She wants revenge
| 30 June, 2010 | Richard P. Grant |
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The parlous state of science reporting in the main stream media is not news. The Daily Mail would have you believe that everything from age to zinc causes or cures cancer (and in some cases both) but even ‘quality’ papers more often than not over-sensationalize findings, or simply get them just plain wrong. In fact, there’s a whole industry devoted to correcting misinterpretations of science and medicine in the media. Everybody knows about Ben Goldacre, but NHS Choices does a super job of analysing newspaper stories, and has a handy guide to the science behind the headlines.
What’s more problematic is how to deal with attacks on science, and scientists in particular. Simon Jenkins is a British journalist known for his anti-science stance (which is a shame, because he writes well and humorously on other matters), and uses the Guardian‘s Comment is Free section to rag on scientists at the slightest opportunity. Earlier this year, Jenkins said some quite extraordinary things, and a couple of pals of mine, Stephen Curry and Bill Hanage, wrote a response to Jenkins in the same column (you can read their unedited response, too.)
That didn’t do any good, apparently, because Jenkins is at it again, this time saying some startling things and into the bargain personally and viciously attacking Martin Rees, the President of the Royal Society.
This time, however, rather than a measured response through the pages of a reactionary mainstream newspaper, Jon Butterworth (a physics professor at University College London) dashed off a quick blog post satirizing Jenkins. And that sparked off a veritable twitter storm, culminating in a Spoof Jenkins Day, organized by UCL cell biologist Jenny Rohn (my colleague at Lablit.com):
We don’t have to take this lying down. Let’s see if Jenkins can take what he so much loves dishing out.
As Butterworth said in a followup piece in the Guardian,
The trouble is, Jenkins’ meanderings are such obvious nonsense that they unify the science community. This is bad, because we either assume the flaws are obvious to everyone (they aren’t), or we respond with howls of outrage, which however justified, can appear to bolster his claims that we think science should be above criticism.
So is this a new weapon in the scientist’s arsenal? Instead of well-designed experiments and vanishingly small p values will we see satire and parody used in the press and on TV to take down opponents of science and rational thinking? Will homeopaths and water diviners be mocked mercilessly in the street?
I would like to think so, actually. It’d certainly make the Daily Mail more entertaining.
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Well, ol’ “Simon says” Jenkins does have the core of it right.
– Scientists want money. And it’s true that this is what the epidemic of plagiarism and falsified data is about. The problem is worse in Western labs staffed with non-1st world grad students and post docs. It is worst at certain institutes of higher education in the developing world – their saving grace is the inability to get much money.
– Scientists do manage to teach science so that it turns off kids. Our teaching of science is awful.
– Scientists do keep science as a religion and we all know the old Einstein quote about how science only advances because the old scientists die.
Jenkins’ problem is that he doesn’t know enough to make his points well.
Um, no. There is no epidemic
Uh, yes. There most definitely is an epidemic Richard. When 9000 papers turn up having virtually identical matches IN THE ABSTRACT to previous publications, that’s an epidemic. Since these were only the most brazenly stupid of the fake scientists, being too lazy to bother even changing the abstract much, clearly, this is the tip of the iceberg.
When 4 out of 9 professors examined in one bioscience department had either: A. retaliated for exposing shoddy science that could kill people in the future; B. protected manufactured data and promoted the manufacturers of it; C. plagiarized data from another lab (in a deal with that lab’s professor for support) giving years of work results to another post-doc who hadn’t done it; D. submitted a grad student’s paper without the actual author’s name on it; Yes, Richard, there is an epidemic.
When a physician was finally exposed for having created an entire academic subject area out of whole cloth, never doing a single study, making up all the data for decades of papers, that’s a sign of an epidemic.
When a large number of papers published in some fields have results that cannot be duplicated, that’s a very strong sign of an epidemic. And it’s all about the money.
When congressional hearings are convened to expose a vast conspiracy within top scientist ranks to falsify and cherry-pick data so as to line the pockets of those scientists, that’s a sign of an epidemic.
