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Investigating science

Investigating science. Peter Aldhous, San Francisco Bureau Chief. (With thanks to Eugenie Samuel Reich).

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Investigating science

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  1. Investigating science Peter Aldhous, San Francisco Bureau Chief (With thanks to Eugenie Samuel Reich)

  2. “Science writers believe in science. They believe science can put men on Mars, can cure cancer and baldness, can feed those African babies. When Professor Schmidtlapp says he’s discovered something big, the science writers…don’t draw their guns and make him put his cards on the table. They don’t flyspeck his raw data, don’t check his funding sources, don’t scrutinize his previous articles for mistakes. They don’t interview his enemies or call his lab technicians at home for an off-the-record assessment of the great man’s work. “They like science, they probably admire Schmidtlapp and they’re excited by the prospect that he’s right. So they just ask him how to spell whatever it is and write it down.” John Crewdson of the Chicago Tribune, in Nieman Reports, Winter 1993 Perky cheerleaders?

  3. The Cloning King WooSuk Hwang

  4. First ethics lapses…

  5. …then scientific fraud

  6. Minnesota Mystery CatherineVerfaillie

  7. Where did we go? www.pubmed.gov

  8. What did we find?

  9. What next? Let’s look at the patents http://www.uspto.gov/patft/index.html Search issued patents and applications http://portal.uspto.gov/external/portal/pair‘Image file wrapper’ tab has ‘drawings’

  10. Lightning strikes twice

  11. We publish…and wait

  12. Verdict: falsification In four figures in the Blood paper, the panel concluded that aspects of the figures were altered in such a way that the manipulation misrepresented experimental data and sufficiently altered the original research record to constitute falsification under federal regulations and University policy. Manipulations identified by the panel included: elimination of bands on blots, altered orientation of bands, introduction of lanes not included in the original figure, and covering objects or image density in certain lanes. University of Minnesota statement MoraymaReyes

  13. Digital image processing Tools to try with Photoshop: http://ori.dhhs.gov/tools/droplets.shtml (Demonstration by Rachel Tompa, student at UC Santa Cruz)

  14. Clinical trials ClinicalTrials.gov http://www.clinicaltrials.gov Information on around 50,000 clinical trials in US and beyond US National Cancer Institute http://www.cancer.gov/ClinicalTrials Information on more than 6,000 ongoing and 17,000 completed cancer clinical trials GemCRIS http://www.gemcris.od.nih.gov Information on gene therapy trials registered with US National Institutes of Health

  15. Grant funding databases CRISP http://crisp.cit.nih.gov/crisp/crisp_query.generate_screen Grants from US Department of Health and Human Services, including National Institutes of Health, Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention US National Science Foundation http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/tab.do?dispatch=4 RaDiUS https://radius.rand.org/radius/index.html Comprehensive database of US government-funded R&D, maintained by RAND Corporation

  16. New Scientist survey of dual-use biology

  17. What types of projects are in progress? • Tweaking the toxin produced by the anthrax bacterium to see if this subverts experimental drugs • Turning a virus circulating harmlessly in rodents into the deadly pathogen responsible for Venezuelan encephalitis. • Making botulinum toxins even more toxic • Transferring genes that help viruses evade the human immune system from one pathogen to another

  18. Divided views among security experts Tweaking the toxin produced by the anthrax bacterium to see if this subverts experimental drugs “You’re creating the threat you’re concerned about with no reason to believe that anyone is doing that.” John Steinbruner, Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland “I don’t think it’s a good idea to create a therapy that is easily subverted.” Gigi Kwik Grönvall, Center for Biosecurity, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center

  19. Investigating science Peter Aldhous, San Francisco Bureau Chief

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