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How Did Those STAP Stem Cell Papers Get Accepted In the First Place?
bmahersciwriter writes The news team at the scientific journal Nature turns its investigative power on the journal itself. The goal: to try and understand how two papers that made extraordinary claims about a new way to create stem cells managed to get published despite some obvious errors and a paucity of solid evidence. The saga behind these so-called STAP cells is engaging, but sadly reminiscent of so many other scientific controversies.
"See, this is exactly why we oppose stem cell research. They are all frauds."
Seriously though, I would have imagined that the papers should only get published if the results themselves were reproducible. Somehow those are skipped and the whole peer review system is in trouble. At the end, I would think whoever reviewed the papers should also be disciplined.
Peer reviewed. Yeah, right. And just who is reviewing the peers?
And found out in short order.
As for what causes researchers to do this sort of thing, well it's the same thing that other humans do. The biggest difference is that science accepts it's lumps and corrects them.
You'll have someone feeling pressure to get results, and they fudge, make hopeful assumptions, or even fake results. This woman appears to have done all three.
Then she manages to get some highly respected researchers to sign on. Laziness on their part. The pee reviewers see the names, and get a little lazy themselves.
Viola. But in all this, the fact remains that others will be fact checking, and trying to reproduce the results claimed in any paper, especially one making these extraordinary claims And that's the strange thing. If you fake the results, you're going to be found out to a high degree of certainty. She toasted her career with a similar degree of certainty.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I can't imagine this was done on purpose... I can't imagine how a scientist would, knowingly, publish wrong results (and perceived as revolutionary/important by their peers). Because this would be nothing more than willingly putting a sword of Damocles over your head / committing professional suicide on the spot. I mean, how is that possible that rational people (scientific minds) would accept to do such thing while being sure it will compromise their entire career (and life) after that?
That's a very libelous claim. Any evidence?
The biggest difference is that science accepts it's lumps and corrects them.
Yes but...
Science has bigger problems correcting them, and takes much longer to do so, when political and financial pressure tempt people to look the other way. Scientists are people too.
This isn't the same as P2P you know...
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
The biggest difference is that science accepts it's lumps and corrects them.
Yes but... Science has bigger problems correcting them, and takes much longer to do so, when political and financial pressure tempt people to look the other way. Scientists are people too.
Beg to differ. go to retraction watch.com.
As far as I can tell, there is no correction mechanism for politically based incorrect assumptions. Just as example - the job creator myth. It's still cited as gospel by many, while the evidence is clear it doesn't create jobs.
Galileo Galilei finally got forgiven by the Catholic church, when Pope Paul admitted the churches "errors" the church made - almost 400 years later. Regardless of political bias, I don't see either of the big two parties having a website of fact checked "We were wrong about this" stuff - at all - much less in a timely fashion.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
You don't seem to understand how Science works. Theories that later turn out to be wrong are proposed all the time, and doing so is not a blot on your academic record unless it is proved (or strongly believed) that you did it on purpose and hence wasted everybody's time knowingly .
If it wasn't deliberate then making an erroneous proposal is a perfectly normal occurrence in Science, and we rely on other scientists to confirm or invalidate our work. Obviously we try our best to get it right, but scientists are human and that's why one person's results are merely the start of the process and are meaningless without multiple confirmations by others.
The real story here is how come experienced peer reviewers accepted the paper if the substance was as poor as alleged.
"Nice journal you got here. Shame if it got broke..."
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world;
the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
- George Bernard Shaw
Better to aim for the stars and hit the moon
then to give up on hope and be depressed.
retractionwatch.com is great for the most influential journals but it's safe to say it's only catching a small minority of the infractions, and of those really only the ones published in english. One cynical solution: as grant money continues to dry up, scientists will realize that the easiest way to improve their chances to get their grant approved is to thin out the competition: exhaustively check their competitors' publications and old grant applications for plagiarism and fraud, then complain anonymously.
(different AC)
I was more worried about the pee reviewers ,,,
Perhaps one source of misunderstanding here is that some people assume that peer review is supposed to be some kind of ultimate validation of a work. It's not, it's a basic sanity check and a validation that what the authors *claim* to have done is sufficiently interesting. It's not an endorsement by the publication venue that the work is correct and the authors are honest, because it's impractical to validate something like that without investing a lot more effort than feasible for a peer review. Reproducing a work might take months, even years.
There are examples where papers on global warming tried to game the system but were found out in short order. For an example see this article where Dr. Roy Spencer sneaked a botched paper past the peer-review system by submitting to an off-topic journal. Because the reviewers were not familiar with the topic they were not aware that the methodology described in the paper had already been refuted by previous literature. Within days the journal editor had resigned: http://science.slashdot.org/st...
