American Society for Microbiology: ‘Has Modern Science Become Dysfunctional?’
March 29th, 2012Well, well, well. I guess the American Society for Microbiology has joined the ranks of the lunatic fringe.
If I had written this, Skepdick Corp-A-Ment Grant Swindling Sci-Cult members would be jamming my inbox with nonsense.
Via: American Society for Microbiology:
The recent explosion in the number of retractions in scientific journals is just the tip of the iceberg and a symptom of a greater dysfunction that has been evolving the world of biomedical research say the editors-in-chief of two prominent journals in a presentation before a committee of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) today.
“Incentives have evolved over the decades to encourage some behaviors that are detrimental to good science,” says Ferric Fang, editor-in-chief of the journal Infection and Immunity, a publication of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), who is speaking today at the meeting of the Committee of Science, Technology, and Law of the NAS along with Arturo Casadevall, editor-in-chief of mBio®, the ASM’s online, open-access journal.
In the past decade the number of retraction notices for scientific journals has increased more than 10-fold while the number of journals articles published has only increased by 44%. While retractions still represent a very small percentage of the total, the increase is still disturbing because it undermines society’s confidence in scientific results and on public policy decisions that are based on those results, says Casadevall. Some of the retractions are due to simple error but many are a result of misconduct including falsification of data and plagiarism.
More concerning, say the editors, is that this trend may be a symptom of a growing dysfunction in the biomedical sciences, one that needs to be addressed soon. At the heart of the problem is an economic incentive system fueling a hypercompetitive environment that is fostering poor scientific practices, including frank misconduct.
As a scientist struggling to get by in the US, it comes as no surprise that people are fabricating data. The big, career-sustaining grants come from NIH since they fund not just you and your lab but your institute/university as well with so called indirect costs. These indirect costs allows the university to profit or at the very least operate without a loss. 10-15 years ago NIH funded ~25% of grants, while these days for some of the NIH funding institutes, the funding rate is below 10%.
As such, many highly trained and very capable scientists can’t get faculty positions or have had to close their labs. Others survive and get by. Along the way there are plenty of sketchy, yet very high-profile, publications. Some of them get retracted but more often than not, they don’t get retracted and they end up slowing everything down while colleagues try to repeat their data. Meanwhile, the authors of such papers get new grants, faculty positions, promotions and the like.
“Science” in the modern (read: industrial) sense is largely just a cognitive replacement for religion in the minds of “rational” people.
White lab jackets. Check.
Holier-than-thou attitude. Check.
This isn’t to discount the valuable nature of genuinely scientific inquiry, a practice still highly esteemed by yours truly. Sadly though, it happens less and less in the pay-to-play world.
What rankles here is the whole pseudo-religious scientific fascism leveled against those outside the walls of the fortress genuinely pursuing scientific “truth” in matters — and being soundly persecuted or simply crushed under the heels of their enforcers in government and the thugs in law enforcement who handle the dirty work.
Incarcerating healers and farmers while the real evil runs rampant in the name of profit margins and western industrial triumphalism writ large.
In other words, “science” in its contemporary corporatized form is just another “-ism” to add to the festering tower of other ism’s thrust upon the world by the masters and their messengers.
Communism. Funded by wealthy industrialists.
Marxism. Funded by monied elites.
Fascism. Still going strong.
And all of them just semantic distractions from the real issue: POWER… and the wielding of it by those who desire the illusion of control.