[NVIC] Science That Lies

[Guest guest]

Yeah, Norway. Time to move there to that magnificently beautiful country

Sheri Nakken (my last name is Norwegian ;-)

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Vienna, Virginia http://www.nvic.org

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UNITED WAY/COMBINED FEDERAL CAMPAIGN

#8122

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" Protecting the health and informed consent rights of children since 1982. "

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BL Fisher Note:

Norway has got it right. Doctors and scientists who manipulate scientific

data, whether inside or outside of government, industry or academia, should

be thrown in jail. The judiciary, created by our founding fathers to hold

those accountable who lie and cheat the public, is an important branch of

government. It should be used to insure that the science buttressing public

health policy can be trusted. This is especially true with regard to

vaccines which healthy people are mandated to take.

The New York Times op-ed piece below also has got it right. Transparency in

science and open public discourse about the credibility of scientific data

is essential to keeping everyone honest.

Accountability, transparency and justice is essential when it comes to

insuring the integrity of the science which drives public policy and

profoundly affects the life and health of every American.

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http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=scienceNews & storyID=20

06-01-16T170149Z_01_L15671814_RTRIDST_0_SCIENCE-NORWAY-CANCER-DC.XML & archive

d=False

Reuters

January 16, 2006

Oslo promises crackdown after cancer cheat scandal

By Alister Doyle

OSLO (Reuters) - Norway promised on Monday to speed up a new law that may

bring jail terms for medical cheats after a hospital accused one of its

cancer researchers of falsifying data published in a leading journal.

" There must be no doubt about the quality of our research, " Health Minister

Sylvia Brustad told Norway's NTB news agency. " So we are speeding up our

draft law. "

The government would present the law to parliament later this year, earlier

than planned, after experts have worked on a review since 2003.

The law would propose stricter rules for overseeing research and might make

cheats liable to criminal charges that could bring jail terms. Under

existing rules, cheats can in the worst case be sacked and banned from

practicing medicine.

Officials said at the weekend that 44-year-old Jon Sudbo, a researcher at

Oslo's Radium Hospital, made up patients' case histories for a study about

oral cancer published by the British journal The Lancet in October.

The hospital said an independent commission would probe all his research.

Sudbo is on a sick leave and has not been available for comment.

" They will start the work mid-week. Hopefully they will give us answers in

one to two months, " said Stein Vaaler, a hospital director.

Among improbabilities in Sudbo's research, 250 of about 900 supposed

patients were listed with the same date of birth.

Last year, South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-suk was exposed for fabricating

two studies claming he had cloned human embryos to provide stem cells.

NOT RETROACTIVE

Any new Norwegian law making it a criminal offence to falsify data could not

apply to Sudbo. " A law would not have retroactive effect, " Deputy Health

Minister Wegard Harsvik told Reuters.

Horton, editor of The Lancet, said the report published in October

would be retracted if Oslo supplied confirmation that it had been falsified.

The hospital's Vaaler said a retraction would be made quickly if the

researcher admitted in writing to inventing the data. " So far he has

admitted falsifying data verbally, " he said.

" There are huge implications for the entire scientific community to make

sure that it has the best safety checks in place to prevent fabrication and

falsification of data, " Horton told Reuters.

The panel investigating Sudbo's research would look at why errors were not

spotted by a peer review.

Horton defended the current system of peer review but said the competitive

nature of scientific research probably contributed in both the Norwegian and

South Korean cases.

(additional reporting by Reaney in London)

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/magazine/15wwln_idealab.html

THE NEW YORK TIMES

January 15, 2006

Trial and Error

By DAVID DOBBS

Many of us consider science the most reliable, accountable way of explaining

how the world works. We trust it. Should we? Ioannidis, an

epidemiologist, recently concluded that most articles published by

biomedical journals are flat-out wrong. The sources of error, he found, are

numerous: the small size of many studies, for instance, often leads to

mistakes, as does the fact that emerging disciplines, which lately abound,

may employ standards and methods that are still evolving. Finally, there is

bias, which Ioannidis says he believes to be ubiquitous. Bias can take the

form of a broadly held but dubious assumption, a partisan position in a

longstanding debate (e.g., whether depression is mostly biological or

environmental) or (especially slippery) a belief in a hypothesis that can

blind a scientist to evidence contradicting it. These factors, Ioannidis

argues, weigh especially heavily these days and together make it less than

likely that any given published finding is true.

