Physicist Reputations Tarnished

ruszka writes "An article at PhysicsWeb goes over a growing concern in the physics community: their reliable image. This isn't a case of jumping the gun, as seen with cold fusion, but over fabrication in data results. Bell Labs and Berkeley are both recovering from cases where their own employees falsified data."

Same in Chemistry

[lovebyte]

Many chemists will say that they have tried to reproduce experiments from scientific articles and have sometimes failed. They will argue that some PhD students and postdocs (in particular) are put under so much pressure to "publish or perish" that some results are sometime fabricated. It's been happening for a very long time in science and it will happen in the future. End of story.

Re:Same in all fields

[nucal]

What amazes me about this is that these people either:

• think they won't get caught.
• know that other researchers won't be able to reproduce their data and are hoping to get caught.
• are delusional and actually believe their data is valid.
• are betting that their theories are right and are making up data in the hopes that they will be first to publish and that others will validate the results.

Yes, the pressure to produce can be overwhelming, but there are other ways to survive in academia. I find that a lot of researchers fall into a trap of only wanting to publish in the absolute best journals - and then either don't publish or get pressured into cutting corners. In the meantime, they could have chipped away at a project and over time make substantial progress publishing in second tier (but still well regarded) journals, to then gradually work their way up to the more "key" findings. In my opinion, this approach generally leads to more innovative research.

Re:Same in all fields

[HorsePunchKid]

I think another possibility is that they feel their research isn't important enough that other people will try to verify it. I can imagine them saying, "Well, it almost works. Let's just publish to get get the department head off our back. I'm sure other people will have the time to go through our work more thoroughly." Sometimes they'll just be wrong, and further research will not bear out their claims. Of course this doesn't explain cases where researchers have falsified groundbreaking or surprising research (e.g. elements 116 and 118, cold fusion, etc.). It's still the wrong thing to do, though.

Re:Same in all fields

[cp99]

I'm currently doing a PhD in chemistry, and personally I feel that it would be very easy to make up results. This is especially true if the research is giving unsurprising results.

It is actually quite differcult to reproduce many chemical reactions which have been published in the science lit. So when you can't repeat someone's work, do you raise a stink (only to find out that everybody but you can reproduce it), or do you find another workaround to the problem that you are trying to solve?

Re:Same in Chemistry

[JBv]

Scientists live for authorship and publication.

Few people are incapable of sharing and discussing unpublished results in fear of being scooped of their doctoral degree or publication. Do not confuse discussion with hype. Many 'scientists' have promised me emminent paradigm shifts in the field since I can remember going to congresses. It seems publishing well and in abundance is not enough, you have also to throw some hype and sand around.

From hype to science fiction in discussions is only a small step. Fortunately going from fiction to full blown fabrication of results is a larger step.

Re:Same in Chemistry

[lovebyte]

Few people are incapable of sharing and discussing unpublished results in fear of being scooped of their doctoral degree or publication.
If you are saying that scientists don't talk about what they are doing so that it is not stolen by others, I think this is not completely true. Just go and visit acedemic labs and they freely speak about what their research consists of. Not with all the details, but detailed enough.
And I am not talking about hype. I think in chemistry and biology which as far as I can see are the two experimental fields where there are a lot of publications, quite a few of the presented results are not reproducible, i.e. incorrect. Maybe not on purpose, but mostly because it was rushed. I have no proof of this BTW.

Pressure for results and funding

[twem2]

The pressure to get results, so you can get funding for research is huge, its not surprising that results get falsified.
Very little research is done with no vested interest now, companies want to make money from it, so they'll only put money into research which is going how they want it, or is worth gambling on as the gains would be so enormous if they were to come to fruition.

Reproducible.

[Alranor]

And this is why one of the fundamental rules of science is that your results have to be reproducible by someone working independently.

I can't see this being a major problem over here (UK) because

a) Scientists understand that results need to be reproducible, and thus won't be hugely thrown by a single lab producing something like this

b) The general public don't really know much about science anyway, and they mistrust it already for a completely separate reason, namely the way the government presents any scientific research as supporting whatever policy they've already decided on (see BSE / foot & mouth / GM food / etc)

Re:Reproducible.

