The tip of the iceberg
Looks like the "pioneer" of Korean stem cell research did actually fake a good deal of his results. I have to admit that I enjoy the whole story. Not because I like to see the credibility of Korean science damaged. Simply because it is important that such stories reach a wider public than they usually do. It adds pressure to the scientific community to reconsider some of it's established practices.
At some point I was naive enough to believe "that science shouldn't be like this". There should be no elements of fraud. Every scientist should strive for pure, honest knowledge, nothing more. But science has become a very large system with thousands of workers involved. It is embedded into a well established capitalistic system.
There is no reason to be surprised that there exist other things than knowledge which also matter to scientists. Like the 40 million dollars Dr. Hwang received for conducting his research. Though he might have been more attracted by the amount of attention he received.
There is no "scientific law" that prevents scientists from manipulating, cheating and lying. It will be hard to actually prosecute Dr. Hwang even though he might have misappropriated millions of dollars. And the combination of a scientific environment without rules and the capitalistic system has led to an "interesting" situation in science. Manipulation or social engineering certainly plays the biggest role in the area of dubious "scientific" practices.
A good example of this is the science paper published by Dr. Hwang. There was an article on yahoo highlighting the position of Gerald Schatten, the senior author on the science paper. There is one sentence in that article that made me laugh:
Levine said it's unclear why Schatten was given senior author status among the 24 South Korean scientists who also signed on to the paper.
I wonder why somebody in the scientific community would say that this is "unclear"? It is common knowledge among scientists that it is very "helpful" to have the right connections in US if you want to publish a paper in Science or Nature. In this case I really hope that Gerald Schatten goes down together with Dr. Hwang. As a senior author he clearly had the responsibility to check the work rather than just adding himself to the list of authors in a prominent position.
So I hope that this case is just another warning signal to the scientific community that some practices should be reconsidered. One of my favourites is the way peer review works. Though I am probably not allowed to make any suggestions since I chose the easy way of just leaving the weird scientific system behind.
Posted at: 10:08 | Permalink | category: /english/personal/news/science
