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Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza tallies tenth retraction (2023)

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Re: Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza tallies tenth retraction (2023)

#71

Post by [deleted] »

eesmith wrote: post #66
armchairdweller wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the writeup. > Pauling is seen as a quack when it comes to vitamin C Pauling has been portrayed as a nobel-laureate-gone-quack / example of "Nobel disease" in pop science media many times. Often by gullible people who are not actually scientists but more science(tm) promoters like podcasters. They don't usually limit it to the Vitamin C advocacy, but seem to like telling a story of a highly intelligent per…

> Pauling has been portrayed as a nobel-laureate-gone-quack Oh, certainly. I wanted to emphasize that the quackery was only in regards to his views on vitamin C. > in pop science media many times To be clear, it's also told in the scientific literature by people with chemistry and medical training. > so apparently the severity of relevant cold symptoms is indeed strongly decreased My previous comment wasn't meant to…

[deleted]

Re: Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza tallies tenth retraction (2023)

#72

Post by leephillips »

JR1427 wrote: post #65
leephillips wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honorable retractions, as a result of honest errors, happen all the time in science and, while unfortunate, are not a huge deal. Much different are the retractions based on research fraud. retractionwatch provides a valuable service in tracking all types of retractions, and in warning the community about unethical or predatory journals.

I like your term "honourable retraction". But if people and retraction watch don't differentiate between these and dishonourable ones, then it doesn't really help.

Retraction Watch provides information. They do an excellent job in following up on incidents and supplying the complete picture. It’s always clear from their reports whether an author was shady or simply made a mistake—and this is usually clear from the author’s behavior, as well.

Of course neither they nor anyone else can be held responsible for unjustified assumptions of the mob, except the members of the mob.

Re: Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza tallies tenth retraction (2023)

#73

Post by borroka »

2cynykyl wrote: post #68
iancmceachern wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Important point, thank you. It doesn't mean we shouldn't work to fix the systemic issue though. It may not he his "fault", but how do we improve our system as a soceity so we put ourself on a upward trajectory not the seemingly downward trajectory we've been on lately.

I'm glad the GP pointed this out, because nobody talks about it. The "PI" of a lab is manager, so these issues are like an accountant embezzling money without the manager knowing. Maybe the manage should have put better processes and monitoring in place, but they were trusting their team members to behave properly, which is not unreasonable IMO. The real issue is that the people who conduct the fraud are usually grad…

It is not unusual, and indeed it is what should be expected, for honors to be accompanied by liabilities.

Ambitious PI's want bigger labs that lead to the recruitment of better students, who then produce more impactful papers, which then support the demand for more funding. It is a positive reinforcement cycle that eventually leads to bigger, better, and more popular labs. Those are the honors.

The liability is that if your name is in the article as a senior co-author, you are just as responsible as the first author for errors or fraudulent research. The senior PI's actual contribution should not matter, their name is there, the publication is used to support their career, they recruited the students or postdocs.

Re: Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza tallies tenth retraction (2023)

#74

Post by St4rBr1ght »

Retric wrote: post #43
Karellen wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Einstein did not discover that the speed of light was fixed. This was a consequence of Maxwell's research Maxwell certainly did discover that the speed of light was fixed. But he did not discover that it was fixed for all observers . It was presumed to be fixed relative to some reference medium that permeated the universe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether There were 40 years of experiments after Ma…

> There were 40 years of experiments after Maxwell figured out the speed of light where people tried to show how the aether worked and how the earth moved through it, before Einstein “discovered” the idea that the speed of light was fixed relative to all observers rather than relative to the universe. Not quite, experiments already showed the speed of light was fix independent of earths motion before Einstein did any…

Michelson & Morley was a flawed experiment.

