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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.
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?
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.
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 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?
(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.
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.
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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.
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.
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?).
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.
You don't know any fruit farmers, do you?
If you know what a retrovirus is, what a protease is, what a protease inhibitor is
And I really suggest you read up on fruit flies.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.