Scientific fraud

This article from Wired News has some info on the recent rise in scientific fraud. This topic started to fascinate me when I read somewhere that the phrase scientific fraud did not exist before the seventies. This is probably not quite correct because there are documented cases of scientific fraud even in the twenties and thirties. There is for example the case of Paul Kammerer who tried to prove the theories of Lamarck. Another famous case is the research in heritability of intelligence conducted by Cyril Burt.

Nevertheless the number of incidents of scientific fraud have been clearly increasing since the eighties. A reasonable explanation is given by David Goodstein:

In the past few decades, however, that state of affairs has changed dramatically. Science is now held back mainly by the number of research posts and the amount of research funds available. What had been a purely intellectual competition has become an intense struggle for scarce resources. In the long run, this change, which is permanent and irreversible, will probably have an undesirable effect on ethical behavior among scientists.

Currently the number of junior scientists is constantly rising while the number of positions in higher ranks remains constant. The impact factor of journals gets more and more important since it allows to compare the "quality" of scientists. There are a number of such indications of increasing competition in science.

What if competition does not provide the most productive basis for science? True, this type of rivalry apparently works quite well for our economy. But there is more to human interaction than competition and science might benefit far more from the collaborative part of our nature. Projects like WikiPedia present fascinating examples of the human ability to aggregate knowledge at an extremely fast pace.

While I'd like to see competition in science actually dwindling I don't believe it to happen anytime in the near future. Hell, I would not have left the field otherwise...

Posted at: 23:24 | Permalink | category: /english/personal/news/science