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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