These practices are eschewed by some, but plenty of others embrace them. Joseph Simmons and colleagues ran a simulation showing how unacceptably easy it was to attain statistical significance using these 'degrees of researcher freedom. Given the intense attention these issues are now getting in the field, they certainly know better now. So are the social sciences more prone to misconduct and fraud than biomedicine and other fields?
Even Stapel's wildly narcissistic mea culpa can't make you forget Yoshitaka Fujii, the Japanese anesthesiologist with a record-breaking retractions. Biomedicine shares some of the more nebulous concerns regarding data transparency, collection and dissemination as well.
Citing the current drama surrounding Tamiflu , Nick Genes notes, "This is a hot topic [in medicine] right now Though a wave of ignominy is cresting at the moment, these problems are not new. Back in the "golden era" of the NIH during the fifties and sixties, David Guston writes , if fraud occurred, the director would make a few phone calls, look into the alleged misconduct, and the offending scientist would be "quickly and quietly removed from the map of science.
It's safe to say this gentleman's agreement handling of scientific integrity had some issues. Philip Handler, then president of the National Academy of Sciences, insisted that the charges of misconduct sparking the first hearings on scientific integrity in were overblown, defensively declaring complete confidence in a "system that operated in an effective, democratic, and self-correcting mode.
Then as now, underlings and younger scientists were often at the forefront of reform, trying to convince their elders to take the problem more seriously. The old guard tends to claim that critiques are overblown, that outside reforms and practices will hinder or hurt science, and that science is a self-correcting process. The new guard tends to embrace transparency and openness, seeing reform as the best way to salvage damaged reputations and keep the field from falling into disrepute.
Incidentally, most of the recent fraud cases were unearthed by whistle-blowers usually graduate and undergraduate students working within the lab or Uri Simonsohn. But none were revealed by the "self-correcting process of science.
Brian Nosek has emerged as one of the key reform figures with his work on the Open Science Framework and the Reproducibility Project. His professional commitment to ferreting out injustice and implicit bias and a lifelong obsession with Star Wars would seem to undergird a life-long fixation with good and evil.
He's the kind of man you can see investing considerable amounts of time and energy trying to save science from its own dark side. Even before Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman issued an open letter telling researchers to embrace reform and set up a replication protocols, Nosek was hard at work on his Open Science Initiative.
In one of his " Scientific Utopia " articles, he imagines a world where researchers will pre-register their hypotheses, openly share and archive raw data in one central location, and check one another's work through replication. Efficient and unbiased replication mechanisms are essential for maintaining high levels of scientific credibility. Depending on the types of results obtained in the discovery and replication phases, there are different paradigms of research: optimal, self-correcting, false nonreplication, and perpetuated fallacy.
In the absence of replication efforts, one is left with unconfirmed genuine discoveries and unchallenged fallacies. In several fields of investigation, including many areas of psychological science, perpetuated and unchallenged fallacies may comprise the majority of the circulating evidence.
In the early s, as economic conditions worsened in the southern United States, the disease became epidemic in just a few short years. What caused pellagra, and what could be done to treat it or prevent it? The history tells us something about scientific errors — and if, when, and how they are corrected Rajakumar, ; Marks, ; Mooney et al. Everyone seemed to acknowledge, even without systematic research, that pellagra was closely related to poverty.
But that could hardly be regarded medically as a cause. In the next several years, many theories emerged. Pellagra was due to poor sanitation some sort of infection , consumption of corn moldy, spoiled? Because the first set of cases had been reported in an insane asylum, and pellagra was found frequently in prisons, orphanages, and cotton mill villages, and given that it shared features with tuberculosis, infection seemed most likely.
The team traveled to Spartanburg, South Carolina, to collect epidemiological data firsthand. They issued their first report in They confirmed the contexts of poverty and sanitation.
Having examined the role of diet, they excluded the possibility of any particular dietary item, such as corn. Their overall conclusion confirmed the earlier assumption of an infectious agent. In the meantime, Casimir Funk introduced the concept of vitamins, and hinted in that pellagra, like scurvy and beriberi, might be a vitamin deficiency, too. Today, of course, we are inclined to celebrate his insight.