[Otter]

Biology in the US went through this a few years ago, at the peak of the Robert Gallo and David Baltimore "scandals". There were a handful of highly publicized cases that were blown up into a trend of "scientific misconduct is on the rise". Yeah, two instances make a trend. Glad to have thinkers like that in science.

Both of those cases turned out to be largely groundless, but not before all of us on NIH grants had to take mandatory ethics seminars, where we discussed ludicrous scenarios about authorship that bore absolutely no relation to reality. Now, ethics seminars have vanished and there hasn't been a high-profile case in years. (Some grad student in Francis Collins' lab falsifying results in 1998 or so.)

These physics scandals do seem to at least be genuine cases of fraud, and I imagine grad students will be herded through some seminars, no new cases will pop up and the whole thing will be forgotten in a year.

Most Aren't Reproduced

[Anonymous Coward]

This notion of independently reproducing results is very good, but that's often easier said than done.

One reason is that if the major factors that brought about the original experiments results are not well known (even though the original investigators thought they did), then REAL results maybe difficult to reproduce...even by those that originally did the work!

Also, one typically doesn't just reproduce results but tries to "reproduce and extend." But here's the rub, this attempt may alter poorly understood processes so much that a replication doesn't occur. A small change can even do this in "choatic / nonlinear systems.

When dealing with statistical results like testing drugs on human subjects. Some experiments show great promise but others don't, even when patient populations seem to be similar (i.e. you pre-blocked and randomized with say 1000 or more subjects and checked that the baseline groups all started the same) and treatments were standardized and blinding was adequate.

Populations can NOT generalize!

Much repeated testing may need to be done to repeat these results.

This and other things provide a sufficient loop-hole to even entirely make-up bogus data.

From personal experience, I've seen this happen and it does happen much more often than admitted by science or the press.

Corrupted Science

[Bonker]

For a growing number of years, science in academia and business has grown increasingly more corrupt. Part of this has to do with the profit-potential of controlling a particular scientific advancement. Look at all the companies who want to patent parts of the human genome for whatever reason. They want to be the only people who can benefit from it. This is mostly, but not entirely limited to the business science community. In the academic science community, the reason is much more simple: Ego.

Right now, we have a generation of scientists who've grown up in the wake of the most rapid scientific expansion in the history of man. That expansion has mostly petered out, but hasn't stopped entirely. Rather than expanding science, current scientists are working a lot more on applying the science we already have. (IMO, we'll probably have another period of rapid expansion once we start harnessing quantum effects for computation and communication.)

For the time being, there aren't going to be any earth-shaking breakthroughs in science like there were in the late 1800's and early-mid 1900's. Science is so complex that very little of it is going to come from single minds. The Higgs boson, for example, is almost certainly going to be disovered and observed by a team if it really exists, and not an individual. What glory there is in science is going to be spread more and more thin, even if we do have another period of expansive discovery in the near future.

While it would be nice to think that most scientists are in the field because they geniunely want to discover and help society, many of the people in the field are not. Worse, many of the people in the field are businessmen or are funded by businessmen who pressure them to produce.

In the worst case, you have a field populated by individuals who's livlihood is tied not only to their reputation, but also to their 'production level'. In this situation it starts working to the scientists' best interests to artificially inflate their own reputations and accomplishments and attack the reputations and accomplishments of other scientists.

There is a lot of work going on right now studying a possible relationship between anti-gravity and superconductivity that is completely dismissed by 'established' science as pop-science and unscientific nonsense. The reason that 'accepted' researchers are dismissing this work is not because they genuinely think it's bogus, but because it threatens them and their reputations. This sort of thing goes on all the time to greater and lesser degrees

How can this be fixed? Scientists have always had huge egos and the damage to the scientific process will take a long time to go away, but I think that a lot of corruption could be eliminated by forcing business out of academia.

Rather than see Universities taking grants from businesses in exchange for access to and control over the scientific process, I'd much rather see businesses pay a 'R&D' tax to the government which was in turn used to fund science programs at universities. Universities would, in turn, make any discoveries publicly available. It's not a perfect solution, but it would go a long way towards making the process less compromised and more trustworthy.

