I think the real point here is that a difference exits between divergent
interpretation of legitimate evidence - which is normal scientific
epistemology - or whether the presented 'evidence' is in some fashion
tampered with. The former is healthy procedure and (I hope) not subject of
disagreement - we all have been wrong a few times at least and corrected
either by better insight or new evidence (or actually useful reviews) - and
the question boils down to where 'tampering' with evidence starts. Is
willful neglect of contrary results tinkering? Is looking only for
reinforcing data already tinkering (aka expectation and confirmation bias)?
It is easy to judge in the case of poorly fabricated stuff like bet V1 or
c3b, but I think the borderline cases are potentially much more damaging.
Btw, I have few more references to the psychology of science
Koehler JJ (1993) The Influence of Prior Beliefs on Scientific Judgments of
Evidence Quality. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
56(1): 28-55.
Simmons JP, Nelson LD and Simonsohn U (2011) False-Positive Psychology:
Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting
Anything as Significant. Psychological Science: DOI:
10.1177/0956797611417632.
Frey BS (2003) Publishing as Prostitution? Choosing Between One‘s Own Ideas
and Academic Failure. Public Choice 116, 205-223 (ETHZ)
Nice weekend reading.
Best, BR
-----Original Message-----
From: CCP4 bulletin board [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of George
DeTitta
Sent: Friday, October 19, 2012 10:46 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [ccp4bb] PNAS on fraud
This gets us more into the philosophy of science but I've always felt
authors had a right to speculate in the discussion sections of their papers
on what it all means. And speculate even past the information in the actual
data (see for example the wonderfully prescient final lines of the Watson
Crick paper). As long as the experiments are fully described and the
confidence of the data is clearly spelled out.
George T. DeTitta, Ph.D.
Principal Research Scientist
Hauptman-Woodward Institute
Professor
Department of Structural Biology
SUNY at Buffalo
700 Ellicott Street Buffalo NY 14203-1102 USA
(716) 898-8611 (voice)
(716) 480-8615 (mobile)
(716) 898-8660 (fax)
[log in to unmask]
www.hwi.buffalo.edu
-----Original Message-----
From: CCP4 bulletin board [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Colin
Nave
Sent: Friday, October 19, 2012 1:13 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [ccp4bb] PNAS on fraud
This is worth looking at as well. Suggests most papers should be retracted!
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
Colin
From: CCP4 bulletin board [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Carter, Charlie
Sent: 19 October 2012 17:55
To: ccp4bb
Subject: Re: [ccp4bb] PNAS on fraud
Dom,
You've opened a pandora's box here, which I won't try to contain. The short
answer is both of the above.
I feel it is becoming increasingly difficult as a referee to be on top of
every paper I review, and as an editor it is becoming increasingly difficult
to find willing referees. Both phenomena are diagnostic of the cost of
eliminating fraudulent publications, which gall me pretty much as much as
they do many others, but which do not drive me apoplectic, either.
I've been amused over the years by the frantic efforts to bring
crystallographic charlatans to justice, even as I've been angered by
publication in high-impact journals of material I myself view as fraudulent,
but which obviously survives peer review.
On the second of your alternatives, I'll give you two examples of highly
celebrated frauds that wound up moving science forward, despite their
scurrilous background. The first is the story of Hasko Paradies, whose only
legitimate publication, as far as I know, was a first-author paper on the
crystallization of tRNA. In that paper, he was, I think, the first author to
describe the use of spermine/spermidine and Mg++ ions in improving
crystallization conditions. These two contributions proved useful in the
actual generation by others of suitable crystals. Paradies apparently went
on to make a habit of filching precession photographs from dark rooms and
then presenting them elsewhere and at meetings as if he had taken them and
as if they were from "hot" problems of the day. His story was chronicled by
Wayne Hendrickson, Ed Lattman, and others in Nature many years later. He
dropped out of science and became a pediatrician, I believe in Munich,
where, despite not having attended medical school, he was much beloved by
his patients and their families. Paradies had been an associate of my own
post-doctoral mentor, Sir Aaron Klug. I've no way of knowing whether or not
he actually faked the data in his report of tRNA crystallization. His
"crystals" did not diffract in any case, which may have driven him to short
cuts.
The other celebrated Fraud was Mark Spector, who embarrassed (and indeed
victimized) Ephraim Racker at Cornell by using 125Iodine to construct gel
autoradiographs to support his remarkable notion of the use of
phosphorylation and dephosphorylation in cell signaling. His data were
entirely fictitious, but it turned out that his ideas were pregnant indeed.
I still view the cross-checking he provoked in serious students of signaling
as having stimulated the entire field and actually accelerated it.
Both Paradies and Spector are gifted fakes. Their work deserves appreciation
for the intelligence that went into the tales they told. A lay homolog was
Ferdinand Waldo Demara, who had very little formal education, but who
established himself as outstanding in several fields, including open heart
surgery, which he performed on a Japanese sailor rescued from after a
battle, and who had shrapnel very close to his heart. Apparently, the sailor
lived, and Demara saved his life. His story is told in a wonderful film with
Tony Curtis in the roll, called The Great Imposter.
I hope I've answered your question about what I meant to say on the subject.
Charlie
On Oct 19, 2012, at 11:25 AM,
<[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
wrote:
Dear Charlie,
Do you mean that small doses of fraud should be accepted as a form of
natural evolution? Or perhaps you were suggesting that genuine
errors/mistakes are acceptable in 1/10000 due to the high costs of spotting
them?
D
From: CCP4 bulletin board [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Carter, Charlie
Sent: 19 October 2012 13:09
To: ccp4bb
Subject: [ccp4bb] Fwd: [ccp4bb] PNAS on fraud
Begin forwarded message:
Date: October 19, 2012 4:40:35 AM EDT
To: Randy Read <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
Subject: Re: [ccp4bb] PNAS on fraud
This thread has been quite interesting to me. I've had a long interest in
scientific fraud, which I've generally held to be victimless. While that
view is unsupportable in a fundamental sense, I feel strongly that we should
understand that error correction costs exponentially more, the smaller the
tolerance for errors. In protein synthesis, evolution has settled on error
rates of ~1 in 4000-10000. Ensuring those rates is already costly in terms
of NTPs hydrolyzed. NASA peer review provided me another shock: budgets for
microgravity experiments were an order of magnitude higher than those for
ground-based experiments, and most of the increase came via NASA's
insistence on higher quality control.
Informally, I've concluded that the rate of scientific fraud in all journals
is probably less than the 1 in 10,000 that (mother) nature settled on.
I concur with Randy.
Charlie
On Oct 18, 2012, at 2:43 PM, Randy Read wrote:
In support of Bayesian reasoning, it's good to see that the data could
over-rule our prior belief that Nature/Science/Cell structures would be
worse!
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