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Dysfunction In Modern Science?
eldavojohn writes "The editors of Infection and Immunity are sending a warning signal about modern science. Two editorials (1 and 2) published in the journal have given other biomedical researchers pause to ask if modern science is dysfunctional. Readers familiar with the state of academia may not be surprised but the claims have been presented today to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) that level the following allegations: 'Incentives have evolved over the decades to encourage some behaviors that are detrimental to good science' and 'The surest ticket to getting a grant or job is getting published in a high profile journal, this is an unhealthy belief that can lead a scientist to engage in sensationalism and sometimes even dishonest behavior to salvage their career.' The data to back up such slanderous claims? 'In the past decade the number of retraction notices for scientific journals has increased more than 10-fold while the number of journals articles published has only increased by 44%.' At least a few of such retractions have been covered here."
When I was in grad school there were always grant-whore and PR scientists around. Everyone knew who they were. They were the Chicken Littles who were always proclaiming the end of the world if their pet project wasn't funded. They were always the first to run to the press with GREATLY exaggerated claims and alarmism if it served their purposes (especially when they were looking for political support with funding). Their "science" was far less about scientific method than their own financial self-interests (including getting the precious tenure that they all craved like little lapdogs).
Of course, I have a friend who still won't accept that this EVER happens. "Science would never allow that," he says. His naivete is so endearing.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
For some reason, people defend publish-or-perish and systems that evaluate researchers based on the quantity of work or the names of journals or conferences where they have presented their work.
Palm trees and 8
Surely any competitive system to select people for desirable posts is going to encourage dubious behaviour? Those editorials don't seem to offer very significant changes, just new metrics for people to game. It's not just academia either - every career where your value is measured by some proxy metrics is going to see unethical behaviour from people near the cut-off.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
...but people forget that "scientists" are not "science", they are simply people using the tools of science to seek the kind of knowledge that the scientific method and process can produce. As such they are subject to all of the same pressures, hopes, dreams, failures, etc. that the rest of us are.
But the process of science itself will always move forward, since science is only about reproducible experiments, so no matter how much bad (human) behavior might get involved, eventually the "truth" will win out. But the bad behavior can of course be extremely damaging to the process.
So there's nothing wrong with "science" or even its application I think. There are probably economic incentives that are promoting behaviors that affect the short-term reliability and the long-term costs of gaining useful scientific knowledge though, and hopefully we can come up with ways of improving the meta-processes.
G.
Read the part after the one everyone always quotes about the 'military-industrial complex'.
A lot of the issues discussed here are only relevant in the life sciences, and especially in medicine. Retractions are not a big phenomenon in the physical sciences. Ditto for publication bias (refusal by journals to publish negative results or failed attempts to replicate published results). This is essentially just because the life sciences are harder than the physical sciences. The life sciences have much more intractable problems with complexity of systems and difficulty in controlling variables.
Some of the problems they discuss are clearly insoluble. The uncertain career prospects for young scientists are a straightforward matter of supply and demand. There are many, many very talented people who would like to spend their careers doing fundamental scientific research. The number of such people is 1 or 2 orders of magnitude greater than the number of jobs available. This isn't a new phenomenon, although in the past the problem may have been hidden more, because, e.g., up until about 1950, only white, affluent, European and American males were considered prospects for a career in science.
Find free books.
The high profile journals weed out sensationalist claims more often than not (part of being high-profile is having a finely tuned bullshit meter). The number of retractions are also a sign of strength, as the mechanisms forcing people to correct their errors are getting better. This isn't to claim that the process doesn't have room for improvement, but the cited examples are rubbish.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
My view of it is that there aren't that many basic concepts to discover in the back of your garage. Particle accelerators, high-field NMR machines, electron or AFM microscopes, huge ground-based or orbital telescopes are needed to make the next discoveries in their respective fields because the easy stuff, that could be seen with bubble chambers, low-field magnets, optical microscopes and small telescopes was already discovered. It's a matter of diminishing returns.
Scientists have been doing their jobs for hundreds of years, no one is going to discover an improved version of the laws of gravitation with a 100 dollar telescope. What may come out of observing dark matter was obtained with multi-million dollar equipment, collaborative effort and brilliant minds going over and over the same thing.
Granted, there may be things to discover that can still be attained in a garage. In hindsight everything is easy, but if no one is looking, there may still be amazing things still to observe in your kitchen lab. But expecting the cure for problems of the world to come out of a bunch of semi-amateur scientists is betting on the wrong horse... it may happen in a field or two, but it won't be the future of science.
Your best hope for home science is in bio
It depends on the sub-field of bio. Genetics of yeast or E. coli: easy and (comparatively). Structures of human neuroreceptors: difficult and expensive (particle accelerator required). Do-it-yourself will only take you so far: you can build your own thermocycler without too much struggle, but what about a system for purifying proteins? It may be tempting to do a half-assed job inexpensively, but the pros use equipment that costs tens of thousands of dollars. (We have to - it would waste too much time otherwise, not just in the time lost by doing manually what a machine can do for us, but later when we discover that our exciting result was actually an artifact caused by a contaminating protein.) You can find some of this equipment used if you know where to look (and know how to detect junk), but it still requires a significant amount of disposable income.
The one field where amateurs really do have a chance is computational biology/bioinformatics. However, "amateur" in this case means someone with a sophisticated knowledge of math and statistics, which generally implies an advanced degree (and/or extensive professional experience) in a technical field.
at home, feel free to scoop up some dirt and look at it under a microscope during the day
I cannot recommend this highly enough to anyone with an interest in the life sciences and a desire for independent learning. This was how I became interested in biology, and after more than a decade of higher education and professional research, I have done very few things that were as fulfilling as watching rotifers and protists feeding, and seeing how many species I could count in a drop of pond water. Even a cheap child's microscope is sufficient to get started, and you can buy higher-quality equipment (the kind that gets used in introductory bio lab in college) used for under $1000.
The problem, unfortunately, is that it's very difficult to do truly original and significant research like this. For the pure learning experience it can't be beat, and I suspect one could make some truly spectacular YouTube videos, but it's no substitute for doing science the messy way, with a real lab and real funding.
One of the big problems I've been hearing about recently is that many journals refuse to publish replication papers, which means nobody wants to replicate the results of any paper to see if the original author was correct, because they themselves won't be able to publish it.
Replication is one of the most important part of the scientific process, it's how you find liars, cheats, and actual errors. If you discourage people from trying to replicate other's experiments you harm the whole scientific process.