Comments on: The Hwang Affair: A Chronology

By: Stephen

Stephen — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 01:58:49 +0000

I’m not sure that where the cells came from is all that important, I’d rather discuss the morality and ethics of interfering with the nature. I guess it’s a part of the big picture…

By: Steve McIntyre

Steve McIntyre — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 03:55:12 +0000

Housekeeping transfer: # 2006-7-26 @ 12:07:04 pm Nature on replication. # 2006-7-26 @ 3:07:41 pm e: #72 it reviews an edition of nature from ~2002 (?). Most of the papers have been replicated, but two of them not. One paper has half of its claim quietly brushed under the carpet, and it can’t be repeated. The other paper is in dispute, and they are curiously vague about specifics; but many people can’t repeat the data, even the original authors have had problems, but they are still standing by their data. against this background, you might expect quite an excoriating commentary; much the opposite. The most common reason for failure to reproduce an experiment is that people do it wrong ! It is rather ambivalent about repeating experiments, and almost complimentary to those poor scientists whose data is subsequently shown to be incapable of replication. The problems arising when you spend years attempting to repeat the unrepeatable are mentioned, and there is a bit about how good Nature is in allowing brief communications to allow you to say when a bit of work is wrong. (I know people who have a view on how good nature really is in this respect…) I recall that this is part of some continuous publishing scheme, where you can publish a paper, and people can discuss the paper, and make comments about how believable it is; but I can’t recall the details. Given that it is two papers out of a single edition of nature which are “in question”, I can see why this paper is soft-pedalling furiously. Another way of putting it is that ~15% of Nature papers are crap. yours per

By: ENM » Peer-censorship and scientific fraud

ENM » Peer-censorship and scientific fraud — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 23:12:06 +0000

[...] The above experiences by respected researchers in the field show that censorship of unpopular views is real and present. While the strangulation of science by peer censorship is bad enough, by ensuring that dissenting the voices require a much higher level of persistence and scholarship than the consenting voices, it has an enabling relationship with scientific fraud. A notion to be disabused is that peer review is adequate for the scientific community to police itself. Most recently on ClimateAudit in, “The Hwang Affair: A Chronology”, http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=476. I’ll comment some more on Nature and Science procedures. The unveiling of the fabrication was not done by their peer reviewers or even by Western scientists. All of the heavy lifting in detecting the fabrication was done in Korea, mostly reported on blogs. I obviously think that disclosure is one of the best and easiest ways of making fraud harder. From my experience with paleoclimate, neither journal applies “best practices” in respect to archiving data and methods and both journals have been unresponsive or ineffective in responding to requests for data. So they are vulnerable to criticism. More on this later. [...]

By: ENM » How to start a science blog (scary version)

ENM » How to start a science blog (scary version) — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 21:16:50 +0000

[...] The lack of data archiving and due diligence in Nature and Science that allowed this fraud has been highlighted again and again here. ClimateAudit, dedicated to documenting the ongoing quasi-litigation of journals and authors in the dendroclimatology field to make public their data and methods (What? Scientists don’t reveal their data and methods?) underlying claims to the famous hockey stick theory of recent temperatures, may have been instrumental in the formation of a National Academy of Science panel Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Past 2,000 Years: Synthesis of Current Understanding and Challenges for the Future. I admit I have a dog in this fight, having tapped out a short article on simulations using random numbers that produce temperature histories remarkably similar to most reconstructions (here and here). These results show that concerns that climate histories may be affected by various forms of undocumented ‘cherry-picking’ such as inter-site selection, are justified. [...]

By: Thinkepi » Recientes fraudes cientàƒ⬦icos: la punta del iceberg

Thinkepi » Recientes fraudes cientàƒ⬦icos: la punta del iceberg — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 13:29:48 +0000

[...] Ahora sabemos que lo àƒ⹮ico que clonàƒⱠel surcoreano fueron las fotografàƒ⬡s de sus trabajos. La historia de este monumental fraude ya es suficientemente conocida y no vale la pena reproducirla (The Hwang affair: A chronology) [...]

By: LTI Blog » Kerry, Hwang, and Trusting the Science [Serge]

LTI Blog » Kerry, Hwang, and Trusting the Science [Serge] — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 20:42:56 +0000

[...] The result of such a policy is the whole Woo Suk Hwang affair (well chronicled here). Unlimited Government money + Scant Government oversight = 1. Procuring human oocytes by purchasing them or allowing subordinate lab scientists to donate them. (it is ironic that we trusted Hwang to treat human clons with dignity and respect when he could not even obtain gametes ethically). [...]

By: TCO

TCO — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 03:42:16 +0000

It’s hard to even replicate this stuff when they refuse to share data or methods or even experimental methods.

By: Sean Houlihane

Sean Houlihane — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 01:34:41 +0000

This is all rather far from my field of familiarity, but who honestly believes that there is any point in the dna fingerprinting part of the story? Either you trust the author to have done as he claims (in which case the test is redundant), or you suspect that the samples may have been manipulated (in which case you expect me to believe that the samples provided for testing won’t pass scrutiny)???

Surely noone really believes material like this until it has been replicated by an independant team? As an example, how many papers have been writen on room temperature fusion? Does anyone believe it’s real yet? As I remember, the teams who claim it’s practical understand that their work is unsubstantiated until the work has been replicated.

Obviously it’s a little harder to be sure of independant replication where we’re talking about analysing pre-existing data sets but if the process is repeatable, it needs to be tested (and not just cloned – the same coincidence repeated 100 times does not make it generally true). Anything else is not science, not the way I was taught it anyway.

Sean

By: Doug L

Doug L — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 19:12:53 +0000

Re #9

It got in. Thank you for having the tenacity to make that determination about the absence of something in 124 posts!

By: Brooks Hurd

Brooks Hurd — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 18:31:38 +0000

I submitted the following post to RC this morning on the “How to be a real sceptic” thread:

Reading through this thread, I was struck by the absence of discussion about the recent Hwang controversy (debacle?) Here is clearly a situation where a good dose of skepticism would have served the interest of science and Science.

Perhaps “Hwang” is a banned word at RC, like “bristlecone”.