stem cell scandal - a change needed for peer review?

[Daughter of Darwin]

It's been a few weeks now since the fall of Hwang Woo-suk, South Korea's cloning king, and there has been time to reflect on what it all means. I wonder if anything will really change now that the news has cooled. The media were calling for an overhaul of peer review - independent validation by a separate lab for all 'high profile' cloning papers. But is that really feasible, and can any of you envision this ever actually happening? In a world where labs are heavily competing, who is going to have time to hold off submitting that Science or Nature paper so that their competitors can confirm the data first and provide an affadavit? I just can't see it being feasible. People are too greedy. And also too paranoid.

[Octavia]

It would happen if the journals made it happen! Not before submitting the paper, that would never work and would put too big a burden on the researcher. But the referees, if they clear the original ms, should make it a requirement that the clones cells/animal (or whatever) are validated independently for the final acceptance. That way the lab still gets a priority date (the date it was originally submitted). Journals could even have a common reference lab for this, somewhere independent and trusted that all high-profile cloning papers would have to 'pass'.

[Beatrice]

I've heard that Hwang might have to go to jail. Does anyone think scientific fraudsters should be imprisoned? Seems a bit harsh to me. He must feel absolutely devastated already. The whole thing was so stupid.

[Quorlox]

As much I hate peer-review when a paper gets rejected, I don't think that's as much a source of the problem as the publisher or perish atmosphere that permeates science right now, particularly in academia. To get tenure, one needs grants and to get grants, one really wants high-profile publications. For "good" publications, you need to get a result first, which often leads to cutting corners. The flagrant fraudsters are not as dangerous as the subtle ones. The former are usually discovered within a year or two, but the latter ones often become well-known while ignoring the need for good statistics or control experiments. These are cornerstones of good science, but they take time, which many scientists no longer feel like they have.

[Daughter of Darwin]

The flagrant fraudsters are not as dangerous as the subtle ones.

Do you think there are loads of scientists out there cutting and pasting different lanes onto their Western blots or cropping off incriminating bands, or making up numbers on tables or showing pictures of control cells for the 'treated' cells because the treated ones just don't look as pretty as Nature or Science would demand? Who aren't necessarily giving a false picture but just making it look 'cleaner'?

I always suspected there were, for precisely the reasons you outline, Quorlox. But are they really more 'dangerous' than someone like Hwang WS, who spawned dozens of international projects and who got up the hopes of funding bodies (who will now inevitably be more cynical)? It's an interesting question. I think it's really awful, this fine fiddling, and probably fairly common, but whether it's more dangerous than the full-on stuff...not sure. In some ways perhaps you are right, if the whole fabric of scientific integrity begins to erode.

[Guest]

In some ways perhaps you are right, if the whole fabric of scientific integrity begins to erode.

My worry is that it's becoming more acceptable to do it. I took an ethics course in grad school and one statistician told us that a prominent researcher once asked her if he could remove the error bars on his data because the bars make is data look less impressive! If the error is large, his data is less impressive than he wishes and removing them is just trying to cover it up.

I've met a lot of scientists who have discarded their own data "because something obviously went wrong with that experiment". They don't know what went wrong. They're really discarding it because they don't like it, it will reduce their chances of getting published, or they don't want to spend the time required to understand the problem.

[Cat person]

Your examples are pretty cheeky!

But there is a valid statistical case for throwing out some outlier data. I think the problem is is that scientists aren't necessarily very well trained in statistics to know when it is proper and right to do so. It is just as erroneous to average in a bona fide outlier point as it is to leave out a real data point.

We are back, I think, to the ultimate reasons why people do these sorts of cosmetic things: to get published more easily. To put food on the table.