Re:Corrupted Science

[lovebyte]

This is just a tiny part of science. I have been a scientist for the last 12 years and the people that hope to make money from science are a very small minority. Most scientists do research because they like it. And that's all.
Now it is true that there is more and more interest from business and that applied science is growing much faster than fundamental research. But still, most scientists will have nothing more than a barely confortable pay check at the end of the month.

When it comes to reputation, well, yes that's the only thing scientists have! They don't measure their worth through their bank balance. So what. It's the same with OSS.

Re:Corrupted Science

[Bonker]

When it comes to reputation, well, yes that's the only thing scientists have! They don't measure their worth through their bank balance. So what. It's the same with OSS.

While I don't mean to belittle you or your work, reputation-based compensation is problematic for the reasons stated in my post above. While it may be the way that scientists measure their own worth, scientists should be more willing to work as a team member and more willing to accept or review controversial work without dismissing it out of hand. I think that if scientists are compensated in a manner that doesn't take into account their reputation, this is more likely to happen. More scientists could do it 'for the love', and not fear not being able to work just because they don't get noticed by magazines and the national media.

Of course this is just my opinion.

Re:Corrupted Science

[Peter T Ermit]

Lots of scientists work as team members (as you noted in your first post.) They do review controversial work all the time... and if they dismiss an idea that's correct, then the truth will eventually come out as the experiment is replicated or as more data arrives. Or are you just bitter about antigravity's being dismissed? (Scientists try keep their minds open, but not so far open that their brains fall out.)

And as for the media being a driver for scientists, that's ludicrous. How many scientists get their names in the press? And of those, how many even get 15 minutes of fame?

Re:Corrupted Science

[tiedyejeremy]

"Rather than see Universities taking grants from businesses in exchange for access to and control over the scientific process, I'd much rather see businesses pay a 'R&D' tax to the government which was in turn used to fund science programs at universities. [...] It would go a long way towards making the process less compromised and more trustworthy."

The problems with this that I see are

• that governments and governmental funding move much too slowly,
• to whom do those making grant allocations report, and
• what is to keep business from influencing the government decisions in the same manner as they have influenced trade policy in steel [tiedyeguide.com] or privacy policies in the case of the RIAA?

Don't get me wrong, I agree that there are problems with the science community as it is and your solution seems good, but is it really any better? I can think of several discoveries that were made a result of purely acedemic interest, but I can also think of discoveries that would have been made much much later were it not for financial interest.
If you mean that companies could "donate" a R&D tax for a particular project to be funded by the government, then maybe we're headed into the planned society sphere, which is a little scarey, to me.
very mixed bag....

The importance of science education

[iskander]

You make some good points, albeit a bit harsh for my taste at times; you certainly don't seem to think altruism in science is pervasive and neither do I! :) Your indictment of "corrupted science" enumerates a lot of accused parties, but I wish to concentrate on my favorite guilty party. I blame the schools. Yep, I do. Let me expound on that and, along the way, comment on some of what you said.

You said:

Right now, we have a generation of scientists who've grown up in the wake of the most rapid scientific expansion in the history of man. That expansion has mostly petered out, but hasn't stopped entirely. Rather than expanding science, current scientists are working a lot more on applying the science we already have. (IMO, we'll probably have another period of rapid expansion once we start harnessing quantum effects for computation and communication.)

WRT the above, I would like to say two things:

1. It is my considerate opinion that a very important objective of scientists should be precisely what you say it is today: to refine our models (i.e., so-called theories) in order to create or improve devices or processes that allow us to profit tangibly from our intellectual effort. Your view that scientists who work on the design of devices or processes exploiting our theoretical frameworks are failing to "expand science" is ludicrous; a good design (one that eventually results in the production of a good device or process or even a new material) is evidence of the value of the theoretical framework and analytical tools used to create it, and, insofar as better instruments and materials make it easier (or even possible) to discover new things and refine our models of them, the activity that you dismiss as merely applicative is in fact also foundational.
2. IMHO, the last wave of rapid progress in science came as a result of improved communications (people and ideas moving and coming in contact with each other) and was made possible by the small size of the interest group and its chosen subject; that is, travel and post of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century made it possible for scientists working far away from each other to share their work and integrate much of the information available then into coherent bodies of knowledge. Now, the advent of modern telecommunications has the potential facilitate a great improvement where communication is concerned (as great as steamboats and trains back in the day) but the integration of all of the information that will be more easily shared is going to be much more difficult, and quantum this and quantum that will not, as you seem to think, help us with that. The real challenge lies in education.