“The problem is that comparable studies published by other authors have already been refuted in open discussions and to some extend also in the literature (Trenberth et al. 2010), a fact which was ignored by Spencer and Braswell in their paper and, unfortunately, not picked up by the reviewers.”
(different AC)
I was more worried about the pee reviewers ,,,
Good one! Tater Salad approved.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Perhaps one source of misunderstanding here is that some people assume that peer review is supposed to be some kind of ultimate validation of a work. It's not, it's a basic sanity check and a validation that what the authors *claim* to have done is sufficiently interesting. It's not an endorsement by the publication venue that the work is correct and the authors are honest, because it's impractical to validate something like that without investing a lot more effort than feasible for a peer review. Reproducing a work might take months, even years.
And you post AC? Very well said. The peer review process is just setting the stage for others to do more research or replicate the results. It's a sanity check, not the proof of the paper. The proof comes later.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
You miss the point. The paper did pass peer review and was published. In a credible journal. It is a great embarrassment to have to retract the paper. The vaunted peer review - supposed to eliminate problems like this - failed.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Worse than that. It's blind faith in circular belief in truth. You get just enough people saying it and it becomes "a number of people" and suddenly a critical mass of people are making or supporting the claim and it becomes "truth." This is a general understanding of how lies become truth all over. Such common lies are "god" and "global warming." Deny either of those (among others) and you will be attacked politically. Observe as I get modded down because I dared mention god or global warming as lies.
let me google that for you...
A reviewer might think that the results are not implausible, so the paper can go ahead. Reviewers don't try to reproduce the results in their own lab.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
"Observe as I get modded down because I dared mention god or global warming as lies."
Ooh, so daring. What's next, O King of Iconoclasts, a bold swig of non-skim milk?
Global warming is something of a "meta lie" then. See, you get just enough people saying it's a lie and it becomes "a number of people" and suddenly a critical mass of people are making or supporting the claim and the lie about it being a lie becomes "truth".
Like the American, Vacanti, who started the whole thing.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
And the end result of this is that Nature, along with other high profile journals, will continue to improve the peer review system. Just like they taught us in Science School. Experiment, look at results, repeat....
Furthermore, peer review isn't all that 'vaunted' - we've known for a long time that bad science gets through peer review. It's just one semi-convenient method of screening. The ultimate screening tool is repeating the experiment. That isn't practical in many cases. Although in this case, it should really have come to mind since Nature had recently asked another researcher to do just that for a less 'extraordinary' result.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Everyone also wants to believe pretty little Dr Obokata, who is has adorable cartoon characters on her lab equipment and wears a cooking apron while experimenting managed to cure mortality. I mean, she would be such a fantastic science poster girl.
I mean, I just looked at her pictures and completely forgot about anything scientific. One look and I was: "Forget about the chimeric rats, lets see if I can inject some of my non-pluripotent cells into her and create some embrionic stem cells!"
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
Journals aren't arbiters of Truth (capital T), they're just what they say they are: JOURNALS of the ongoing work of science.
Someone records that they have done X in a journal. Because said journal is available to other scientists, other scientists get to try to make use of the same notes/information/processes. If they are able to do so, they journal it as well. Get enough mentions in enough journals that something works, and we can begin to presume that it does.
If only one mention in one journal is ever made, then it is just another record in another journal of another thing that one scientist (or group of scientists) claim to have done.
Peer review is just to keep journals from expanding to the point that there is too much for anyone to keep track of or read. It is emphatically NOT the place at which the factuality or truthfulness of notes/information/processes are established once and for all. That happens AFTER publication as other scientists get ahold of things and put them through their paces.
Seriously, this is all exactly as it is supposed to work. I have no idea why there is such hoopla about this. There is nothing to see here. One group journaled something, other groups couldn't replicate it, they no doubt will reference this failure in future articles, and "what happened" is recorded out in the open for all of science, thereby expanding our pool of knowledge, both about what consistently works in many situations and of what someone claims has worked once in one situation but appears either not to work in the general case or requires more understanding and research.
Again, there is nothing to see here. Let's move on.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
The vaunted peer review - supposed to eliminate problems like this - failed.
Not really. Peer review is designed to catch holes in their logic or spot errors, such as if the incorrect analysis method was applied or if their scientific evidence doesn't fully support their claim. When it comes to outright fraud, a peer reviewer really has very limited means of spotting it. In exceptionally rare cases they will request that a claim be replicated by an outside researcher, but that is exceedingly rare and I don't think I've ever heard of a reviewer actually attempting to replicate research themselves as part of the peer-review process.
