If this was truly fraud, how did the people involved expected to get a way with it? They must know that the results will be checked multiple times and independently verified. Especially on ground breaking advances such as this.
I think at one point we're gonna have to stop calling this scientific studies unless it has been tested and repeated by at least 2 other independent labs.
Or we can continue like this and let the word science lose its meaning.
This is how the system is supposed to work. You create an experiment, you perform it, if there are interesting results you publish them. Then since it's public, other people can try to reproduce the results. If they do, the results are stronger. If not, there must have been a mistake.
The fact that the press tends to report on the initial experimental results as INFALLIBLE SCIENTIFIC TRUTH is not the fault of the scientists.
100% agree with this. Further, it's important for the "mistake" to be out in the public for everybody to see, because it implies a change in the paradigm of what's required for repeatable experiments; some unknown factor that needs to be reported.
And discovery of those new, unknown factors are where the exciting discoveries come from! Fields where we know all the governing principles are really boring, IMHO.
Exactly. I'm always sceptical when I see "groundbreaking breakthrough" (or similar exaggeration) in a title, unless the results can be confirmed/reproduced by the 3rd party. More often then not, such "discoveries" are later proved to be some kind of error (intentional or not).
> She claimed there was a secret knack for creating STAP cells, but has refused to publicise it, asserting it is a subject of her future papers.
Also, from wikipedia:
> In July 2014, Obokata was allowed to join Riken’s (a state-backed institute) efforts in July under monitoring by a third party. She tried to replicate her own study using genetically manipulated mouse spleen cells that glow green if a gene indicative of pluripotency is activated. She fails to reproduce ‘STAP cell’ to back up her claimed discovery.
Please, please, please submit some more original journalistic source rather than PhysOrg for stories like this. It's unclear from this incomplete PhysOrg write-up if the reference is to a considerably older original story in Nature[1] The Retraction Watch group blog, a good source for interesting stories for Hacker News, had some reporting about this story a while ago.[2] That commentary reporting links to a story in Science that is not paywalled,[3] and an easy Google search found another blog with commentary on what the STAP fiasco does to research on stem cells.[4] There is not a lot of new news or added value in this PhysOrg submission.
It basically says that RIKEN gave her until November to show that STAP worked, there was some recent hope that it would work, that hope was dashed in more rigorous tests, and there will be an official announcement of the failure on December 19.
As a scientist, retraction watch which is run by failed scientists and science writers is a disservice to science, with their ad hominem attacks.
Derek Lowe's In The Pipeline is a much better place to follow reasonable discussions of scientific publications.
As a biologist, I groan every time somebody tries to send me a phys.org link. It's a really really terrible PR regurgitation site, I've never seen a quality article from it.
In the opinion of Hacker News participants who came before me and who educated me on this point, "perfectly fine resource" appears to be an exaggeration, at least. Wasn't PhysOrg banned entirely as a source on Reddit for a while? (Perhaps that has changed; I don't know.) I learned from other participants here on HN that there are better sites to submit from.
"I try and debunk/explain [shady] biological science news wherever possible here. In fact, it's typically my only contribution, but one I feel is highly important.
"Your perpetual (and totally correct) crusade against PhysOrg reminds me there are others doing the same, and for that I thank you."
reddit temporarily banned phys.org in a move that was widely looked down on by the users and was eventually overturned because they (along with a few other news sites) were banned without notifying the community.
Now, they were rightly banned for gaming reddit (in the same way some of them have gamed and been banned from HN), but that doesn't reduce the intrinsic quality of them as a news aggregator.
phys.org is a news aggregation service, and in that they are immensely useful because they tend not to write from the position that more mainstream news sites do - that the reader is a complete moron.
