The Endless Frontier

The NY Times story is here.

It’s nice to see that certain people at Columbia have learned how to control the press. Instead of sliding these retractions directly into the journals, they realized that this new batch was going to be a big story. Thus, why not decide on a message and contact the paper of record to have them repeat it for you? When any tough questions are asked, simply refer to the ongoing investigation and say that it would be improper to comment. Also, take note that NONE of the retractions have been published yet, so we can’t see exactly what was wrong. This tactic serves to dilute the bad news such that all of it doesn’t hit at once.

Well played. Also, I particularly love the statement: “We have re-examined Ms. Sezen’s work extremely carefully.”

Respectfully, Professor Sames, IT’S YOUR WORK TOO!!! You took authorship, you run the lab, and as principal investigator, you are the person chiefly responsible for quality control. Let’s not forget that you benefitted from the work by “earning” tenure. It’s time to stand up and take responsibility for what is–at best–gross negligence. As for now, I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt that it’s nothing more.

And I guess that investigation will be wrapping up soon?

Finally, to all of the reporters that come here for Sames/Sezen news, why don’t you ask Dr. Sames if he feels that he deserves some of the blame, and if so, how much? Does he feel he is a victim in this series of events? Does he think he could have prevented all of this from happening? How would he have handled the situation differently once he discovered something was wrong? If Sames says he can’t comment on these questions due to the ongoing investigation, remind him that he has shown no such reservations about throwing Bengu Sezen under the bus in the New York freaking Times.

I’m not saying I think she’s innocent, because I don’t. I just think that hypocrisy should not be an acceptable instrument of self-preservation in our honorable profession.

Update: The first (fourth) is now out in Org. Lett. It’s all of two sentences and sounds exactly like the others.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 15th, 2006 at 1:17 am and is filed under Chemistry. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete inappropriate comments.