Healthy Skepticism Library item: 3263

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Altman L, Broad W.
Global Trend: More Science, More Fraud
New York Times 2005 Dec 20
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/20/science/20rese.html?pagewanted=print

Notes:

Ralph Faggotter’s Comments:

There has been a huge increase in the amount of research being done in recent years, but it rarely translates into an improvement in the human condition.
This is in part because the principle determinants of human happiness and well-being are not to be found in the laboratory, the pharmacy, or the clinicians’s office but in the mis-directed civilization which we have constructed.

Furthermore, there have been so many scandals regarding published material which has turned out to be fraudulent that the entire business of scientific research has a questionmark hanging over it.

Full text:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/20/science/20rese.html?pagewanted=print
THE NEW YORK TIMES
December 20, 2005 F-1
Global Trend: More Science, More Fraud
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN and WILLIAM J. BROAD
EXCERPT:
The South Korean scandal that shook the world of science last week is just one sign of a global explosion in research that is outstripping the mechanisms meant to guard against error and fraud. Experts say the problem is only getting worse, as research projects, and the journals that publish the findings, soar.

Science is often said to bar dishonesty and bad research with a triple safety net. The first is peer review, in which experts advise governments about what research to finance. The second is the referee system, which has journals ask reviewers to judge if manuscripts merit publication. The last is replication, whereby independent scientists see if the work holds up.

But a series of scientific scandals in the 1970’s and 1980’s challenged the scientific community’s faith in these mechanisms to root out malfeasance. In response the United States has over the last two decades added extra protections, including new laws and government investigative bodies.

And as research around the globe has increased, most without the benefit of such safeguards, so have the cases of scientific misconduct. Most recently, suspicions have swirled around a dazzling series of cloning advances by a South Korean scientist, Dr. Hwang Woo Suk. …
( for the rest of this article see http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/20/science/20rese.html?pagewanted=print )