I submit for your consideration that traditional educational institutions and approaches are not serving us as well as they could in preparing budding scientists for the herculean task of integrating all of the newly available information; instead, it seems we are cranking out a stream of scientist lookalikes whose primary concern is justifying their activity to their benefactors using the language and values of business. Further, I submit the following, also for your consideration:

1. We should not continue teaching science chronologically and phenomenologically, giving ourselves the sorry excuse that the good students will make the pertinent connections by themselves;
2. We cannot continue pretending that the same pedagogical perspective will be valid for every individual and every individual has the same average scientific talent, giving ourselves the sorry excuse that considering a homogeneous collection of spherical entities with average radius R and average density D has worked for us in the past; and
3. We must look for better ways to teach what we know by focusing on the students' formative experience as the primary concern of educators and insisting that the act of teaching be subordinate to the act of learning.
4. We must stop giving students the impression that the only legitimate aspiration of every scientist is to make a momentous discovery that will secure one's place in history or, failing that, a steady stream of grant money and a fellowship at a good research institution.

To summarize: Good Science requires Good Scientists, and until we make some much-needed changes to our academic curricula, our pedagogical methods, our conception of the educational experience, and the cardinal values of our profession that we teach to young scientists, we will have to endure the embarrassment caused by low enrolment, a$$hole educators, cheating researchers, and bullshit grants.

So, why don't the schools do something about it all and start turning out Good Scientists?

Well, I suspect that good educators feel trapped in the current situation. It does not seem possible to make a distinction between students of different degree programs because there is now such an overriding emphasis on the double duty of introductory science courses (taught mostly to engineers) as the bread-and-butter of physics and mathematics departments that it would be professional suicide to insist on a separate curriculum for your own department's students. It does not seem possible to make a distinction between students having different aptitudes because there is such an overriding emphasis on the notion of education as a paid generic service, modeled after drive-thru car washes and buffet-style cafeteria food, that it would be professional suicide to speak of this or that student as being somehow deserving of special treatment. How will you explain to a tenure board leveling against you an accusation of favoritism (supported by fresh student evaluation forms, no less) that you felt morally compelled to loosen deadlines for those two students whom the dean had put on probation but who you knew were going to be excellent mathematicians one day? How would your department chair and dean react to a radically different curriculum that would turn out better physicists but render most of the offerings suboptimal for students who did not intend to take a degree in Physics?

[The case of bad educators is not worth dwelling on: a professor who does not wish ever to be surpassed by her students lest she lose her aura of superiority, or who hinders talented students out of resentment, or who rewards students who grease her ego is very unlikely to be concerned with the general problem of how to provide a better formative experience for aspiring scientists, as it is much easier for her to trip them up than to improve her own skills.]

You said:

What glory there is in science is going to be spread more and more thin, even if we do have another period of expansive discovery in the near future.

In reading that remark of yours, I can't help thinking of how the scientific establishment is teeming with people who got into it for the wrong reasons (e.g., "I can play this game, or at least let on that I can, plus I like having other people think I'm smarter than they are") and with the wrong goals (e.g., "I wish to be celebrated and run a little research empire and go to lots of conferences ans junkets"), competing for limited resources with people who got into it for the right reasons (e.g., "I don't suck at this, honestly I don't, and there's nothing else I'd rather be doing and it gives me a warm-fuzzy") and with the right goals (e.g., "I hope the effort I put in today means that, tomorrow, we may all know more about the way things work"). [Please, pardon all of that parenthetical garbage; I was just trying to make my meaning clearer.] I mean, who cares if the glory is spread thin? We should be happy that we manage to work out the answers to important questions and that everybody is going to benefit from the new knowledge; actually, anybody for whom that isn't enough should probably think twice before becoming a scientist in any capacity. I think that there is a difference between recognition ("I know you did this, and I like it") and glory ("I'd like you to sign my copy of your latest book, as well as my very lowest back, if you please"), but it certainly seems some people wouldn't care to have the former without some of the latter.

