NYTimes’ bungled analysis of fraud in science

Today’s NYTimes article by Lawrence Altman and William Broad traces the history of fraud in science with a view to identify the underlying causes. Not surprisingly, l’affaire Hwang is the immediate provocation.

It is chilling to read the long list of high profile cases of scientific misconduct:

• “In the early 1980’s, a young cardiology researcher, Dr. John R. Darsee, was found to have fabricated much data for more than 100 papers he wrote while working at Harvard and Emory Universities. His work appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and The American Journal of Cardiology, among other top publications.”
• “In 1999, federal investigators found that a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., faked what had been hailed as crucial evidence linking power lines to cancer. He published his research in The Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences and F.E.B.S. Letters …”
• “The year 2002 proved especially bleak. At Bell Labs, a series of extraordinary claims that seemed destined to win a Nobel Prize, including the creation of molecular-scale transistors, suddenly collapsed. Two of the world’s most prestigious journals, Science and Nature, had published many of the fraudulent papers, underscoring the need for better safeguards despite two decades of attempted repairs.”
• “… serious doubts about the truthfulness of published studies done in Canada and India.” (see footnote [1])
• And, of course, the Hwang Woo Suk disaster involving human cloning experiment. (see footnote [2])

Given so many high profile frauds emanating from the US laboratories, one would think that these guys would at least display some caution when they discuss frauds that have taken place in other countries. No such luck! Here are two representative paragraphs:

“The Korean case shows us that we should be a lot more cautious,” Marcel C. LaFollette, the author of “Stealing Into Print: Fraud, Plagiarism, and Misconduct in Scientific Publishing,” said in an interview. “We have been unwilling to ask tough questions of people who are from other countries and whose systems are different because we were attempting to be polite.”

and

Experts now say that the explosive growth of science around the globe has made the problem far worse, because most countries have yet to institute the extra measures that the United States has put in place. That imbalance is at least partly responsible for a rise in scientific scandals in other countries, they say.

One really has to admire the strength of their faith in the “extra measures that the United States has put in place”. Don’t get me wrong, here; I am all for instituting them in India and other countries. However, shouldn’t these guys look at why frauds continue to happen in the US labs, in spite of these “extra measures”? After all, it is possible that the “extra measures” have no deterrent value at all in checking fraud in high impact research; and if so, we should be looking elsewhere. Is it even necessary to see the Hwang affair through the lens of “US vs. the rest”, when such a view could lead to a misdiagnosis of the underlying cause?

So, what makes the misconduct in high impact cases different from that in low profile cases? P.Z. Myers offers a possible answer.

***

[1] Read this piece in the British Medical Journal for more information on the Canadian and Indian studies referred to by the article.

[2] To the list of scientific frauds compiled by Altman and Broad, we may add this and this.

Superstar among science popularizers

I am convinced that’s exactly what Simon Singh is. A superstar.

He came to IISc to give a popular talk on ‘Big Bang’, based on his book with the same title. His talk had good publicity, so we knew there would be a big crowd. But we were certainly not prepared to face a full house in an auditorium with 400 seats when we got there a full 15 minutes in advance! We were lucky to get some ’seats’ on the aisles; those who came later had to stand in nooks and corners, and some even had to stay outside, listening to the talk over the closed circuit TV outside the hall! In all, we probably had about 700 people listening to him.

Well, at 4:00 p.m. sharp, Simon walked in, and with his rock-star-in-a-jacket look (picture). After the speaker introductions were done, the Simon Show started.

Yes, that’s what we had yesterday. A grand, awsome Show. Like a great story teller, he took a pretty complicated idea in cosmology, broke it into bite sized bits, and spiced it all up with anecdotes and little jokes. Just what was the effect of all that slicing and spicing on us? We just lapped it up!

In terms of science, the Wikipedia entry on the big bang has more stuff than what Simon had in his talk. His was a simple narrative, that started with original hypothesis by Georges Lemaitre, took us through key events such as Edwin Hubble’s observation of the ‘red shift’, George Gamov’s prediction about the cosmic background radiation, and ended with the famous discovery of this background by the Bell Labs scientists Pennzias and Wilson. In between, he even managed to sneak in the story about how Fred Hoyle first used ‘”that Big Bang” in a derogatory way to describe this theory, only to watch (with horror, I suppose) the supporters of the theory hijack that phrase!