What normally happens is that other people in the field will read the paper and say "I don't really buy this" and attempt to replicate it themselves. If a consensus of groups can't replicate their findings, then the question becomes whether there was fraud involved or if it was just another example of "winnners curse" or maybe something unique about their study that was different from all the rest (like if they were looking at a different cell line or global population than everyone else). In no case is it really feasible for the peer-reviewer to catch outright deceptive fraud, but usually it gets spotted sooner or later. And the bigger the scientific claim, the bigger the bulls-eye becomes on your back.
... by the journal itself... investigating itself... the result will be that they don't find any wrong doing in their own journal.
And then the media will report "journal finds no wrong doing"... and then we can all go back to sleep.
Right guys?
The issue is not this one journal. Its a general lack of scrutiny in science itself. They are not being audited. The data is not being checked. The experiments are not being replicated.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
It was peer reviewed and found to be incorrect within a month of publication.
How on earth can you compare this to global warming?
Peer review works if the people doing the review are honest and competent. Both aspects have been in sharp decline, not only in the biomedical field. These days, positions for Professors and PhD students are more often than not filled with people that can simulate competence and that have no or little personal ethics whatsoever. They will form groups that accept any and all papers from each other and reject anything from others. Anything original also generally has a high chance of getting rejected, unless the reviewers know and like the authors. The peer-review system is so broken and corrupt that it has just stopped working as the quality of the "researchers" forming it is way too often abysmally bad. (And forget about "anonymous reviews". The in-group has all the Tech-Reports from their friends and can recognize all papers written by them.)
This is not a new phenomenon, it seems to just be getting worse again. But remember that Shannon had trouble publishing his "Theory of Information", because no reviewer understood it or was willing to invest time for something new.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
That seems unlikely. Most scientists do it because they love science, as opposed to doing it for the money and bling, the hot guys and girls and of course the celebrity status.
As the money dries up you'll see more of them burning out and running themselves into the ground through sleepless nights in the lab than you will see them trying to thin the competition.
It doesn't matter how thin the competition gets, if you have no reaults you'll lose funding no matter how many others you take down with you.
Ultimately though the scientists find their science more interesting than the other people so thats where they'll turn.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
No. The correct spelling is "voilà".
It is not commonly spelled so in English. It is a bit naïve to think there is only one true spelling all over the world.
Although alternative spelling may be current, there is only one correct spelling. Ignoring the correct spelling, doesn't make the common alternative spelling suddently correct.
This experiment was actually easy to reproduce. Unlike the global warming climate model. Besides even when the model does not hold, as it has for quite some time, people just prefer to ignore reality instead.
http://www.nature.com/news/cli...
As we speak they prefer to clutch at straws rather than consider that the effect was caused by solar activity. Ah well.
I don't think I've ever heard of a reviewer actually attempting to replicate research themselves as part of the peer-review process.
My wife actually had a reviewer go out into the bush and collect data to counter one of her assumptions, despite numerous publications making the same assumption. Some people just can't help themselves.
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. -- Susan Ertz
The biggest difference is that science accepts it's lumps and corrects them.
Yes but... Science has bigger problems correcting them, and takes much longer to do so, when political and financial pressure tempt people to look the other way. Scientists are people too.
Beg to differ. go to retraction watch.com.
As far as I can tell, there is no correction mechanism for politically based incorrect assumptions. Just as example - the job creator myth. It's still cited as gospel by many, while the evidence is clear it doesn't create jobs.
You are making the error in assuming that Economics or Finance is a science. It is called a social science , but it doesnt' work like one. People make assumptions and then form theories. The assumptions like "General Equilibrium Model" or "Rational Markets" are normative rather than what actually see to be the practice in the world. Then based on these assumptions theories are formed. These theories cannot be falsified because experiments are notoriously difficult to set up (you need entire countries) and even if a set-up is made there are 10 other possible hypothesis that explains the results.
Economics is like trying to explain ocean currents without using wave mechanics or Newtons laws.
http://slashdot.org/submission/1062723/Cheap-mobile-data-plan?art_pos=2
And the end result of this is that Nature, along with other high profile journals, will continue to improve the peer review system.
Unless the amount of errors are below their threshold for action. Or they don't act to improve their peer review systems in response.
At this point it isn't even clear if she really did lie. She certainly screwed up, but the experiments are being repeated to determine if the method actually works or not. It's too early to say if this is fraud or not.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Peer reviewed. Yeah, right. And just who is reviewing the peers?
Ha! I knew the denialists would come swarming out of the woodwork on this one.
Consider the stem cell paper that we're talking about here. It was published in January and immediately started going down in flames. Here we are six months later, watching scientists gleefully kick the cold corpse of the authors' reputations. And you're still wondering who keeps the reviewers and editors of a scientific journal honest?
