The Sick Rose
| 28 April, 2011 | Richard P. Grant |
10
|
|
O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
–William Blake
Peter Lawrence has weighed into the debate on the state of research in an article for Lab Times, boldly claiming that The heart of research is sick. See also Sir Iain Chalmers and pieces in Nature by Jennifer Rohn and Alison McCook (ex of this parish).
Peter, typically, pulls no punches. “Essentially, it’s the publication process,” he says. “It has become a system of collecting counters [to get grants and tenure] rather than to communicate and illuminate findings to other people. The literature is, by and large, unreadable.” He ties this in to the problems women face when trying to have a research career, and the “babies we want them to have”, while recognizing that equal representation of men and women in all careers is “silly”: “Individuals should do the kind of work they enjoy doing, that they’re good at. And this can lead to different proportions of men and women in the arts and sciences.”
There’s more, of course. He says that not having to write grants (he was at the MRC-LMB in Cambridge for nearly forty years) is a “much better way of funding sciences.” When you’re a young researcher, spending a third of your time looking for money, you’re not left with much energy for research itself. He touches on ethics, describing his experience of being ripped off by another research group, and how we might police ourselves to prevent this sort of thing happening.
And, gratifyingly, the article has attracted a couple of evaluations (free link). Helen Skaer at the University of Cambridge says “the solutions really lie in our hands, making this a must-read for everyone”, and Ferdinando Boero of the Universita’ del Salento classifies it as an oxymoronic “controversial confirmation,” making the rather distressing (but not untrue, unfortunately) observation that “Administrators rule. And scientists play the game.”
It’s another long weekend here in Blighty, so I’ll see you all again on Tuesday. But I think there’s enough there to be going on with.
|
|
previous post
Very interesting logical discussion in this Lab Times article. Towards the end, there is a point about some “pendulum” of how science and scientific careers are conducted; that the way things are done now will eventually swing from the illogically bad towards the logically good. From my vantage point of having been in Science for 36 years now, I can confidently state that the pendulum has swung only one way, from sort of stupid to horrendously horrible.
The System of Science is not a free-swinging pundulum. There has been this invisible ratchet preventing any swing back, allowing only those forces to take hold that made things worse and worse over the years. The solution? Break the machine. Institutions need to form a New Plan for the conduct of science and for the development and nurturing of its caretakers, the scientists.
The delusion that science can “police” itself or is self-correcting, appears intractable & is every bit as potentially destructive & dangerous as those of any florid psychosis. In fact, the stakes are much higher, the potential impact so much more far reaching. Scientific misconduct usually involves not just an uncorrected mistake or an accidental oversight. Its motives are not any loftier than the usual motives for fraud, deception, scams or con-tricks, namely money, control, power, prestige and position. The modus operandi are remarkably similar to those of countless fraudsters & imposters throughout human history and often just as hard to detect or have taken seriously. Scientific misconduct is fraud, it often devastates its victims (our patients are real people!) and it must be considered a crime worthy of independent, objective & expert investigation, prosecution & the imposition of penalties applicable to the severity of the specific crimes proved. Self regulation has been an abject failure, for all the usual reasons & the principles of justice, denunciation, specific deterrence & general deterrence, have been ignored or at best applied with a feather. If this means that law enforcement & the criminal justice system must take on these crimes, then so be it. Perhaps it’s the only way to genuinely & realistically deal with the crimes involved.
I concur with you, dear Paul. I do not see any light at the end of the tunnel. Just dark. The machine will break by itself, though. The bluff cannot last for very long. It is just like with economics. Unfortunately we seem not wise enough to understand that a change is needed: we need a breakdown to understand that it is time to change something. I hoped for gradual evolution toward the wise side of the pendulum, instead there are more chances of a punctuated and dramatic event that will change the route of the evolution of science. If it will not be in one way, it will be in another, but things will have to change. Apparently things are changing, though. I have read that the government of California decided not to fund the search of the Martians anymore! Maybe there is hope, after the Science article on traces of “molecular life” on an asteroid that came from Mars (soon followed by another article saying that it was probably a terrestrial contamination, but Clinton had signed the Mission to Mars already).
woops! I was writing to Paul Stein, and Jerome Gelb arrived in between. Jerome is obviously a medical doctors (he speaks about “our patients”) we are “scientists” (the word is too important and I am timorous in labeling myself as such). We do not have the life of people under our control, and we do not go for THAT kind of money. But yes, we like power and glory too. However, our main problem is not fraud, I think. The sickness Lawrence laments refers to the values we have in performing our work. It should be fun. Satisfying own curiosity should be our greatest satisfaction, whereas we like to compare our IF and our Hs. Like young kids do when they compare their hydraulic apparatuses. If I measure mine in WOS it is 23, but on Google Scholar it is 28! I have written several letters to TREE, and one to Nature. They come out in WOS, so I can count them to calculate my IF, right? So, I use Google Scholar to calculate my H, but I use WOS to calculate my IF. Then a colleague might say: hey, you added 35 points to your IF just for a short letter to Nature. Fraud! But if a 600 pages monograph with no IF counts nothing, then I have to invent something to counterbalance the lack of appreciation of 5 years of work. If our main pulse is not to find something interesting, but to inflate our scores, then the heart of research is really sick. Frauds, dear Jerome, are honest stuff. They can be discovered and punished, so those who commit them take their chances. But the degradation of science is going through a more subtle decay, and there are no laws to punish it.
