Category Archives: Tribe of Science

The saga of the journal comment.

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Recently, Steinn brought our attention to some of the difficulties involved in getting a scientific journal to publish a “Comment” on an article. He drew on a document (PDF) by Prof. Rick Trebino of the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Physics detailing (in 123 numbered steps) his own difficulties in advancing what is supposed to be an ongoing conversation between practicing scientists in the peer reviewed scientific literature. Indeed, I think this chronology of exasperation raises some questions about just what interests journal editors are actually working towards, and about how as a result journals may be failing to play the role that the scientific community has expected them to play.
If the journals aren’t playing this role, the scientific community may well need to find another way to get the job done.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, let’s look at some key stretches of Trebino’s timeline:

1. Read a paper in the most prestigious journal in your field that “proves” that your entire life’s work is wrong.
2. Realize that the paper is completely wrong, its conclusions based entirely on several misconceptions. It also claims that an approach you showed to be fundamentally impossible is preferable to one that you pioneered in its place and that actually works. And among other errors, it also includes a serious miscalculation–a number wrong by a factor of about 1000–a fact that’s obvious from a glance at the paper’s main figure.
3. Decide to write a Comment to correct these mistakes–the option conveniently provided by scientific journals precisely for such situations.

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Discuss “Unscientific America” Saturday at Firedoglake Book Salon.

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For those of you who have been following the various online reviews of and reactions to Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum’s book Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, you may be interested in the Firedoglake Book Salon discussion of the book. The discussion takes place Saturday (tomorrow), 5-7 pm Eastern (2-4 pm Pacific; those of you in other time zones can probably calculate your local time equivalent better than I), will include author Chris Mooney, and will be hosted by yours truly.
Given that I’m pretty convinced I have the best commentariat in the blogosphere, I’m hopeful that a bunch of you will be able to join us!

Tempering justice with mercy: the question of youthful offenders in the tribe of science.

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Recently, I wrote a post about two researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) who were caught falsifying data in animal studies of immune suppressing drugs. In the post, I conveyed that this falsification was very bad indeed, and examined some of the harm it caused. I also noted that the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) meted out somewhat different penalties to the principal investigator (ten year voluntary exclusion from government funding and from serving in any advisory capacity with the PHS) and to her postdoc (three year voluntary exclusion from government funding and PHS advisory roles). Moreover, UAB had left open the possibility that the postdoc might work on other people’s research projects under very strict mentoring. (Owing to the ORI ruling, these research projects would have to be ones funded by someone other than the U.S. government, however.)

On that post, commenter Paul Browne disagreed with my suggestion that rehabilitation of the postdoc in this case might be an end worth seeking:

“While such an obvious departure from an experimental protocol — especially an in an experiment involving animal use — isn’t much of an ethical gray area, I think there’s something to be said for treating early-career scientists as potentially redeemable in the aftermath of such ethical screw-ups.”

You have got to be kidding.

We’re not talking about an honest mistake, or deviating from an approved protocol with the best of intentions, or excluding a few outliers from the analysis but rather a decade of repeatedly lying to their funders, their IACUC and to other scientists working in their field.

What they did almost makes me wish that science has a ceremony similar to the old military drumming out.

At the very least they should both be charged with fraud, and since they presumably included their previous falsified results in support of NIH grant applications it shouldn’t be too hard to get a conviction.

Believe me, I understand where Paul is coming from. Given the harm that cheaters can do to the body of shared knowledge on which the scientific community relies, and to the trust within the scientific community that makes coordination of effort possible, I understand the impulse to remove cheaters from the community once and for all.

But this impulse raises a big question: Can a scientist who has made an ethical misstep be rehabilitated and reintegrated as a productive member of the scientific community? Or is your first ethical blunder grounds for permanent expulsion from the community? In practice, this isn’t just a question about the person who commits the ethical violation. It’s also a question about what other scientists in the community can stomach in dealing with the offenders — especially when the offender turns out to be a close colleague or a trainee.

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Unscientific America: Are scientists all on the same team?

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As promised, in this post I consider the treatment of the science-religion culture wars in Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum. If you’re just tuning in, you may want to pause to read my review of the book, or to peruse my thoughts on issues the book raised about what the American public wants and about whether old or new media give the American public what it needs.

