Why should all Koreans pay for the sins of one fraudulent ’scientist’?

Nicholas Wade has a report on the immediate aftermath of the disgraceful end to the Hwang Woo Suk saga. This guy seems to have figured out how to trick the system:

The South Korean government, which promoted Dr. Hwang as a national hero and an international celebrity, has seen its investment wasted. The leading scientific journals that vied to publish Dr. Hwang’s work are re-examining their acceptance procedures. [...]

Three ingredients of his ascent were attracting generous support from the South Korean government, compartmentalizing his laboratory so that few others had any overall view of what was going on and reporting plausible advances that scientists abroad felt they, too, might have achieved if they had access to as many human eggs as Dr. Hwang obtained.

In addition, Dr. Hwang invited well-known American researchers to be co-authors on his articles, which he may have hoped would make his findings more acceptable to leading journals like Science and Nature. He even invited Dr. Gerald Schatten, a stem cell expert at the University of Pittsburgh, to be the lead author on the June 2005 report although Dr. Schatten had done none of the experiments. But Dr. Donald Kennedy, the editor of Science, said the inclusion of American co-authors “certainly did not affect us.” [...]

An indication of Dr. Hwang’s good connections to the government was the inclusion of Dr. Park Ky Young as a co-author of his 2004 report on human cloning. A botanist by training, Dr. Park may not have contributed much scientifically to the task of cloning of human cells. She is, however, the science adviser to Roh Moo Hyun, the president of South Korea.

Now, this part of the article really irritates the hell out of me:

“Clearly the scientific credibility of Korean investigators has been compromised,” said Dr. John Gearhart, a stem cell expert at Johns Hopkins University and a member of Science’s board of reviewers. He referred to the fact that duplicate and misidentified photos had turned up in articles by other South Korean authors besides Dr. Hwang.

This is utter nonsense. Two or three groups have screwed up. Does it mean that you start with the premiss that every Korean scientist is a fraud until proven innocent? The response of Donald Kennedy, the editor of Science is puzzling:

Dr. Kennedy said, “You cannot avoid a sense of taint from an experience like this.” He added, however, that many leading American universities had had at least one case of scientific fraud.

Read the two sentences again. What do they really mean? Just how many scientists in these American universities suffered because of “a sense of taint”?

It’s over

A panel at the [Seoul National University], releasing initial findings of a investigation, accused Hwang Woo-Suk of damaging the scientific community with his deception, while the South Korean government threatened to pull its funding for his research.

“I sincerely apologise to the people for creating a shock and disappointment,” Prof Hwang told reporters as he was leaving his office at Seoul National University, considered the country’s top institution of higher learning.

The quote is from this Guardian story. The International Herald Tribune story is here.

Remember the NYTimes report we looked at just a few days ago? Towards the end, it had this to say about the then ongoing investigation:

But experts also cautioned that the committee’s credibility requires the addition of outsiders, and perhaps scientists from other countries, who know the field and can help ensure that the investigation will retain its objectivity.

One has to wonder how these ‘experts’ are going to react to this news.

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.

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[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.