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Japanese Stem Cell Debacle Could Bring Down Entire Center
sciencehabit (1205606) writes Shutting down the research center at the heart of an unfolding scientific scandal may be necessary to prevent a recurrence of research misconduct, according to a report released at a press conference in Tokyo today. A committee reviewing conduct at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (CDB) in Kobe, Japan, found lax oversight and a failure on the part of senior authors of two papers in Nature outlining a surprisingly simple way of reprogramming mature cells into stem cells. The committee surmised that a drive to produce groundbreaking results led to publishing results prematurely. "It seems that RIKEN CDB had a strong desire to produce major breakthrough results that would surpass iPS cell research," the report concludes, referring to another type of pluripotent stem cell. "One of our conclusions is that the CDB organization is part of the problem," said committee chair Teruo Kishi Kishi. He recommends a complete overhaul of CDB, including perhaps restructuring it into a new institute. "This has to be more than just changing the nameplate."
There's an overwhelming (>95%) scientific consensus on global warming based on hundreds if not thousands of studies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveys_of_scientists%27_views_on_climate_change).
In contrast, this was a single, poorly done, study.
I was wondering if someone would try to relate this to global warming. Of course this story is a good example of why it's silly to think climate scientists are falsifying the science. Anything that doesn't match up with reality will be soon found out and called out by other scientists. After more than 60 years of intense study of the climate how often has that happened? I can recall a few instances where errors (rather than deliberate falsification) were made and when pointed out quickly corrected but no instance of actual attempted falsification.
Sounds like the same drive to produce global warming results.
Not even close. You need to go to retraction watch http://retractionwatch.com/ and read up. Papers get retracted all the time, and these guys cover it.
Right now, plagiarism is a big thing, even self plagiarism, which is now detected via software. It isn't as nasty a thing as what the japanese researchers pulled, but it is a violation regardless.
Unfortunately for your thesis that AGW scientists are corrupt, much of the retractions have been on the side of those researchers that are trying to disprove it.
http://retractionwatch.com/201...
These guys had a journal funded by an oil institute, plagiarized themselves, and engged in good old fashioned political nepotism in hteir anti- AGW publication.
http://retractionwatch.com/201...
Another retraction
http://retractionwatch.com/201...
Interestingly enough, the most evil person in the deniers universe has decided that he would use their own tactics
http://retractionwatch.com/201...
I know that there is zero chance of you changing your mind, as you'll just write this off as more proof of the gigantic cabla of Climate scientists sipping on their mojitos, in their carribean "laboratories",, whilst enjoying billions of dollars the have in their Cayman island bank accounts for making sure nothing anti-AGW gets past them.
Anyhow, read if you dare.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Sure it is. That's the entire point, to determine if the research is valid. Just because they *do not* review it thoroughly, doesn't excuse them when they fail to catch fraud. "The reviewers do not, and cannot, replicate the results" And what *excatly* is preventing them?
The purpose of peer review is not to replicate results, it is to determine whether the methods are sound, as OP said.
What *exactly* is preventing them from replicating is: thousands of hours and millions of dollars of equipment. Not everyone has access to a trillion dollar LHC or super high tech bio lab, and even if the reviewer does, he is doing his own research and cannot spend his grant money or time to the experiment described in the paper just for the purpose of peer review.
Now, you might suggest re-vamping the system so that there is specific funding for scientists to peer review papers, but that is insane since there are literally thousands of papers published every month, and that is only counting the highest tiers of journals and proceedings.
Biology is insanely complex. So complex that even a .1% impurity of a drug with a dimer form can leave you with a permanent autoimmune disease or outright kill you. There have been experiments before that nobody else could replicate and it turned out to be a batch of pipet tips being used.
It is not good that they publish without being able to replicate but the incentive system does not encourage that. Nature doesn't publish articles that replicate results or show a negative result on something. How you do as a scientists in today's climate is based on getting in high impact journals. This means as soon as someone gets a working result they immediately try to public it in a major journal to avoid being scooped. They later find out they can't replicate the experiment which means something random made it work that they don't understand and probably did not write down.
You get what you incentivize regardless of the field. This is true in politics, education etc and it is why we have so many unintended consequences. We have poor incentive systems and refuse to change them.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
I worked at CDB for a number of years, but I ended up quitting a couple of years ago, in large part due the fraud becoming a bit too much of a daily obstacle to actually getting any work done.
Rather than go on a (very) long rant about the various problems with RIKEN, let me just give my insider opinion for now. If anyone has any questions, I'll do my best to answer.
IMHO:
1) Academic misconduct is considerably more widespread in Japan than in the Anglosphere. I've gotten tired of speculating on reasons why that is the case, but Google will probably have something to say on the matter.
2) Shutting down CDB is actually a rather clever PR stunt on RIKEN's part. As anyone who has spent a long time (10+ years) in Japan can tell you, a large part of Japanese culture, in both the corporate and academic spheres, involves what might be called 'constant renewal'. RIKEN is no exception, where this constant renewal manifests itself in three major ways:
2a) Non-academic staff at RIKEN shuffle jobs annually or bianually, including (incredibly) the "compliance unit" charged with investigating academic misconduct, commercial fraud, etc. This shuffling is, especially for more senior non-academic staff, generally between units rather than within units. The pretext is that this allows staff to become "generalists" so that RIKEN offices can easily continue running even if a few staff happen to leave all at once for whatever reason. For junior non-academic staff, what this means is that a secretary one year might be a health+safety officer the year after that, and work in the PR department the year after that. Maybe that's suboptimal, but if that was where it ended, I think that would be fair enough.
Where the real problems start is when more senior staff, such as "deputy lab director", "head of legal" or "compliance officer" start shuffling. In practice this means that an investigation into the purchase of a $50,000 Dell server that should have cost $5,000, the publication of fraudulent research, or even sexual harrassment had better start and finish before April 1st, or the shuffling happens, the new guy says "I know nothing" and the old guy says "sorry, that's not my job any more, talk to the new guy." As you can imagine, RIKEN (like any organization struggling to survive) is not really in any great hurry to investigate itself, so these aborted investigations are essentially all that ever occurs.
2b) Academic staff at RIKEN shuffle jobs in a rather interesting way; essentially all researchers at RIKEN (including new employees such as Postdocs, but excluding postgraduate interns) have multiple, concurrent positions. A Postdoc with 3+ simultaneous appointments is normal, and even mid-career researchers at RIKEN typically have 7 or so simultaneous appointments, mostly in different research centers. In this way, researchers' employment is effectively made permanent and can easily withstand the elimination of an entire research centre or two. Conversely, one common way for RIKEN employees to be constructively dismissed is to have the number of appointments reduced to one or two, so that when a given RIKEN center is "renewed", the old center ceases to exist and any employees belonging only to that center become redundant.
2c) RIKEN research centers themselves are continually renewed. In this case, CDB might be shut down, and that's going to get a good deal of press. What is going to get less press, I imagine, is that a new center, QBiC has recently been opened. While QBiC is currently based in Osaka, 30 miles away, my understanding is that a new QBiC center is being constructed literally across the road from CDB. Should CDB actually be closed, expect the majority of CDB researchers to suddenly find themselves with QBiC appointments (many already have such!) and all this closure will amount to is, quite literally, moving into brand new offices a stone's throw from the existing site.
3) I think that comme