Panel To Investigate Scientist For Cloning Claims

collegetoad writes "A panel of scientists from the Seoul National University will investigate scientist Hwang Woo-suk on whether he committed fraud in claiming he had developed tailored embryonic stem cells. From the article: 'Hwang also said in a paper published in 2004 in the journal Nature, that he had cloned, for the first time, a human cell to provide a source of embryonic stem cells -- master cells that can provide a source of any type of tissue or cell in the body.'" We've reported on this previously.

Comments

Sarbanes Oxley?

[Doomedsnowball]

Is this the Enron of Biomed research? Do we need better accounting (of data and methods) like Sarbanes-Oxley? Just a thought.

Re:Sarbanes Oxley?

[drewzhrodague]

No. Science takes care of its own, in its own way. THis is what peer review is for. Watch! They will get to the bottom of the dispute, scientifically, and then we will see what is really there, and what is bogus. Someone's got a tagline, about having a stable society when someone guns-down a schoolyard, and the laws don't change. Same kinda thing here, laws shouldn't even be involved, as their methodology will tell all -- eventually.

Hopefully

[vertinox]

Hopefully the panel will go out and actually try to reproduce his results rather than having a political debate of whether not it is.

His business ethics are questionable, but if there is some truth to this then they should be able to follow a scientific method in order to prove or disprove the falsification of the findings.

peer review is more than that

[Quadraginta]

First of all, peer review functions in many places besides vetting articles for publication. Indeed, it's much more important in reviewing grant applications and in how and whether your colleagues direct good students and post-docs your way, since while publications are nice, it's successfully attracting research money and recruiting good employees that really counts. This guy is getting that kind of peer review now -- and greatly to his harm. So indeed the system is functioning as designed.

More importantly, if you're saying the system is busted because it must sometimes punish fraud after it's published, instead of preventing its publication entirely -- well, then perhaps something needs to be clarified about the nature of scientific publication. A scientific journal is not a textbook. Stuff published there is current research, not accepted wisdom. It's not meant to be archival quality, things that folks will stake a reputation on. It's meant to be the "bleeding edge" of knowledge, so to speak, the latest and (necessarily) shakiest bit of possible insight. Reasonable people expect much that is published in a journal to turn out to be wrong, or incomplete. They don't ordinarily expect it to be a fraud, but it does happen on occasion, and reasonable people keep that in the back of their minds, too.

In fact, one of the main reasons for scientific publication is to present new ideas and data to the widest possible audience, so that people who don't know, fund, or work for the original researcher have a chance to consider the merits and drawbacks of the idea, test it, challenge it, and prove or disprove it. You might reasonably think of scientific publication as more or less a "debugging" step of a new scientific idea, the process by which you submit some newfangled notion to the rigours of a bunch of "beta testers" (other scientists) who will bang on the idea, make sure it's sound.

You would not, I hope, conclude that because spectacular bugs are sometimes found in software at the "beta" stage this means that the authors were wrong to release it at all. Having a large community of interested expert users cooperate in beta testing your software -- think open-source software -- can speed up the process of producing quality products greatly. That's exactly how scientific publication works.