I’m afraid Nando Boero is mistaken. Medical Research is Scientific Research & attempts at narrow definitions & egocentric demarcation simply adds to the ease with which misconduct can be justified or ignored. Medical researchers operate under the same rules & pressures to publish & often work in the same institutes & universities as scientists of various fields. The point isn’t what we call any human subjects we use, or what lab animal! The point is that which Nando’s comment highlights so starkly, that NOT identifying scientific misconduct as fraud and as potentially criminal does science a gross disservice. Don’t divide us Nando by differentiating between types of financial inducement on offer! Grants are used and sought universally and conference sponsorships, academic dinners, equipment etc can be found in countless departments. It’s not only post-docs either, as the list of fraudulent professors grows longer each year!
Maybe I did not express myself properly, dear Jerome. I had the impression that your main concern was about fraud (one stealing the work of another, “inventing” results, etc.). And I saw in your mentioning of the patients a deeply felt responsibility, because they can die if one follows the advice stemming from the results of a dishonest medical scientist that, for instance, demonstrates (inventing data or pushing them a little bit) the efficacy of a drug that might even cause severe collateral effects that were not evaluated enough. People can die, because of that. I study gelatinous plankton, and I might invent higher clearing rates of fish larvae for my animals, so to show that they are very important for fisheries, decreasing their yields. My fraud would not have a big pharmaceutical firm in the back! So, this is the difference, usually. And people are very sensitive about human health, more than about anything else. So, the more you promise to remove all causes of death, the more you get. But, to me, frauds are just an extreme case and I concur with you that they can be deadly when practiced in medicine and I think they are less dangerous in other disciplines. There is no fraud in saying that with the genome project we will unveil all the secrets of life! Then, oh oh! it is not enough, that promise is untenable, we need proteomics, and then we need to know what those genes code for. In the beginning, however, this was left unsaid. The promise was very big. You call it a fraud? Usually it is perceived as good advertisement. Now we sequence everything. Gene bank contains lots of beautiful sequences that are ascribed to species. Who did identify the specimens whose genes were sequenced? Taxonomy is disappearing, and the species are being misidentified. So we have deposited sequences that are referred to misidentified species. And now there are scientists that promise to solve the problem with the barcoding. But if you barcode a misidentified specimen, then your barcode is wrong! And you perpetuate the mistake. Nobody will die for this. Well, taxonomy is dying, while there is a lot of money spent to study biodiversity. Is it this a fraud? I still think it is effective advertisement. And I even think that those who use it are really believing that what they are doing is honest. Journals press authors not to cite too many articles (space is money) so the authors cite their own papers and those of their friends (or those who come from their country). Sometimes they are gently pressed to cite articles published by the same journal they are publishing in. This is considered as “playing the game”. Lawrence identified many of these aspects, and the fraud he suffered was just one of the many sicknesses that he is denouncing. As for dividing medical doctors from the rest of biologists, well, this is the way it is. Even in F of 1000 there is a Biology section and a Medicine section. In the most viewed of Medicine this article on the heart of science is simply absent. The funding of medical research is incomparably higher than that of the rest of biology and, in some countries (Italy is one), medical research is “invading” the rest of biology, taking all financial supports. Simply because they are not divided… so if Medicine is into Biology, then what you expect? If you compare the study of cancer with the study of jellyfish, what do you think will win? So, please, let’s remain separate. But let’s speak to each other, as we are doing now.
May be it has more to do with having a job with a reasonable income and applying for grant to pay for the research expenses which would be, I hope, less stressful than having to find enough money to pay salaries and consumables.
In addition science is increasingly done in a feudal world where people are absolutely dependent on higher up for survival, which does not help.
There is still some openness but for how long? increasingly universities want to gag researchers in the name of competition, but are we not above all public servants working to bring knowledge to be used by all?
There’s also a comment on the evaluation, at http://f1000.com/9738956#comment-891.
Recent estimates by medical journal editors have quoted figures as high as one in five papers being either seriously flawed, misleading, plagiarised or tainted by deliberate misconduct. The response of Universities, journals, national & international bodies has been pathetic. I have personally witnessed several colleagues’ attempts to expose fraudulent work, only to be shocked by the responses, which ranged from none at all to repeated correspondence, whitewashed inquiries by committees riddled with conflicts of interest, accusations of insanity against a well respected complainant & civil suits against Australian science & medical journalists, one of whom has decided to never again stick his neck out to expose scientific fraud & misconduct because of the impact on him & his family. Believe me, the seriousness of the malady infecting research is far more serious than most scientists could even imagine & extends far beyond the making of honest mistakes or oversights.
Ironically, I really enjoyed reading Peter Lawrence’s interview, even though I do not agree with everything he says. Heart of science is sick indeed, particularly down here in Australia, where the funding enterprise is run by bureaucrats and bean counters with little appreciation of science. Some of our politicians made comments recently to the effect that funding cuts for research are in the ‘long-term interest’ of the nation. Even our scientific academies are like ‘club’s’ that reward ‘friends’ rather than quality of work (one only has to look at the recent awards). On top of that you add discrimination that always exists here just below the surface, and professional success in science becomes an issue of ‘privilege’ than of quality of work.