

Call for acid-bath stem-cell paper to be retracted - dfjorque
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2014/03/call-for-acid-bath-stem-cell-paper-to-be-retracted.html

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ideonexus
I'm uncomfortable with the sweeping-generalizations of this comment from the
article, but I do think there's some insight to it concerning independent
thinking and science. Science is a creative endeavor:

Steve Jackman said:

"Foreigners have an image of the Japanese as very thorough, detail-oriented,
and meticulous. However, my experience in Japan over more than a decade has
been just the opposite of this. Things got so bad at my Japanese company that
everytime I would check my Japanese subordinates’ work, for me it was never a
matter of if I would find mistakes, but how many mistakes would I eventually
end up finding. Many of these were due to pure sloppiness, carelessness, an
inability to think independently, critically or to ask questions, a blind
allegiance to protocol and heirarchy, and a fear of being perceived as a
troublemaker or someone who is not a team player.

"This helped me understand why Japanese companies place such importance on
manuals, rules and doing things by the book, since the Japanese are usually
very good at following rules that have been written down for them. This style
may work well for manufacturing industries, but not for research, STEM fileds
(Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths), or in the knowledge and service
industries of the future."

~~~
anon4
Isn't then the solution to write a manual that tells people precisely how and
when to be creative and lays out a protocol for raising issues? One that looks
like a very rigid structure, but in fact allows for good creativity.

~~~
DrJ
and some would argue that you place a lot of focus on the artifact (manuels)
than on creative thought.

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tokenadult
Here is commentary from the group blog by science journalists _Retraction
Watch_ on this story, "Co-author of controversial acid STAP stem cell papers
in Nature requests retraction: report":

[http://retractionwatch.com/2014/03/10/co-author-of-
controver...](http://retractionwatch.com/2014/03/10/co-author-of-
controversial-acid-stap-stem-cell-papers-in-nature-requests-retraction-
report/)

Stem cell research is a "hot" research area, because it can be hyped as a
cure-all, so we should all be especially skeptical of initial reports on new
stem cell research. In general, we have to distinguish submissions to Hacker
News based on press releases (there are way too many of those) from review
articles by experienced researchers that digest the primary research done by a
variety of researchers around the world. The latter kind of submission (a
review article from a peer-reviewed journal or a book chapter from a
practitioner's handbook) would be an excellent submission to Hacker News if it
has a link that lives online for free reading, but it would also mean reading
something longer than something that can be summed up with a one-line lt;dr
summary. Otherwise, a thoughtful article by a science journalist who
interviews scientists besides the scientists hyping a new discovery can be
much better than a new "peer-reviewed" preliminary research finding. All too
often, in our haste for "news" here about medical research, all the hackers
here can be led astray about what is really established knowledge in medicine.

~~~
frozenport
This isn't correct, consider that the whole scientific community was excited
about this paper. And why not? It was published in a good journal and there
are a few people trying similar methods.

Could be big if it works, although not sure it is HN content as opposed to
some biology community.

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chrisBob
Everyone gives Science, Cell and Nature way too much credit. They are flashy,
but tend to have less substance than other journals. Their retraction rate is
also much higher.

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3187237/figure/F...](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3187237/figure/F1/)

~~~
codelap
I'm not even going to go into why the correlation between influence and
retraction rate exists, that should be blatantly obvious to any with a
background in any of the sciences. Also, we want retractions, it means science
works.

~~~
cjensen
Retractions _are_ good in when the original paper was the best efforts of its
authors. This kind of big-news nonsense paper is far less forgivable.

------
return0
PubPeer explains how their commenters helped identify some fraud there:
[http://blog.pubpeer.com/?p=117](http://blog.pubpeer.com/?p=117)

So what's the role of Nature group here? Print colourful printouts of
sloppily-reviewed papers? I feel somehow these "publishers" (basically,
they're just glorified PDF repositories) aren't really worth the money they're
getting.

------
baldfat
Again the people who say Philosophy is dead to science I say UGH learn from
history. Philosophy and Ethics are still the heart of progress.

How many Scientific papers that were "peer reviewed" have we now learned that
the science behind the scientific papers have seriously been lacking.

The cost is in the suffering and deaths of patients who didn't get help needed
that research would have found if they didn't have to chase all these rabbit
trails.

Biased and mad

PS Theology/Philosophy Degree holder and my son is named after my favorite
Philosopher.

PSS My other son died of cancer (Bone Cancer) where there has been zero
progress in mortality rate over the last 30 years.

~~~
DangerousPie
I don't understand your argument at all. What does philosophy have to do with
any of this? Are you claiming that if more people were to study philosophy,
this would make the world more "moral", leading to less scientific fraud?

I see things like this as part of the cost of doing more and more advanced
research at a fast pace. You are bound to have a few misses, but all in all
you still make progress.

~~~
ThomPete
Popper, Kuhn etc where laying the groundwork for how to validate phenomena and
add facts to our models of the world.

The black swan is a good example of this problem (i.e. what lead to why we try
to falsify things.)

Without a discussion about scientific methods no science and therefore
Philosophy is important.

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bertil
This is fantastic news.

I wish more blog articles and newspapers had a similar feature: not just let
the author edit, but openly retract their core affirmation. Sounds like it
could have been useful to Newsweek recently.

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chrisBob
Japan has a strange culture: Their scientific funding is based largely on
hanging out naked at a hot spring with the guy that controls the budget.

~~~
TeMPOraL
And in US/Europe it would be going to the same parties as the guy who controls
the budget. I don't see any difference in substance.

~~~
chrisBob
The biggest difference that I see is that women are usually invited to
parties. There is a huge gender imbalance in Japanese science research, and I
think the culture around funding is responsible.

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johnny635
Such jealousy in academic land...

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return0
Academics have dug their own grave here. They keep pushing for last century's
publishing model and then they use this publishing model to gauge their own
academic value.

