the real research.
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?
Interestingly, the same thing could be said of computer science and programmers. As a programmer, I have two options:
- I can create intellectual "property" for the benefit of Corporate America(tm).
- I can release the source code of my work so that the whole of society benefits.
Unfortunately, I can make a living doing the first, but not the second. Even worse, should the company patent my ideas, I will be denying others the ability to use even rudimentary algorithms without the paying of exorbitant royalties; not only will I exclude my own work from the benefit of others, but I will be actively destroying the ability of other programmers to make a living.The choices aren't easy. Fortunately for my sake, my company isn't in the intellectual property business. But the type of coding that I would like to be doing (engineering modeling, GUI design, etc...) inevitably involves me assigning any intellectual property rights for my work to a corporate entity.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
(2) If people put their names on a paper, they should define their contributions and be responsible for the results. If they don't want to accept responsibility for parts of a paper because they didn't work on it, they should say so clearly.
Unfortunately, it has become common practice for people to pad their publications through multiple authorships: five people writing five papers each only have one publication each, but five people putting their names on each other's publications have five publications each; so much more marketable for job hunting that works by counting publications.
It doesn't look like much is changing. In response to the Schoen affair, the American Physical Society weasled out of a requirement of academic responsibility by all authors; things are just continuing the way they are. And scientific papers with little more substance than press releases are becoming increasing common, in particular in the biomedical sciences, as companies promise the sky and find them good PR and marketing materials. And editors are afraid to reject that junk.
But since the peer review system and system of academic publications is becoming increasingly corrupt and useless, perhaps on-line publishing of results without peer review will become the norm. Then, it is really word-of-mouth and recommendations by known friends, as opposed to anonymous reviewers, that matter.
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.
The idea is that the folks on the PhD committee need to understand the work well enough to vet it. Which means that one responsibility of a dissertation is to explain your work in a way that is understandable at a minimum to the committee deciding on your degree. And of course the orals need to answer any lingering questions in the minds of the committee that your work is valuable. So if their works is nonsense, and they have PhDs, it's the responsibility of the committee members who granted them the degree without properly vetting their work.
If.
So last month, the American Physical Society, representing some 40,000 physicists, expanded the ethical guidelines for researchers, in their Statements on Profession Conducts document. The new guidelines call for more ethics training in science and urge all research institutions to adopt the same set of misconduct procedures. The guidelines also clarify co-authors' roles and duties, making it clear that when you put your name on a paper, your reputation is on the line.
Biologists faced similar scandals during the Gallo and Imanishi-Kari cases in the 90's. Unlike Robert Gallo and David Baltimore, who survived the scandal virtually unscathed, the physicists involved in today's scandals are actually being held accountable.
The above info was compiled from an article that originally appeared here.
Looking for political forums? Check out "The World Forum".
Scientific misconduct is nothing new, but in the long run things work out. The scientific method is inherently self-correcting, but sometimes that takes decades to work out.
Some of the 19th century "competition" has become the stuff of legends. Edison vs. Telsa to design the national electric grid. Telsa's ideas won out. Edison vs. almost everyone else. The dinosaur pioneers Marshal and Cope. One used the others name for fossilized shit! But in the end the real facts survived and the garbage disappeared.
Fox-int-the-henhouse atory here!
This is not a new idea. Article I section 8 of the United States Constitution provides that Congress may "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. . . " (capitalization in original). This clause is the basis of Congress's power to grant patents and copyrights.
The trade-off is simple: Inventors are given a limited time (currently 20 years from date of the filing of a patent application) during which they may recoup their investment and profit from their work with the reassurance that they may sue to stop anyone who tries to get a free ride off their work by copying an invention and thereby trying to profit from the work of another. In exchange, the patent has to contain "a written description of the invention, and of the manner and process of making and using it, in such full, clear, and exact terms as to enable any person skilled in the art to which it pertains . . . to make and use the same, and shall set forth the best mode contemplated by the inventor of carrying out his invention." 35 U.S.C. sec. 112, para. 1.
Section 112 is one of the most litigated provisions in the law. Ever. Each and every word has been exhaustively examined by the federal courts and has been found consistently to carry out the policy of ensuring that once the limited time for recouping an investment has passed, that society as a whole has enough information so that anyone in that technical area ("art") can make and use the invention simply by reading the patent.
What are the alternatives to this regime? There are two that readily come to mind. The first is that if you believe that all scientific knowledge should be immediately available without restriction, then by all means, publish the work and make it freely available to anyone who wants it. No one will stop you from doing that (unless of course you are teaching how to build nuclear weapons, etc., ...). The second alternative is to protect your invention by keeping it as a trade secret.
Trade secrets do little to promote the progress of science. They work more of a hindrance. Those who have chosen this route must ensure that their invention truly remains secret or their protection and ability to recoup their investment is lost or greatly diminished. The principal "progress" occurs when someone decides that the invention is too valuable to not have access to, and decides then to reverse-engineer the invention to discover its secrets. Trade secrets potentially last in perpetuity, so it is theoretically possible that no one will ever learn or benefit from the secret scientific advance.