Pellagra, we now know, is a niacin vitamin B3 deficiency. But in the context of the time, without clear evidence, his proposal could only be regarded as speculative.
Niacin was not yet known. In a separate —15 study, initiated by the U. Public Health Service, Joseph Goldberger focused on diet and tried generally more varied diets in four different institutions.
The effect on reducing pellagra was favorable. Goldberger's conclusions reflect our modern views, so his work tends to be rendered intuitively as groundbreaking. A classic study overturning the earlier misconceptions. Self-correction at work.
Yet Goldberger's data were very broad. While the results indicated diet as a possible factor, Goldberger could not identify any particular deficiency, whether amino acid, mineral, or another factor. Ironically, he gave low probability to the role of any unknown vitamin. Correction is not as easy as identifying an alternative or producing a handful of confirming evidence.
A few years later, in , the Thompson Commission published its final report. Drawing on additional research — and despite Goldberger's findings — they strongly echoed their earlier conclusions that pellagra was infectious.
The tentativeness seemed resolved. End of story? Ironically — perhaps paradoxically — the apparent resolution to the theoretical uncertainty by a prestigious commission rejected the ultimately correct answer. Even more remarkable, perhaps, were two supplemental sections to the final report by independent researchers invited by the commission to contribute their views.
How did Davenport address the diet-versus-infection controversy? By dismissing both! The significant cause of pellagra, he concluded, was, instead, hereditary! Davenport presented over three dozen pedigrees, mapping the occurrence of pellagra across generations in families Figure 1.
When both parents are susceptible to the disease, at least 40 per cent. More evidence, then. But it hardly promoted correction. Davenport's interpretation we may easily observe in retrospect was surely influenced by his belief in eugenics. For him, many undesirable human conditions could be attributed to genetics, rather than discomforting social inequities or politics.
He thus discounted the correlation of pellagra with economic impoverishment. Historically, Davenport's high-profile pronouncement led away from, not towards, correction. Amid the controversy about whether pellagra was caused by diet or infection, Charles Davenport presented this pedigree as evidence that pellagra had, instead, a significant hereditary factor. The second addition to the commission's report was from Edward Vedder, who had worked earlier on beriberi, recently identified as a vitamin deficiency.
Unfortunately, perhaps, that caution was not widely accepted in the shadow of the Thompson Commission's and Davenport's strong claims. It may seem to us, now, that Vedder was correcting science at this point. But in the context of the time, this required knowing anachronistically, in advance of the future history to trust Vedder, not Davenport or the commission, as the voice of science Sacred Bovines , May, That is the conundrum or error. Meanwhile, Goldberger had continued his work under the Public Health Service.
In a new study also published in , he and labor economist Edgar Sydenstricker echoed the diet deficiency hypothesis. But now they linked poor diet directly to low wages and the high cost of food, which they presented as the root cause:. They further blamed the agricultural system in the South, which was focused on cotton as a cash crop, at the expense of growing local vegetables, which, where available, tended to alleviate the risk of pellagra.
That is, the problem was fundamentally or primarily socioeconomic, not biological. Their emphasis on the social system — faulting the tenant system and agricultural economy — would continue at least until Marks, , quotation on p. That did not really help foster understanding of any specific nutritional dimension of pellagra.
Even Goldberger and his colleagues heroes, today seemed not always to contribute methodically to correcting the science. Because most scientists considered the question resolved, they did not seek further evidence. That was due to Goldberger's work alone.
In , he finally narrowed down the apparent deficiency to an amino acid — either tryptophan or cysteine — while simultaneously rejecting a role for vitamins. Again, what appears as self-correction supports the wrong conclusion. By , Goldberger reversed himself again, accepting vitamin H as a factor.
The subsequent publications in began to gain some traction among other scientists. Goldberger had found a simple nutritional supplement, yeast, that seemed effective in treating pellagra in both dogs and humans. Hospitals and other institutions had a concrete and affordable remedy that could be implemented.
Scientific opinion followed. But still without full clarity on what caused pellagra. Goldberg died of cancer in , and without his effort, the search for dietary clues to pellagra waned.
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