In the interests of truth in advertising, let me state at the outset that this post will not involve anything like a detailed rehash of “Crackergate”, nor a line-by-line reading of the contentious Chapter 8 of the book. You can find that kind of thing around the blogosphere without looking too hard. Rather, I want to deal with the more substantial question raised by this chapter: Are scientists all on the same team?

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Unscientific America: Is the (new) media to blame?

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In this post, I continue working through my thoughts in response to Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum’s new book, Unscientific America. In this post, I focus on their discussion of the mainstream media and of the blogosphere. You might guess, given that I’m a member of the science blogosphere, that I have some pretty strong views about what blogs might accomplish in terms of helping the public engage with science. You would be correct.

A fair portion of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (reviewed here) explores conditions of American life that make it harder for the public meaningfully to engage in science — or easier for them to disengage. Prominently featured here are the changes that newspapers and television have experienced in recent decades. Mooney and Kirshenbaum write:

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Unscientific America: Give the people what they want, or what they need?

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In the post where I reviewed it, I promised I’d have more to say about Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. As it turns out, I have a lot more to say — so much that I’m breaking it up into three posts so I can keep my trains of thought from colliding. I’m going to start here with a post about the public’s end of the scientist-public communication project. Next, I’ll respond to some of the claims the book seems to be making about the new media landscape (including the blogosphere). Finally, I’ll take up the much discussed issue of the book’s treatment of the science-religion culture wars.

Never fear, I’ll intersperse these posts with some that have nothing to do with the book, or the framing wars. Also, there will be new sprog art.

One of the tensions I noticed within Unscientific America has to do with who bears responsibility for the American public’s disengagement with science. Do we blame scientists who have been so immersed in doing science that they haven’t made much conscious effort to communicate with members of society at large? Wretched science teachers? The American people themselves for being too dumb or lazy or easily distracted to “get” science and why they should care?

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Book review: Unscientific America.

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UnscientificAmerica.jpg
Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future.
by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum
Basic Books
2009

In this book, Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum set out to alert us to a problem, and they gesture in the direction of a solution to that problem. Despite the subtitle of the book, their target is not really scientific illiteracy — they are not arguing that producing generations of Americans who can do better on tests of general scientific knowledge will fully address the problem that worries them. Rather, the issue they want to tackle is the American public’s broad disengagement with scientific knowledge and with the people and processes that build it.

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Manuscript review and the limits of your expertise.

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At his lounge, the Lab Lemming poses an excellent hypothetical question about manuscript review:

Suppose you are reviewing a paper. Also assume, that like most papers these days, that it has multiple authors, each of whom applies his expertise to the problem at hand. And finally, assume that you are an expert in some, but not all of the fields used to solve the particular problem being reported in this paper.
What do you do if one of the key points in the paper that is not your area of expertise seems fishy. For example, if the paper is on your field area, what if some of the lab results seem fishy. Or if you are an analyst, what if the experimental setup seems odd.
Assuming that you are a successful researcher, you probably have long-time collaborators who are experts in these fields. So, what is the best way of accessing their expertise, given that some sort of confidence generally surrounds papers in review.

Let’s break down some of the relevant interests at work here:

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How to discourage scientific fraud.

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In my last post, I mentioned Richard Gallagher’s piece in The Scientist, Fairness for Fraudsters, wherein Gallagher argues that online archived publications ought to be scrubbed of the names of scientists sanctioned by the ORI for misconduct so that they don’t keep paying after they have served their sentence. There, I sketched my reasons for disagreeing with Gallagher.
But there’s another piece of his article that I’d like to consider: the alternative strategies he suggests to discourage scientific fraud.
Gallagher writes:

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Fraud, rehabilitation, and the persistence of information on the internet.

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In the current issue of The Scientist, there’s a pair of interesting pieces about how professional life goes on (or doesn’t) for scientists found guilty of misconduct by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI).
Alison McCook’s article, Life After Fraud, includes interviews with three scientists against whom the ORI has made formal rulings of misconduct. A big concern voiced by each of these scientists is that after the period of their debarment from eligibility to receive federal grants or to serve on a Public Health Service (PHS) committee has expired, the traces of their punishment persist online. McCook writes:

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