I am not blind - I know there are substantial problems with patent examinations that allow invalid patents to issue. However, the proper remedy for that is to ensure only good patents issue. How? First, by allowing the PTO to hire enough competent examiners to handle the work flow. The PTO is a self-sufficient agency. It is actually a significant profit center for the government. Much of the money paid into the PTO however is immediately diverted by Congress for other purposes instead of being put back into the PTO to improve the agency. Most recently, Congress drastically increased the size of user fees at the PTO to pay for Homeland Security. I am confident in saying the the diversion of user fees from the PTO is among the Top 3 Gripes of every patent attorney in the US.
The execution may be flawed at times, but the policy is sound. We have advanced much further as a society by granting patents than we would have otherwise.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
I disagree with the author's basic assumption: that the purpose of science is to find a higher truth, for its own sake, and that benefits to humanity are merely tangential spinoffs. I think science's purpose should be to create things that will improve the human condition, especially in fields of inquiry such as biology, where the results of scientific research can have almost immediate, tangible results on people.
I understand the arguments for more or less undirected research, that electricity or quantum physics or [insert science here] would never have been discovered without it. I disagree. Directed research would, I feel, have lead us to all of our modern breakthroughs anyway. It frustrates me, as a student, to see scientists waste time, money and effort on questions that are fundamentally not that important. It is much better to look for an effective HIV protease inhibitor than it is to look for patterns in the mating habits of fruit flies.
My other sig is also a
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
Where do you think engineering got its grade ? Without the equation of physic and science engineering would not go past the "try and retry again randomly until it looks OK". Engineering IS NOT independant of science. It is one of its Offspring : application of scientific law (be it physics, mathematic or biology).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
It seems to me that RMS needs to come up with a GPL for scientific discoveries and inventions.
The human genome should have been GPL'd not BSD'd
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
(Of course I don't have numbers to back this up--faked data is not new, either).
Since 1982, the frequency of faked data incidents has grown by 79%.
(Ok, I made that result up myself, so what?)
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
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 think they got it backwards.
It could easily be
"The conflict between the free exchange of ideas that the scientific community demands, and the property ownership that commercial sponsors need to survive".
We like to see the business community as demanding and unreasonable, and we like to see the scientific community as altruistic and open, but in the real world, business is based on not losing money and most science can (possibly) proceed without community-wide coordination.
I read at +2 to avoid noise. This way I avoid the spams, but I get to ses spam replies that are modded up. That is very annoying.
But what if the post starts at +2?
-Sean
Can't wait to see the MS "spin control" on this one. "Well, when you factor in long term preferences and TCO, you see that what he really meant to say was..."
Your Servant, B. Baggins
The article is trying to argue that open source science is better than closed source science. The problem with the arguement is that closed source science gets strong feedback. That is, bs won't hold up when trying to create a product with it, and the company will ultimately fail. However, open source science in universities doesn't have as strong a feedback mechanism. At a university, the product is the published paper, and it results in funding for the university to do more research and for profs to get tenure. Therefore, there is as much temptation to falsify data at a university, but it's more difficult to catch the fraud. This is because when someone publishes a paper, it gets circulated and most people assume it's correct since it's usually difficult and expensive to reproduce the data. Therefore, a lot of papers are complete bs, but the authors get more funding from the govt and private grants anyway because nobody checks to see if the data is reaaly accurate. I would go so far as to say some profs have made a career out of this sort of thing.
Vote for Pedro
Actually, patents prevent people from profiting off reverse engineering a product and selling a knock-off product. The fact that you need to reveal your ideas to the public is because it's the only good way to stake your claim to an idea. The fact that the knowledge becomes public domain is a side effect really.
Vote for Pedro
Cyno wrote:
/. for quite a while, and the competition is fierce.
Exxon and all oil companies and all capitalist nations would lose control. That's a very very very bad thing in the eyes of any exec in any oil corp as well as the current US administration.
That is the one of the most absurd comments I've read in
Of course the interest of oil companies is hiding such an invention, but the interests of the US (and all technologically advanced nations) are the complete opposite.
why are litereally billions poured into fusion research if the US does not believe oil and coal should be replaced ? why does Japan, the EC and the US invest in plasma research ? you may criticize the internal distribution of money within that field, or the results obtained, but saying the US does not want oil replaced is plain nuts. and contrary to evidence (there is a whole bloody department of the US admin for this issue alone, the DOE, look it up, it's not a secret)
criticize where critic's due (and the US does deserve that, many times), credit where it's due. Don't let hate overcome common sense.
Working for necessity's mother.
It's a Bad Thing when the citizens can't understand the law even if they want to.
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
But what happens to a capitalist society when you have free energy? We were talking about a hypothetical situation in which cold fusion were possible. All other forms of energy have severe costs and/or environmental impacts, all of which aid capitalist nations. Free energy, on the other hand, would take a lot of money out of the governments' pockets. How would it pay for roads? New taxes, which are not easy to pass. Any government would be stupid not to research free energy because the first one to discover a clean free energy source has a significant advantage over the rest, especially if it knows what to do with it. And if your government wasn't researching free energy you might think something was wrong. Anyway, what I was saying is that free energy is not in the best interests of capitalist governments. The status quo is.