While the narrative of the science was simple, and had just a few strands, Simon embellished each of them skillfully using an extensive rhetorical toolkit. Some of the devices he used were:

Live demos: For explaining the physics behind Hubble’s ‘red shift’ experiment, he takes an electric whistle attached to a string, turns it on, grabs the other end of the string, and has the whistle going around his head in a circle about half a meter in radius. If you listen with your eyes closed, you hear the pitch of the whistle going up and down rhythmically; if you now listen with your eyes open, you notice the pitch going up when the whistle is coming at you, and going down when it is going away from you.

Doppler Effect!

Anecdotes: Lemaitre was a priest. However, he insisted that his scientific idea should be examined on its own merits, without getting his religion mixed up with it. Apparently he even protested when the then Pope said he liked the idea of the big bang, because it means there was a creation event requiring a Creator.

Jokes: These jokes were largely little pranks that he played using his audiovisual material. For example, when Sir James Jeans wrote a book in 1930 called ‘The Mysterious Universe’, a Hollywood actress called Tallulah Bankhead said this book was so great that it has ‘everything that a girl must know‘! In fact, Simon started with this little gem, and when he finished, he said, ‘you know, I am not as great a physicist as James Jeans , but I would really like it if Cameron Diaz came around and said the same thing about my book’!. During each recounting of the Jeans-Bankhead incident, he had the right pictures and words pop up just at the right time to produce a great effect.

Colourful people and things: One of the early opponents of the Big Bang theory [he also proposed the 'tired light' explanation of the 'red shift' observation by Hubble] is supposed to have given the English language a curiously geeky cussword: ’spherical bastard’, one who looks the same (i.e. a bastard) from any side!

With excellent control over the proceedings, Simon kept bringing the focus back to the main story: the Big Bang. All the above are just interesting asides that made the main story more interesting.

During the Q&A, he said he wrote his book to tell everyone about this one big idea, so that we can appreciate it and more importantly, celebrate it. By that yardstick, what we all had was a great celebration.

Thanks for the great Show, Simon!

Meteor impact craters

Check out this wonderful page that has marked out, on Google Maps, where crater marks can be seen on earth. I guess this is the next best thing to going up there in the sky to take a peak!

[Link via Digg.com']

Hype in science?

Let me give start with an example: I saw in nanotech wire this report. The headline screams:

Princeton’s Group Nanotechnology discovery by could have radical implications

Let’s look at the underlying paper that has led to this screaming headline: It is this paper (pdf),that was recently published in the journal Physical Review Letters (22, 228301, November 25, 2005). It actually has a much more sober title:

Optimized Interactions for Targeted Self-Assembly: Application to a Honeycomb Lattice

Read both the ‘nanotech wire’ report and the broad features in PRL paper, and compare the tone and tenor in them! Let me give you the last paragraph of the PRL paper:

The optimization scheme proposed here is only one approach to the inverse problem, and we expect that others will be needed to search for interactions (isotropic or not, additive or not) that stabilize general systems. Apart from any particular algorithm, however, a central point of this Letter is to propose the use of powerful inverse statistical mechanical techniques to exquisitely control self-assembly from the nanoscopic to microscopic scales.

And this is what ‘nanotech wire’ says:

Now Salvatore Torquato, a Princeton University scientist, is proposing turning a central concept of nanotechnology on its head. If the theory bears out � and it is in its infancy — it could have radical implications not just for industries like telecommunications and computers but also for our understanding of the nature of life.

In concluding that this work is terribly hyped up in ‘nanotech wire’, am I being clueless?

Hello world! Here is yet another blog …

Hmmm, I am taking a plunge into the world of WordPress blogs. This is something that I have wanted to do for several reasons. But the main one is that WordPress is an open source program. This is my way of making use of one.

In fact, my first blog was set up on my own server using WordPress. I felt a little guilty about using up our Department’s computing and web resources for it. So, I set up my first blog with Blogger about a year ago.

I have been watching the progress on the WordPress blogs for a while now, and was also secretly wishing for someone to send me an invite. Thus, it was a pleasant surprise for me to learn recently that WordPress.com became open for new membership.
I will continue to explore WordPress, to learn more about it. I am sure it will be easy to learn all the intricate things here without too much of a problem. At the same time, I also need to spend some time on it. I am yet to decide how I am going to divide the content between my two primary blogs.

I’ll be baaack!