Scientific integrity and the ethics of 'utter honesty'

So far, the most relevant document I've turned up from my archives is Report Of The Investigation Committee On The Possibility Of Scientific Misconduct In The Work Of Hendrik Schön And Coauthors, September 2002 - Lucent Technologies† Malcolm R. Beasley et al (aka, Bell Labs Beasley Report), [PDF]. Although not immediately to hand, I know that I'll still have physical copies of Schön's Science articles as I've kept my old issues of this and other scientific journals.

It's all slowly coming back to me now—when examining Schön's papers (as published in say Science, Nature, Physical Review, etc,) one could also have a running commentary on what was wrong with them if one read them in conjunction with the Beasley Report. It provided comprehensive instances of the fraud from the published documents. In effect, Beasley provided an annotated guide to Schön's papers.

As I've just been reminded, the Beasley Report is very detailed, it is 129 pages long including appendices one of which includes a table that lists 25 papers by Schön and cohorts that the Beasley Committee investigated. Schön is the only author to appear on all 25 papers and the type of fraud is listed for each paper, these include: 'Data Substitution', 'Unrealistic Precision', 'Contradictory Physics', 'Unusually Good Results', and 'Unusual Fabrication or Procedures'.

Presumably I'm not providing you with any additional information here as I'd expect that Samuel Reich would have detailed all this and more in his book.

In addition to the aforementioned chemistry incident the reason that I took an unusual interest in the Schön case was that I'd had reasonable experience in working with field effect transistors, so when the news of his research fraud broke the subject matter piqued my interest. Also, my professional experience in electronics made the Beasley Report easy to understand.

Reckon you're right about leading journals like Science, Nature etc. being reluctant to withdraw papers for image reasons. In hindsight that's now very clear. In the long run, the failure of those running the scientific journals and the scientific community generally to get fully on top of the Schön matter and other instances of scientific fraud has turned out to be very detrimental for science and scientific research.

Even 'soft' scientific fraud, such as the never-ending exaggerated claims made by research teams about the effectiveness of their research (usually for the purposes of obtaining funding and general PR), has dramatically compounded the problem. Together, they have had a serious and detrimental effect on the way many of the population perceive science in that over recent decades huge swathes of them have turned away from or have been turned off science, many no longer believe what scientists say and or that they dismiss their comments with a gain of salt.

Take the instance of climate change alone (there are many more). We only have to look at the millions of its skeptics and their widespread disbelief in climate science to know that they hold little respect for the subject, the same also holds for much of other science. To make matters worse, many now hold such disrespect and contempt for science and scientific institutions at levels that border on zealotry—that is, they hold attitudes of distaste for science that are more akin to the hatred and furor one often observes between warring religious groups.

There is little doubt that science no longer commands the very high respect from the population that it once did decades ago. Whilst no doubt there are many reasons, cultural and otherwise, that have contributed and combined to produce this downturn in science's popularity, it is nevertheless clear that exaggerated claims and mixed messages that have come from scientists and technocrats over the past 50 or so years have been largely responsible for creating these negative attitudes.

One only has to look at cancer research to witness the problem. If every instance of the many, many thousands of optimistic pronouncements about cancer made by researchers since WWII had actually contributed to curing the disease even to, say, the tiny extent of just 0.1% improvement per pronouncement then the disease would have been wiped out many years ago. Yes, whilst researchers have made progress over those 70-plus years, cancer is still the second biggest killer of humankind—and the population is only too well aware of the fact—and also the fact that scientists have failed to live up to their promises in that they've failed to deliver a cure. It's little wonder that the consequences of such skepticism and disbelief have morphed into other areas of health management—such as the failure of many to heed important messages about COVID; the unreasonable fear and loathing of chemicals—even benign ones—and the chemical industry per se, — views that are held by a huge percentage of the population—and so on, and so on.

The irrational fear of chemicals among so many of the population alone illustrates the absolute abject failure of science education.