Re: Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza tallies tenth retraction (2023)

#75

Post by 2cynykyl »

borroka wrote: post #73
2cynykyl wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad the GP pointed this out, because nobody talks about it. The "PI" of a lab is manager, so these issues are like an accountant embezzling money without the manager knowing. Maybe the manage should have put better processes and monitoring in place, but they were trusting their team members to behave properly, which is not unreasonable IMO. The real issue is that the people who conduct the fraud are usually grad…

It is not unusual, and indeed it is what should be expected, for honors to be accompanied by liabilities. Ambitious PI's want bigger labs that lead to the recruitment of better students, who then produce more impactful papers, which then support the demand for more funding. It is a positive reinforcement cycle that eventually leads to bigger, better, and more popular labs. Those are the honors. The liability is that…

> you are just as responsible as the first author for errors or fraudulent research

I know what you're trying to say, but I think you're making it too black-and-white. There are two nuances I'd like to point out: Firstly the senior author did not actually perpetrate the fraud...this has to mean something when assessing blame I think. Secondly, the senior authors do not really have the ability to filter out fraud, assuming it's done cleverly. What can they do aside from reading the drafts and scrutinizing the data/methods/interpretation? Are they expected to have a team of shadow PhDs doing the same experiments to ensure reproducibility?

No doubt some PIs create an environment that encourages fraud, and that's a problem. But the point I'm trying to make is that if we want to solve the problem of scientific fraud we need to be honest about the source of the problem. In my opinion, it's the fact that a student's entire future is wholly dependent on a good result. The senior author already has a job, probably tenure, and plenty of other projects on the go, so one failed project is not a problem. The cost of failure to the student on the other hand is essentially infinite!

Re: Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza tallies tenth retraction (2023)

#76

Post by 2cynykyl »

i_love_limes wrote: post #50

For those not in Academia, it's worth noting that when you get to his level, it's more like being a VP or senior leader. Ultimately, yes you are responsible for the quality of output of your team, but you are absolutely not looking in detail at every paper, more the ideation and focus of the department. He should be grilling his assistant profs / research fellows to get their act together and raise the bar, but this…

I had a bit of a eureka on this subject this afternoon: when looking at scientific fraud and who to blame, we (as a society) tend to focus on who stands to gain if the fraud is successful, but instead we should look at who stands to lose the most if the fraud is caught.

Let me explain via a 2x2 matrix (which I highly doubt will render properly, but here goes):

Actor | Fraud is successful | Fraud is caught

------------| -------------- | ----------------

Professor | Scenario A | Scenario B

Student | Scenario C | Scenario D

Scenario A: If a fraud is successful, the senior author gets a small benefit in the form of a slight raise, incremental increase in success rate of next grant, maybe an award, some endorphins from the praise. Very minor actually.

Scenario B: If the fraud is caught the senior author's career could be in shambles, like resigning from their tenured position, losing investors in spin-offs, humiliation, etc. They have a lot to lose.

Scenario C: In the event of a successful fraud, the student stands to gain a lot in the form of job prospects, future income, and generally accomplishing their life's ambitions. There is a huge payoff for the student in this scenario.

Scenario D: If they don't perpetrate fraud (to salvage a bad result), their career in academia is over, they have wasted 3-4 years of the life, which is the same outcome as if they did perpetrate fraud and got caught. The student has nothing to lose!

Re: Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza tallies tenth retraction (2023)

#77

Post by borroka »

2cynykyl wrote: post #75
borroka wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not unusual, and indeed it is what should be expected, for honors to be accompanied by liabilities. Ambitious PI's want bigger labs that lead to the recruitment of better students, who then produce more impactful papers, which then support the demand for more funding. It is a positive reinforcement cycle that eventually leads to bigger, better, and more popular labs. Those are the honors. The liability is that…

> you are just as responsible as the first author for errors or fraudulent research I know what you're trying to say, but I think you're making it too black-and-white. There are two nuances I'd like to point out: Firstly the senior author did not actually perpetrate the fraud...this has to mean something when assessing blame I think. Secondly, the senior authors do not really have the ability to filter out fraud, ass…

> What can they do aside from reading the drafts and scrutinizing the data/methods/interpretation?

You would surprise how few of the big lab's PI's even do that. And since a big lab, say in biology, can send out 40–50 papers a year, there is no time for the PI to think deeply about hypotheses, methods, data collection. But having a big lab is a decision, as I wrote in my previous comment: honors/grants and liabilities.

> In my opinion, it's the fact that a student's entire future is wholly dependent on a good result.