You said:

How can this be fixed? Scientists have always had huge egos and the damage to the scientific process will take a long time to go away, but I think that a lot of corruption could be eliminated by forcing business out of academia.

I agree sort of. I think it's OK for a company to fund education, but I don't think it's OK for a company to expect that this investment yield directly attributable profits in the form of patentable technology; that is, in science as in other fields, companies should fund education as an investment in the formative experience of the people they may one day hire. Having made my clarification, let me augment your proposition. I propose:

• That we first relieve scientists with the huge egos of which you speak of educational responsibilities, because science education is about more than just formulas strung together by complex mathematics and long tables of experimental data;
• That we eschew celebrity and profitability as justifications of the study of science, because the study of science is valuable beyond the superficial economic impact of patentable technological breakthroughs; and
• That we all (especially deans and department chairs) think harder about our own values and those of the people we hire before weighing in ex-catedra on the latest instance of scientific fraud, because it may just be that we have just as much explaining to do as the perpetrators.

Well, that's what I think, anyway. And I do apologize for the long post, but this (the quality of science education) is a primary concern of mine, and I have a hard time restraining myself. :)

Re:Corrupted Science

[Peter T Ermit]

Yegads. Just to respond to a few of the points in your essay:

For a growing number of years, science in academia and business has grown increasingly more corrupt.
Do you have evidence of increasing corruption? There were two high-profile cases of fabrication recently, and this is a typical two-makes-a-trend media story. Can you point me to some data that supports your claim of increased corruption over the years?

Part of this has to do with the profit-potential of controlling a particular scientific advancement.
Yeah, the element-118 marketing potential was limitless.

Look at all the companies who want to patent parts of the human genome for whatever reason. They want to be the only people who can benefit from it.
Whether you agree with patents for genes or not (I don't), I don't see how this is corrupt. The government has ruled that you can get a valid patent for a gene, and these scientists do. They're not doing anything illegal or corrupt -- they just want to be the people to make money off of their research.

... Right now, we have a generation of scientists who've grown up in the wake of the most rapid scientific expansion in the history of man. That expansion has mostly petered out, but hasn't stopped entirely....For the time being, there aren't going to be any earth-shaking breakthroughs in science like there were in the late 1800's and early-mid 1900's.
This argument crops up every few years like clockwork, and the breakthroughs keep coming. Just in the past few years, scientists have come to accept "dark energy", and it is now the biggest mystery in cosmology. Sounds like there's a lot left to learn.

... While it would be nice to think that most scientists are in the field because they geniunely want to discover and help society, many of the people in the field are not. Worse, many of the people in the field are businessmen or are funded by businessmen who pressure them to produce.
I don't know many scientists who are in it for the money or the ego satisfaction of saying that they're a scientists. They could have become lawyers or doctors instead... and do you know what the average salary of a physics associate professor is? After college, grad school, and a postdoc, they earn about $50,000 per year (for 9 months of work). Hardly rolling in the dough, especially after 12 or so years of piddling income.

... In the worst case, you have a field populated by individuals who's livlihood is tied not only to their reputation, but also to their 'production level'.
How horrible. Holding people accountable for their reputation and productivity. JESUS! Can you name any job (other than postal worker) where reputation and productivity don't count? And you seriously think it's a good idea to ignore someone's reputation and accomplishments on the job?

There is a lot of work going on right now studying a possible relationship between anti-gravity and superconductivity that is completely dismissed by 'established' science as pop-science and unscientific nonsense. The reason that 'accepted' researchers are dismissing this work is not because they genuinely think it's bogus, but because it threatens them and their reputations.
No, they ignore it because it's a violation of the second law of thermodynamics. And besides, if there's a lot of work on it, what are you complaining about? Are you afraid that the crank scientists working on antigravity just aren't reputable or accomplished enough?

... Rather than see Universities taking grants from businesses in exchange for access to...etc. etc.
Hey, buddy, maybe you should read the article. Case 1 occurred at Bell Labs. Not a university. Case 2 occurred at LBNL. Government-funded agency, not a university. So even if your idea made sense, what the hell does it have to do with the corruption we're seeing now?

