The Blogosphere on the Retractions
This guy is talking about them.
Dr. Free-Ride is too. Her post is pretty forgiving and chock full o’innocent-until-proven-guilty stuff, but there are some real gems in the comments:
It occurs to me that one relatively easy way around this problem would be supplied by having computer-connected cameras filming all activity in the lab. Hard drive space is cheap these days.
Good golly, Ms. Molly. Maybe our bosses could rig them such that they could access real-time video on the Internet. That’d be great!!11!!1!
Oh, my goodness! There is almost certainly something sinister, even socio-pathological behind a story like this.
It sounds like desperate absolution of responsibility on behalf of the mentor or organizer of the study and the institution represented since he/she was senior author and ultimately responsible. A resignation would be more sincere and a penalty to those in the host institution linked at all levels to such a system.
This is another symptom of the dysfunctional anti-scientific socio-political distribution of support, credit and information system that is in desperate need of reformation.
You go, girl!
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July 2nd, 2006 at 8:37 pm
Paul,
I can’t help but wonder how much the current tenure climate at “prestigious” universities and early career “star status” in graduate school or postdoc contributed to these alleged frauds. I think we can understand why bengu committed these alleged frauds, rather then blame some pathology as some posters have suggested. And, not surprisingly, we have seen this before with nanotech and Hendrik Schon at IBM/Lucent (all too close to home for Columbia). Under an advisor, that is as eager to get those fantastically great results as they are to get more of them, (with honors, awards, grants, and tenure positions to follow) students realize that those “stars” get advancement. Just before Hendrik’s investigation, he was awarded a prestigious material science prize with his advisor Professor Batlogg, and was offered the chair of a Max Planck Institute (MPI) in germany; not just a position but the chair! How can this be? Maybe the MPI and the award people didn’t have access to his data? Nope. Professor Lydia Sohn took the figures directly from his papers and noticed they were the same; the tiny snowball at the top of Schon’s mountain started downhill = busted. The award people and MPI must have not cared enough about his actual scientific experiments to question / reproduce / replicate / extend them (or just look at the figures closely!). Who’s fault is that? Obviously it’s mostly Schon’s, but doesn’t IBM / Lucent (facing a dramatic fall in their stock value), the MPI, Batlogg, or the award people bare some responsibility for being at the least premature in their actions and complicit in creating an environment that makes thorough science secondary to fantastic, albeit questionable, results. The MPI, awards people, and Batlogg are guilty of caring more about their careers, awards, grants, ego, stock price, fame, or fortune then about solid science. If they had cared about questioning results and doing some actual experiments then about being a “star” this probably wouldn’t have happened. More disturbing is wondering how many more scientists care more about what and where science can get them then about science.
We can look to many of these same circumstances and motivations in bengu’s situation; bengu was awarded the Arun Guthikonda Fellowship in Organic Chemistry, was in-line for Columbia’s after thesis awards (usually measured by number of papers, and she had more papers then anyone else in her year: 1 patent, 9 papers, 1 book chapter), and she had a good postdoc lined up with Professor Kool at Stanford (her first choice, oddly enough, was to stay at Columbia and work with Dali). She made the choice early in her career to allegedly fake the results rather then to discover them. But why? Ego, fame, fortune, fellowships, awards, career, come to mind; regardless she wanted to use science to get her something or somewhere. Dali was a known firebrand advisor; having official hours for the group and minimum 12 hour working weekdays and 10 hour working weekends, few early papers or grants, and an intense pressure to produce results. (Dali also started class one morning “We all heard what happened and it’s sad but now it’s time for chemistry.” September 11th, 2001) Its a recipe for unsound/questionable scientific practices.
I think we can understand dali’s alleged malignant neglect in discovering the truth (he fired three graduate students that couldn’t reproduce bengu’s results); fighting for tenure, grants, and awards. Since dali’s C-H bond activation papers, he has numerous awards and grants not to mention a favorable tenure decision (also a Science review, book chapters, patents). Things were going so well, why look a gift-horse in the mouth? Dali neglected his first responsibility as a scientist, be the first and best critic of his own work. As scientists we should be skeptical, critical, and suspicious of any data and all results. Dali wasn’t. Upon hearing the first rumors of irreproducibility (almost three years ago) he should have gotten up off his chair, left his office, put on a lab jacket, and run those experiments himself. He didn’t. That wasn’t a failure to only himself, but to bengu, his group, Columbia University, JACS, the chemistry community, and science. Dali’s alleged reluctance to investigate these irreproducible experiments is scientific misconduct, but where are we culpable in all of this? Has science become a cult of personality industry? Privy to idol worship? Has the establishment of numerous awards, fellowships, mainstream publications affected science? Do we think of ourselves as great thinkers, deserving of Swedish prizes and ego massages? Are we needy of the publics adoration? The real scandal is how many scientists are.
Those unfamiliar with the Schon scandal should see: http://www.lucent.com/news_events/researchreview.html
and “Disgraced Physicist Stripped of Ph.D. Degree” Mitch Jacoby, C&E News, June 17, 2004.
Those unfamiliar with Col. Richard Meinertzhagen should see:
John Seabrook; New Yorker, May 27 2006, 50.
Herman Blume
July 3rd, 2006 at 5:05 am
Those are some great points, especially:
I’ve got to think that anyone who fabricates data is psychologically diseased at some level. In the Columbia case, if this was fabrication, they would have known they’d be caught…it was a methodology paper in a fascinating field; it wasn’t the 37th step in a 50-step synthesis that no one was going to care about.
And did Sames actually say that on 9-11?! I know Columbia is farther uptown than NYU, but our campus went absolutely dead–not just for the morning, but for an entire week! All chemistry (lab work) had to stop, at least for the day, because there were no emergency services available if something bad were to happen. Some jerk pulled the fire alarm in my dorm and it took over an hour for the fire department to show up and clear the alarm.
July 3rd, 2006 at 9:32 am
My advisor said the very same thing to our research group on 9-11-01. Granted, we’re not in NYC but the events of the day were very upsetting and I could not even concentrate on what I was doing. The university president had suspended classes (but of course, that does not really apply to grad students doing research). Most of the news websites were down. The only thing you could get is a very delayed statement from yahoo.com. Later, we were able to catch some shots of the first tower going down on one of the tv’s in one of the teaching labs. I remember thinking “what kind of person am I working for?” but that thought was overcome by the numbness I felt for weeks afterwards.
Paul, perhaps you should make a poll of how many advisors said similar things on that day?