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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."
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?
There you have it ``innovation'' == ``dishonesty''
Over to you, Microsoft ... :-)
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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).
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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?
"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 think you are breathing too much into the statement you're referring to. What physicists are annoyed at is that their research interests are soley judged by the potential amount of money it can make. Physics has a long tradition of basing itself on the pursuit of knowledge, and more importantly, the truthfulness of that knowledge. Replacing "academic interest" with "potential revenue" has many adverse effects, of which some are appearing now. The issue is not about how much money physics gets, but what is being used to justify research.
The author was of the opinion that the life sciences are not as rigorous in testing the veracity of research results. I do not know if this is true, but it would be not be surprising -- biological systems are much more complex and harder to control.
I fully agree with the author of the Physics Today article that the corporatisation of universities is quite dangerous.
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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The author was of the opinion that the life sciences are not as rigorous in testing the veracity of research results.
Very true. But biology is where physics was at the time of Newton. Each big science domain is doing what it can with what it has. I don't think that applying a physics point of view to just life sciences or any other scientific domain is right.
I suspect the author of the article would agree with you. I think the argument isn't so much "let's be very rigorous to prove that we are better than the biologists." It's more that physicis is no longer the premiere cutting edge technological science as it was in the 20th century; increasingly, biology is taking up that mantle. Instead of continuing as an also-ran has-been, the author seems to be proposing that physicists change their attitude to try and distinguish themselves as useful and productive in a different philosophical area, an area that much of the biological sciences probably won't really be strongly pushing into for at least a few decades.
Mind you, I personally think that applying a (fill in the blank scientific) point of view is right, almost always. However, you then need to evaluate how useful that exercise was. Not performing the excercise out of some sense of "not right" is just as harmful as refusing to make progress in biology because the field can't currently live up to physics standards of rigor. Keep an open mind in both directions; apply as many reasonable scientific perspectives as you can to see if you learn anything in the process.
-Rob
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.
Speaking as a physicist (well, astronomer) the past decade or so has seen the rise of biology in the public's eyes, and the flow of money to the life sciences. If your science is purely defined by public popularity, though, you'd better hope that the public stays interested in biology.
We haven't had the equivalent of a public relations disaster for biology yet, which would cause public opinion to turn against it. All you need is a biological Chernobyl and you'll be tarred with the same brush that physicists have had applied to them. Not that I'd want anything like that, God forbid.
Also, is the authour of the article a bit bitter? Yes, but he does not speak for all physicists.
Don't get me wrong, I'd like a larger grant for some of my research, but we can't always get what we want, and if I *needed* the money, then I should bloody well write a better grant the next time around. Shame on me, not shame on the biologists. My personal moan aside, I think that money in science is well spent, whatever field it is in. If the research is exciting and interesting, by and large it does get funded.
I think there's the relatively modern issue of corporate interests and how they affect the flow of ideas in a given subject, and it just so happens that biology is the science that is facing this at the moment.
Hurm. Time for coffee!
Dr Fish
That is untrue. There are no sub-nuclear effects that are employed in semi-conductors. Rutherford and Chadwick's work on the structure of the atom was all pre-war and that is what the physics of semiconductors is based on. I have degrees in electronics and particle physics, the quantum mechanics used in solid state uses a completely different notation to that used in particle physics.
Only through linear accelerators was the crystal structure and properties of semiconductors properly worked out
You were almost close. Accelerators are used for chrystalography but not lineacs, It is the bremstralung radiation that you get from accelerating a charged particle arround a curve that provides the high powered radiation. The crystaline structure of silicon GaAs etc are all very simple and were deduced long before quantum mechanics, let alone particle physics. I very much doubt that any crystal structure that had such a high degree of complexity it could only be deduced using those techniques would be far too complex to be useful for VLSI.
As for your fusion power comment, I must say that, for one thing, there hasn't been too much funding because there hasn't been too much progress.
How much progress has there been in particle physics? Why would basic research into the fusion process be intrinsically less interesting than finding out the structure function of the z0 etc?
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