General News Japanese Scientist's results on procedure to create stem cells proven to be false

This is a problem of science culture and competitiveness gone haywire. In an environment of fund scarcity, complex science, and a general lack of critical thinking, I am not surprised in the least.

Bad science is one of the most underreported issues of our time.

 

^^^ What he said.

 

Damn, that's disappointng.

 

What's up with Nature and stem-cell research? It's the second time that's happened. The last time data with stem-cell research was fabricated was around 2005-6 with South Korean Hwang Woo-suk.

 

The peer-review process is generally lame, often gamed with cronies, ineffective and outdated; there are websites now that crowdsource scientific review much more efficiently and brutally, not ideal yet, but a way better system for keeping people honest than we've had to endure until now.

Scientific publications are a thing of the past (there is simply too much to absorb for any publication to realistically take it all in and evaluate properly), and this has vast implications for science as it is currently conducted.

 

It's not just Nature, not just stem cells... Schön scandal is another recent example of a big-time fraud of that kind.

I suspect that the underlying dynamics here was very similar to what drove Schön - a somewhat sloppy paper he wrote as a postgrad (hey, 10% or so of published papers are erroneous in any case, mine is a shining example of integrity and diligence by comparison!), being hired into a very prestigious lab because of that paper and concluding that that's exactly how the whole thing works. With PI disinclined to look gift horses in the mouth and reviewers being unable to attempt to reproduce even if it was their job... No wonder.

And I don't think that merely abandoning a scholarly journal as a primary means of scientific communication would do much in that particular scenario, it's more about how that whole system of career advancement and research funding in sciences is set up. It encourages publishing papers no one cares about enough to seriously check, and while overwhelming majority of scientists are honest enough and care enough about their subject to not to game that system, some are tempted, quite a few of those get away with it, and if they're (un)lucky enough to rise to prominence... Well, this happens.