The majority may still not be corrupt, although describing the reaction of that majority to fake science as horror is a bit much, but the fraction of corrupt, sociopathic con artists in science has risen to dangerous proportions. You should consider, for instance, your own second sentence, which gives lie to your later claim of horror. You say, “it’s the same as it ever was” (close quote of the Talking Heads from “Once in a Lifetime” a song about alcoholic blackouts.)
The rest of your reply isn’t even worth commenting on. You certainly don’t sound like anyone who has published something even slightly controversial.
Jenkins has an overall well targeted line of criticism. His error is not being informed enough to make his criticisms accurately.
So all of science is about to topple, is it? What’s your cite for the 9,000 abstracts, please? Over what time frame? Compare it with the total number of papers published each year.
Nobody denies there is a problem with fraud
Sigh. Haven’t been paying much attention to science have you? It was, I believe, reported in this online periodical.
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/41458/title/Study_finds_lots_of_apparent_plagiarism – Science news report. See citations and references to the right.
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/081008/full/455715a.html – It appears that Garner’s database has risen from 9,000 to 75,000 suspicious papers.
Physician exposed for fraud: http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/55503/
Sigh yourself. What exactly is going on there; what *exactly* are they looking at? And do you know how many articles are published each year (a) in PubMed (b) in the life sciences (c) in science itself? This problem is not new, it’s not huge, and it is found out. You are throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
And do you still believe that teachers are scientists? Or is that part of my reply you’re not bothering with?
I think Jenkins does have some very good points.
>>When pain is expected of every corner of the public sector, no claim to public money should escape scrutiny. Those intending to live off the earnings of others should always have to explain why.
So far, our answer seems to be “because it is a good thing.”
Sounds good to me. But the premise is wrong: the financial impact of funding science appears to be net positive, not negative. If anybody is intending to live off the earnings of others it’s artists and journalists.
I agree, and have argued elsewhere, that publicy-funded scientists should not expect to be immune to funding cuts. What Jenkins says, however, goes far beyond that.
Everybody lives off the earnings of others, unless you’re a self-sufficient off-the-grid hermit.
Richard is right. Aside from the USA’s highway system, the highest return on investment for the taxpayer was Apollo, which had an ROI of over 7 times investment. Science generally runs between 2 and 3 times investment. It is true that in the last 20 years, the ROI on NIH grants has dropped quite a bit. The cost per product translated from research is now around $60 million of research.
I’d never heard of this Jenkins person, but his ilk are rampant on this side of the pond. After reading his column about the East Anglia kerfluffle, I was both disheartened and encouraged. I was disheartened to think that an educated person could be such a fool, and I was encouraged to know that we Yanks don’t have a monopoly on supercilious dorks.
And here I thought that the UK was a center for rational thought (Darwin, Hawkings, Newton, etc.), but this twit gets space in a major, respected publication to spew forth over something of which he understands very little. Can’t you guys do better than him?
We try. We really do.
Methinks thou doth protest too much.
Jenkins is a trenchant critic, but it is disingenuous to suggest he’s ‘anti-science’. And his criticism of Martin Rees was hardly personal or vicious – simply criticism. If it is agreed that scientists are fallible humans, like everyone else, it’s perfectly reasonable for non-scientists to question scientific theories/dogma/whatever, *especially* when certain scientists & areas of science have become so symbiotically linked to politics and public policy that it is hard to know where one stops and the other begins (or indeed whether the dog or the tail is in charge). No amount of bristling at newpapers whose editorial policies you don’t agree with changes the reality of this.
The fact alone that the East Anglia Climate Centre e-mails showed that scientists there were blocking (or trying to block) the publication of research by sceptics of anthropogenic global warming was appalling – and yet we are to believe that nothing is rotten in the state of science…? Indeed, far from ‘test everything: accept nothing on faith’ being the mantra of the so-called mainstream climate science community, for example, the labelling of AGW sceptics as ‘deniers’ – often, increasingly, by their fellow pro-AGW colleagues – suggests that transition of some areas of science from an unbiased, continual search for truth to a faith-based pseudo-evangelical orthodoxy continues apace.