Re:Corrupted Science

[Sibelius]

OK, so I can either mod you down as "Overrated" (yes, I think giving you a 2 is overrating you), or I can reply.

Your post has this flair of sweeping generalizations reminiscent of people who have little idea of what they're talking about (but that nevertheless tend to be popular with the younger of the /. crowd). For your own benefit, consider seeing the world not as you imagine it to be, but as it is, and in order to do that, you're going to have to go out (no, the Internet will not teach about the real world) and experience it.

Do you know why I'm comfortable making such an assumption about you? Because I recognize in your writing how I used to write, and I know much more about the world than I did just a year ago, but already I can tell you that, put plainly, the variety you'll find in the real world is often times too difficult to be summed up as you tried to in your post.

A good start, BTW, would be to have some facts or "personal experience" that you can add into your commentary.

Good luck.

Scientists

[smoondog]

Scientists are like any other profession, there are good ones and there are bad ones. Physicists should be happy, their image has a long way to go before they get to the level of politicians or lawyers.

Falsified Results

[stinkydog]

I think we need to look at how we educate as a cause for false results. My two cents:

High School Chemistry Experiments
Expected results are known
A if you get expected results F if you don't
Crappy equipment and sad lab partners

Do you:

1>Turn in the results you got even though they are wrong and take the F.
2>Doctor the results and get an A.

Most 'college prep' students choose #2. What have we preped them for?

SD

Re:Falsified Results

[Observer]

2>Doctor the results and get an A.

Back when I was studying physics at university, a friend did something very smart, if not particularly ethical. He'd screwed up royally with a particular lab assignment which was known to carry a large part of the marks for that year's lab work. He doctored the results (not so easy at the time, this was before scientific calculators were affordable on a typical student budget, and when you used the university computer you submitted programs on decks of punched cards with a turnround time of half an hour if you were lucky for each compile/ run/ swear/ correct & resubmit cycle). But he doctored them well: they still looked pretty poor, but they were consistently poor, and matched his plausible excuse of (genuine) eyesight limitations. He got a B.

Last I heard he was somewhere in senior management at a large multinational, so I guess he took the appropriate lesson from that experience.

Re:Falsified Results

[invenustus]

I know you were making a point, but I want to agree that most lab classes I've been in have been useless. Dissection allowed me to see a bunch of unidentifiable slimy junk inside a dead animal. Chemistry labs allowed me to burn pencils. Best of all was physics, where I managed to disprove all of Newtonian mechanics through crappy equipment, both in high school and college. (Did you ever have to measure acceleration and velocity by looking at marks on a tape that was being pulled by a falling weight? Ugh!)

Once in college, I had to do an experiment with cars on a frictionless track. Nice, except that one of the cars had a stuck wheel. Once I proved that inertia no longer existed in the universe, the earth flew out of its orbit, and we all froze to death. The heating in my dorm didn't work so well either.

Tests of confidence...

[Vrallis]

This reminds me a bit of a story told by an old science teacher I had. They told us about their final exam in a college chemistry class. The procedure they had to carry out was simple: mix HCl (hydrochloric acid, a very powerful acid) and NaOH (sodium hydroxide, a very powerful base) to produce NaCl (sodium chloride, ordinary table salt) and H2O (erm...duh...).

The test didn't end there though. The professor required the students to *drink* some of the solution in order to prove they were confident in their own ability to carry out the procedure properly.

Now, would you drink something that could potentially kill you if you weren't truly confident you know what you were doing?

Re:Tests of confidence...

[Amazing Quantum Man]

That's got to be apocryphal... Can you imagine the lawsuit if that happened and someone *HAD* fscked up the ratios when doing the experiment?

Oh, and they hate it when you reproduce the work

[Animats]

I once reproduced a famous "blocks world" in the AI literature. Got a copy of the original code, on paper. Paid someone to type it in. Discovered it was in a wierd, obsolete LISP dialect called Conniver. Found the original Conniver manual on microfilm. Wrote appropriate emulation code in Common LISP. Ran original program. Debugged original program. Discovered that basic approach was flawed. Contacted famous professor. Professor very unhappy.