Dark and Dirty: The Cutthroat Side of Science
NEW YORK — Being a scientist is a
noble profession, but it has its darker side. From fierce competition to
plagiarism to outright scientific fraud, scientists are far from immune to the
sordid.
A panel of experts discussed the
slimy side of science at an event held here on April 30 at the New York Academy
of Sciences and moderated by "Scientific American" Editor-in-Chief
Mariette DiChristina.
Dr. Morton Meyers, professor and
emeritus chairman of the department of radiology at the State University of New
York (SUNY) at Stony Brook, recounted historical conflicts over the Nobel
Prize; Harold "Skip" Garner, a professor at Virginia Bioinformatics
Institute at Virginia Tech, described wholesale plagiarism in scientific
literature; and Dr. Ivan Oransky, executive editor of Reuters Health, delved
into the slippery world of retracted studies.
Scientists "are people who have
ambition and envy and jealousy, just
as you and I do," Meyers said at the event. It's "interesting to lift
the veil on scientific discovery to trace the human elements that underlie many
of these things."]
Battle for recognition
As most humans do, scientists seek
recognition for their efforts, and nowhere are the stakes higher than for that
pinnacle of scientific honor: the Nobel Prize. Meyers' new book, "Prize
Fight: The Race and the Rivalry to be the First in Science" (Palgrave Macmillan,
2012) deals with some of the great conflicts over priority and credit in the
Nobels.
One such conflict involved the
inventor and biochemist Selman Waksman and his then-graduate student Albert
Schatz. Waksman and Schatz were studying antibiotics found in the soil when
they came across streptomycin, the first antibiotic effective against
tuberculosis. The two patented and published their research. Schatz was listed
as first author on the paper but second on the patent.
Waksman was awarded a Nobel Prize for the discovery of streptomycin in
1952, prompting Schatz to sue Waksman for a share of the credit and the patent
royalties. Schatz won a settlement, but was blacklisted from getting a job and
faced major struggles for the rest of his career. "Both were right, and
both were wrong," Meyers said. The story illustrates the gray area of apportioning
credit in a supervisor-graduate-student collaboration. But in other cases, it
is more black and white who deserves the credit.
'Borrowed'
work
Scientists
are usually fastidious about citing their work, but sometimes the pressures to
publish become too great. With success in academia tied to scientific output,
it's not surprising that some researchers stray into plagiarism.
Garner found such plagiarism while
developing software to search the Web for paragraphs of text in order to track
down scientific studies. In doing so, he inadvertently stumbled upon a plethora
of results that "were virtually identical but had author sets that were
nonoverlapping," Garner said. In other words, the papers were
"borrowed" and republished by other scientists without the correct
attribution.
Garner ran his program on a
supercomputer, comparing the texts of tens of millions of scientific articles.
From the results, he created the "Déjà Vu Database," containing about
80,000 pairs of papers that were more similar than mere chance would allow.
About 10 percent of these appeared to have two sets of authors, so Garner sent
questionnaires to the authors, asking them to explain the duplication.
"Ninety-five percent of the
original authors were unaware of being ripped off," Garner said. About
one-third of the copiers said they didn't think the practice was wrong, another
third apologized and the rest made excuses, such as not knowing they were an
author.
Some pretty prominent people were
among the copiers, including the chairman of the clinical department of a
prominent university in Boston, and a former vice president of Iran, Garner
said. He even received mortal threats from the Iranian VP.
Garner has developed similar
technology to detect instances of fraud, such as applying for multiple grants
for one study. In biomedicine, such "double-dipping" accounts for
$200 million to $300 million in government spending, Garner estimated.
Ultimately, Garner hopes the government will make use of this software to
prevent this kind of malfeasance.
Retract that
But it doesn't always stop with
copying. In some cases, individuals stray into the realm of fabrication.
The
number of scientific retractions — statements that a scientific
study should not have been published because its data or conclusions are
erroneous, plagiarized or made up — has been growing steadily in
recent years, at a rate that outstrips the increase in studies.
Oransky
and Adam Marcus, managing editor of "Anethesiology News," run a blog
called Retraction Watch. They started the blog because they wanted
to shine a light on retractions. Some retractions are the result of minor
mistakes, but all too frequently, foul play is involved.
Some
scientists are repeat offenders. Take the Dutch psychologist Diederik Stapel,
who has been in the news recently for committing academic fraud in several dozen published papers.
Then
there's the Japanese scientist Yoshitaka Fujii, who has had 183 papers retracted,
Oransky said. Or the South Korean plant scientist Hyung-In Moon, who faked
other scientists' email addresses so he could review his own papers.
It
was once thought that misconduct was behind fewer than half of retractions, but
it turns out to be responsible for two-thirds of them, Oransky said. The
problem is compounded by the fact that retracted papers remain in
scientific-article databases, so people continue to read and cite them.
In
light of all these problems, science loses some of its luster. But as in any
profession, it's important to remember that "scientists are humans,
too," Garner said.
By
Tanya Lewis, LiveScience Staff Writer | LiveScience.com
No comments:
Post a Comment