Scientific Fraud: ‘Nobody Had Noticed the Whole Thing Was Rotten’
April 21st, 2012Nobody noticed, eh?
Well, my archives go back to 2002, for example, but I don’t count, and thousands of others like me don’t count.
The professionally educated ignoramus class heaps scorn on “conspiracy theorists” for outing their crackpot grant swindling and corporate profit cult for what it is, but then, when the rot has gotten too deep to be able to maintain appearances, “Nobody had noticed.”
Via: New York Times:
“Nobody had noticed the whole thing was rotten,” said Dr. Fang, who is a professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine.
Dr. Fang became curious how far the rot extended. To find out, he teamed up with a fellow editor at the journal, Dr. Arturo Casadevall of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. And before long they reached a troubling conclusion: not only that retractions were rising at an alarming rate, but that retractions were just a manifestation of a much more profound problem — “a symptom of a dysfunctional scientific climate,” as Dr. Fang put it.
Dr. Casadevall, now editor in chief of the journal mBio, said he feared that science had turned into a winner-take-all game with perverse incentives that lead scientists to cut corners and, in some cases, commit acts of misconduct.
“This is a tremendous threat,” he said.
Related: American Society for Microbiology: ‘Has Modern Science Become Dysfunctional?’
“Absolute power does not corrupt absolutely, absolute power attracts the corruptible.”
? Frank Herbert
as with so many science minded individuals before them, seems to be a cycle between innovators and blind monsters. or at least i like to think it cycles, and it hasnt just been getting worse since before my parents were born.
Seems we definitely have moved past the state where people think they are going to try to do what is just, right, or good and have moved on to “well everybody else is scamming the system as much as possible, if I don’t do it too, then I am just cheating myself.”