Peer review isn't some kind of certification of a paper's truth. It can't reliably weed out misconduct, experimental error, or statistical bad luck. It's just supposed to reduce the frequency of fiascos like this one by examining the reasoning and methods as described in the paper. It doesn't have to be perfect; in fact it's preferable for it to let the occasional clunker through onto the slaughterhouse floor than to squelch dissenting views or innovation.
That's why climate change denialists still get published today, even the ones who disbelieve climate change because it contravenes their view of the Bible. Peer review allows them to keep tugging at the loose threads of the AGW consensus while preventing them from publishing papers making embarrassingly broad claims for which they don't have evidence that has any chance of convincing someone familiar with the past fifty years of furious scientific debate.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Coming from AC, I find that to be only a little ironic.
I believe you are misreading the previous post. What they are saying is that political and financial pressure has an impact on scientists. It was not a comment on politics/finance vs science.
Beg to differ. go to retraction watch.com.
I'm not sure where the misunderstanding was, but you aren't "differing" with me, you are agreeing with me.
As the money dries up you'll see more of them burning out and running themselves into the ground through sleepless nights in the lab than you will see them trying to thin the competition.
I don't dispute this, but don't forget there are things like... grants. And too much science lately seems to be more interested in chasing those grants than is healthy.
You are making the error in assuming that Economics or Finance is a science.
No, I agree with you to some extent, but my original comment was misunderstood a couple of different ways.
I wasn't suggesting that it had anything to do with political or economic science. Rather, that science can be unduly influenced by economic or political pressure.
I do agree that there are many economic models, some of which claim to be empirical and others not, etc. But one thing we do know is that by and large Adam Smith's "invisible hand" can and does work, if allowed to do so. (Presuming that appropriate antitrust regulation and enforcement exists, of course.)
You miss the point. The paper did pass peer review and was published. In a credible journal. It is a great embarrassment to have to retract the paper. The vaunted peer review - supposed to eliminate problems like this - failed.
No I didn't. Nature has had papers retracted before.Yes, they were embarrassed. Your "vaunted peer review" comment shows you are just itching to disprove science, or otherwise have some sort of hrdon for it.
Peer Review is there to find glaring errors and omissions. It is a group of people who look at a paper and determine it should be okay to publish.
It's what happens afterward where we find out if the bear shit in the buckwheat or not.
Other researchers try to replicate the results, or somoene sees something wrong and calls it out.
I think that your idea of peer review would limit research to things that we already know, because after all, how can the peers determine that every single item in any paper is correct if they don't already know everything in the paper already?
This is not to belittle the fraud that Haruko Obokata pulled on many people, including her very respected co-authors. This was serious, and she should never work in research again. There are lessons to be learned, including not giving any sort of pass based on reputation - very bad, because she did most of the work, her co-authors probably just a cursury overview. Once it got past that point, the peer process wasn't as thorough as it should have been.
Nastyass bad mistakes, based on the fraud of a researcher who now has as much credibility as the asshat who was in cahoots with a lawyer in order to get money off sympathetic juries in the vaccine/autism fraud case. Main difference here is I'm not certain what her specific reasons were.
But while you are going OH, Noes!, I'm saying looks lika another one was caught.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
No, you seem to not understand how English works, there are many correct spellings for things, for the most part ignoring diacritics. Dictionary's are a record of how a language is used not a unchanging tome (French excepted). If that's how people spell the word and others understand it, that IS the correct spelling.
Although alternative spelling may be current, there is only one correct spelling. Ignoring the correct spelling, doesn't make the common alternative spelling suddently correct.
Thnakss fro the vawllooble input. Yu speling fascists crak mi uwp.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Perhaps what you meant is that the notion "global warming is a lie" is itself a circular belief? That would make more sense. After all, a key property of a circular belief is that it's exact origins are somewhat obscure. The theory of global warming has well known, logical origins founded in the laws of thermodynamics and provable via repeatable (and oft-repeated) experiments. The origins of the theory can be traced back to those original observations which can't be logically explained otherwise.
Whereas the belief that "global warming is a lie" has all the properties of a circular belief:
(a) The proof of the belief refers to the belief itself
(b) The origins of the belief are obscure and it's proponents are often at considerable effort to avoid discussing the likely origins
(c) The belief makes no reference to observations which justify it and indeed, contradict known observations.
Is it therefore safe to assume that that is what you meant - that the belief "global warming is a lie" is itself a lie?
"Unlike the global warming climate model" citation needed. Desperately, considering just how many scientists and how much compute power is given to the task.
Viola.
What does kindling in the shape of an over-sized violin have to do with it?