That's very true, but there is also a thing called personal responsibility. Any non-violent "fraud", any "criminal", has some reasonable motivation behind their actions. But committing fraud is not an inevitability, and a lack of strong punishment that has origins from understanding the motivations behind those actions punishes people who behave, loosely speaking, properly.

Years ago, when I was doing academic research, I asked a colleague of mine if they would change some of their research results if the fraud (a) was never discovered and had no general consequences, (b) led to a publication in Science, Nature, Cell, etc. that would semi-guarantee a tenure-track position, and with that, "bread on the table" for the family, the kids, the aging parents. They said they would never do that, but was it true for them? Would it be true for me? Since the question is legitimate, strong punishment is needed to reduce the occurrence of fraud in research.

And since there is a tenure-track position available for dozens of good applicants, it is natural that a good result will make the difference between having a professional life in academia or not. But is it not the same, with the kind of "good result" depending on the field, for all those fields in which there are many more participants than "winners"? An immediate parallel can be made with doping in sports.

Re: Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza tallies tenth retraction (2023)

#78

Post by mianos »

agos wrote: post #39
mianos wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only half joking, but have you ever had the issue on a Mac where you copy something and it randomly fails to copy, so when you paste, it pastes the previous copy? Easy to imagine, slack that it did not get seen. (I think the bug is at least 15 years old).

wait it does not happen just to me? is it widespread? I thought I was going mad or my keyboard starting to break down!

No it's not just you. There was an Apple ticket with thousands of 'me too', but they said it does not exist and deleted the whole thing about 10 years ago.

Re: Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza tallies tenth retraction (2023)

#79

Post by Kranar »

cma wrote: post #45
mjburgess wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The speed of light in maxwell's eqns is non-relativistic. That is itself basically just the insight and founding principle of special relativity. The rest is just to work out how to revise relativity to account for non-relativistic velocities -- and this is fairly trivial at the special relativity level. More novel, from einstein, was GR but many insights here can be found "in the air" amongst professional physicists…

Had anyone presaged the special relativity energy mass equation that would result?

E = mc^2? No, that was absolutely novel.

But special relativity? Yes, Henri Poincare had already come up with a mathematically equivalent theory to special relativity. Einstein's is a much simpler theory by all means, but the original commenter talking about it like it came out of no where and people must have thought Einstein was crazy or lost his mind, that's just a gross misunderstanding of history.

If anything, Einstein's theory of special relativity gained acceptance rather quickly because it basically converged to where physics was already heading.

Re: Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza tallies tenth retraction (2023)

#80

Post by freeopinion »

2cynykyl wrote: post #68
iancmceachern wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Important point, thank you. It doesn't mean we shouldn't work to fix the systemic issue though. It may not he his "fault", but how do we improve our system as a soceity so we put ourself on a upward trajectory not the seemingly downward trajectory we've been on lately.

I'm glad the GP pointed this out, because nobody talks about it. The "PI" of a lab is manager, so these issues are like an accountant embezzling money without the manager knowing. Maybe the manage should have put better processes and monitoring in place, but they were trusting their team members to behave properly, which is not unreasonable IMO. The real issue is that the people who conduct the fraud are usually grad…

Your point is clear and extremely important. Edison supposedly once said, "I didn't fail. I just discovered 99 ways not to build a light bulb." Or something like that. Among those 99 failures were 20 super meaningful discoveries. In those failures the world's understanding of material science advanced in ways that affected a million later research projects.

A PhD candidate who can prove a hypothesis wrong should often have their work valued as much as one who proved the opposite.

But consider something like the invention of Paxos. If you leave out one small piece, you fail. All that time and effort seems wasted. You haven't proved anything true or false. You've just failed. But if you've documented your failure sufficiently, somebody might come behind you and fix that one little piece you got wrong.

One of the problems with our current system is that three years or ten years of research never gets published or properly documented for posterity because it didn't succeed. Even failures should be written up and packaged for the next grant to extend the exploration. There needs to be some reward for doing that packaging. Maybe we can call it a PhaD (almost PhD). Do you award a PhD to those who take up their own or somebody else's PhaD and complete it successfully?

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