Ioannidis's argument induces skepticism about science. . .and a certain awe.

Even getting half its findings wrong, science in the long run gets most

things right - or, as Grobstein, a biologist, puts it, " progressively

less wrong. " Falsities pose no great problem. Science will out them and move

on.

Yet not all falsities are equal. This shows plainly in the current outrage

over the revelation that the South Korean researcher Hwang Woo Suk faked the

existence of the stem-cell colonies he claimed to have cloned. When Hwang

published his results last June in Science, they promised to open the way to

revolutionary therapies - and perhaps fetch Hwang a Nobel Prize. The news

that he had cooked the whole thing dismayed scientists everywhere and

refueled an angst-filled debate: how can the scientific community prevent

fraud and serious error from entering journals and thereby becoming part of

the scientific record?

Journal editors say they can't prevent fraud. In an absolute sense, they're

right. But they could make fraud harder to commit. Some critics, including

some journal editors, argue that it would help to open up the typically

closed peer-review system, in which anonymous scientists review a submitted

paper and suggest revisions. Developed after World War II, closed peer

review was meant to ensure candid evaluations and elevate merit over

personal connections. But its anonymity allows reviewers to do sloppy work,

steal ideas or delay competitors' publication by asking for elaborate

revisions (it happens) without fearing exposure. And it catches error and

fraud no better than good editors do. " The evidence against peer review

keeps getting stronger, " says , former editor of the British

Medical Journal, " while the evidence on the upside is weak. " Yet peer review

has become a sacred cow, largely because passing peer review confers great

prestige - and often tenure.

Lately a couple of alternatives have emerged. In open peer review, reviewers

are known and thus accountable to both author and public; the journal might

also publish the reviewers' critiques as well as reader comments. A more

radical alternative amounts to open-source reviewing. Here the journal posts

a submitted paper online and allows not just assigned reviewers but anyone

to critique it. After a few weeks, the author revises, the editors accept or

reject and the journal posts all, including the editors' rationale.

Some worry that such changes will invite a cacophony of contentious

discussion. Yet the few journals using these methods find them an orderly

way to produce good papers. The prestigious British Medical Journal switched

to nonanonymous reviewing in 1999 and publishes reader responses at each

paper's end. " We do get a few bores " among the reader responses, says Tony

Delamothe, the deputy editor, but no chaos, and the journal, he says, is

richer for the exchange: " Dialogue is much better than monologue. "

Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics goes a step further, using an open-source

model in which any scientist who registers at the Web site can critique the

submitted paper. The papers' review-and-response sections make fascinating

reading - science being made - and the papers more informative.

The public, meanwhile, has its own, even more radical open-source review

experiment under way at the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, where anyone can

edit any entry. Wikipedia has lately suffered some embarrassing errors and a

taste of fraud. But last month Nature found Wikipedia's science entries to

be almost as accurate as the Encyclopaedia Brittanica's.

Open, collaborative review may seem a scary departure. But scientists might

find it salutary. It stands to maintain rigor, turn review processes into

productive forums and make publication less a proprietary claim to knowledge

than the spark of a fruitful exchange. And if collaborative review can't

prevent fraud, it seems certain to discourage it, since shady scientists

would have to tell their stretchers in public. Hwang's fabrications, as it

happens, were first uncovered in Web exchanges among scientists who found

his data suspicious. Might that have happened faster if such examination

were built into the publishing process? " Never underestimate competitors, "

Delamothe says, for they are motivated. Science - and science - might have

dodged quite a headache by opening Hwang's work to wider prepublication

scrutiny.

In any case, collaborative review, by forcing scientists to read their

reviews every time they publish, would surely encourage humility - a tonic,

you have to suspect, for a venture that gets things right only half the

time.

Dobbs is the author of " Reef Madness: Darwin,

Agassiz and the Meaning of Coral. "

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