It seems to me that science needs to completely rebrand itself, and it needs to begin with not making promises that it cannot keep—if in doubt science should say absolutely nothing. Clearly, part of that rebranding ought to be aimed at cleaning up all aspects of scientific fraud, not just extreme instances such as the Schön matter. Scientific fraud has been with us for eons and it will probably always be so but we're now long past the days of Charles Dawson's Piltdown man-type hoaxes, which, incidentally, took over 40 years to conclude conclusively that it was a fraud. We now have multiple techniques for detecting fraud such as Benford's Law (aka First Digit Law), etc., these need to be combined with truly effective policies to ensure that scientific ethics and standards are maintained—if necessary, even to the extent of making them an adjunct or an addition to the Scientific Method if it would ensure that scientific research would become more honest and ethical. No doubt, in the next few years we will also see a huge enhancement to the detection of scientific fraud when AI begins to scan millions of existing research papers. No doubt it will find many more past instances of fraud.

Finally, if you think my comments about science's falling out of favor and grace with a significantly large part of the population is grossly exaggerated then it's worth spending eleven minutes on the Internet Archive viewing the short film Why Study Science? This rather corny documentary from 1955 was made to encourage US high school kids to take a positive interest in science and the study thereof. However, what's truly relevant about the film for us today is that it oozes with the then existing ethos that everyone in society was interested in and or understood the importance of science no matter what their profession was or what other values they held: https://archive.org/details/WhyStudy1955_2.

(In my opinion, this film ought to get a wider coverage than it has at present if for no other reason than it gives us a clear reference point from which to measure changes in society's attitude towards science.)

There is no missing the fact that this documentary conveys par excellence the zeitgeist of the mid 1950s. It clearly shows that back then society did value science in ways and to the extent that we have not seen exhibited for many decades. Having an appreciation for science was the de facto ethos of those days, which may seem surprising given that the 1950s was also the peak period for nuclear weapons development. Despite that, people's faith in the value of science and scientific research didn't waver.

Furthermore, I can attest that this positive attitude towards science still prevailed with just about everyone that I came in contact with a decade or so later when it became my turn to study science in high school. This positive attitude towards science wasn't a matter that most people even consciously thought about let alone questioned—as it was the accepted norm.

It wasn't for another decade or so in the late 1970s to mid 1980s that the anti-science rot began to set in and take hold.

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† BTW, I've just done an online search for the Beasley Report and some websites are still hosting it, here's the first one that I came across: https://w.astro.berkeley.edu/~kalas/ethics/documents/schoen....

This is the depressing part of it. Systemic corruption and people turning a blind eye. If one's just a cog in the system and not the top brass it's much easier to ignore the problem and plod on regardless. If it's too much for one's conscience and one turns whistleblower one's status within the organization usually changes and one is usually perceived to be a 'leper' by coworkers - even by those who are not engaged in any nefarious activity. In effect, the whole organization coalesces together and acts like a single organism trying to protect itself, the wistleblower being perceived as an internal threat. I know, I've been in that situation and it's not very nice. Moreover, it's certainly not the best career move.

In many organizations the top brass as well as branch/departmental managers etc. arrive at their positions via the Peter Principle, and those who are promoted this way are usually smart enough to know it. Even if they aren't corrupt they know that a wistleblower stands to disrupt the organization in a way that could likely threaten their position, hence their ambivalence about fixing the problem. (Presumably something similar happened at Bell.)

Unfortunately, wistleblowing often doesn't cure the problem in the long run. There is however one unexpected side effect, which is one quickly learns who one's true friends are and those who have real integrity. What's surprising is that they often turn out to be those who one would least expect.

"lab notebook discipline is very poor among the fraudsters, they 'lose samples' and so on"

I have little doubt about that, especially if documentation is written up long after the event. There's a word of caution here though, I've sometimes rewritten notes after the event because my scrawl is almost illegible. As a result rewrites can look too good and thus appear suss. My solution is to always keep the scrawl no matter how bad it looks.

I should hope so! With the right format, it would basically be StackOverflow for researchers. Interesting questions with hard solutions, attracting the attention of the experts who create discussion? Who WOULDN'T care about that?