BBC reports about celebrities speaking on scientific issues – and comments by experts. I would like another BBC news feature about scientists speaking on scientific issues from different disciplines, for example famous molecular biologists about ethics.
Tag Archives: Science + Philosophie
6 sigma (TM)
No, this is not a post about another case of scientific misconduct (the sigma factor in transcription initiation published in Cell last October) but about Six Sigma, a process developed at Motorola in 1986 for measuring defects and improving quality of the production process (Motorola owns the trademark for Six Sigma). Read more at the excellent Wikipedia article – applying these principles could also help scientific projects, yea, yea.
3 Rs
The 3 Rs of regulating animal research are Refinement (to minimize suffering), Reduction and Replacement (to minimize the number of animals used). A Nature news feature now has a critical appraisal of current knockout projects where each of the 25,000 genes will be knocked out in the next future. Although current technology represent an advantage over recent undirected mutagenesis projects
… the number of mice needed to establish a line stretches from 50 to several 100. On top of this, another couple of 100 animals are needed for basic analysis of genetic make-up and phenotype…
Many genes cannot be knocked out – some knockouts may even be lethal.
We are also not so much interested in permanent destruction of genes in all tissues but in conditional and temporal shutdown of gene function.
And many researchers are not so much interested in the current 129 background than in BL6 (at least in immunology and allergology).
Finally (in human genetics) we are not dealing with knockouts but with multiple genomic variants of a gene. The question therefore is
Is the spirit of the knockout projects in line with [3R] principle[s]?
although I acknowledge that these industrial projects may generate many “nice to know” facts.
Open peer review failed
It was an interesting experiment that started on June, 1 in the Nature office: a first trial of of open peer review. Of the 10,000 papers received every year, 6,000 are immediately rejected and eventually 700 published after peer review. The result of the trial, however, is disappointing:
We sent out a total of 1,369 papers for review during the trial period. The authors of 71 (or 5%) of these agreed to their papers being displayed for open comment. Of the displayed papers, 33 received no comments, while 38 (54%) received a total of 92 technical comments.
The trial provoked some web traffic with approx. 800 page views/day. Welcome back to the altruism thread, the discussion may be followed at their blog, yea, yea.
He can run slowly
if you want to see Crison and me in the same stadium, you must bid him slacken his speed to mine, for I cannot run quickly, and he can run slowly.
(from Platons Protagoras dialogue English|German).
firstmonday has a wonderful paper “More, Faster, Better: Governance in an Age of Overload, Busyness, and Speed” basically arguing that the vast sources of information has a rather paradoxical effect: the abundance of information rather disconnects and distances us from ourselves and the world around us.
Immersed in a sea of media, information sources, technologies and devices, many of us are now becoming aware of the downside — some would say the dark side — of these powerful new modes of communicating and acting.
The mere number of papers being published even in my most genuine area of interest is impossible to monitor at the end of 2006 – bioscience looses more and more scientia. Although papers still have a “discussion” section, there is no more discussion as references are getting more and more eclectic.
The Levy paper in firstmonday is a “must read” – in particular the chapter on
Vannevar Bush, an American born in 1890, was trained as an electrical engineer and for the first part of his career worked as a professor and an administrator at MIT…. Bush was famous enough to appear on the cover of Time in April of 1944. Yet today he is best remembered not for his technical work or his contribution to winning the war, but for an article he published in the Atlantic Monthly in July, 1945, titled “As We May Thinkâ€
and what he says about two kinds of thought: routine or repetitive or logical thinking along an accepted groove – literature scan, arithmetic operations all that technical stuff that can be automated: In contrast there is mature, creative thought, deep, original thinking, reasoning – without any mechanical substitute. Levy makes the point that
Certainly the easy availability of information and the increasing pace of life can at times be empowering and even exhilarating, but too much stimulation can lead to numbing, a loss of focus, and withdrawal: it can dumb down, enervate and even stupefy.
the information overload (with less reliable, often questionable) information leads to a deprivation of mature thinking that severely affects now the academic world
Yet today’s universities — their faculty, students, and staff — are increasingly caught up in the current cultural frenzy; academics are now busier and more overloaded than ever before. The pressure on faculty to obtain outside funding is intense and increasing as the pool of available funds shrinks; time spent searching for potential funding sources, writing grant proposals, and shepherding them through intricate bureaucratic procedures is simply added on to the other expectations of the job…. increased student expectations that instructors should and will be available for consultation at all hours of the day and night, weekends included. E–mail has also made professors that much more reachable by the general public, the press, and academics at other institutions…
What can be done? Prescreening of relevant science by (institutionalised) editors or (anarchic) blogs? And by which criteria?
Quod licet Jovi not licet Bovi
Rolf Zinkernagel in a commentary in Nature Immunology explains that today almost everything can be measured – and a nearly uncontrollable complexity often paired with weak detection methods renders experiments almost unrepeatable. His recommendations are
Most if not all experiments have limitations. Therefore researchers must think and argue and do experiments contrary to published results and against biases.
Nearly all studies need some funding; funding is controlled by peer review; peer review usually prohibits these experiments. Yea, yea.
Human breeding
There have been always attempts to make humans better – an idea that attracted people nearly every century. Ovid created Galatea from a statue, Goethe’s homunculus originated from a test tube, Mary Shelly created her monster from corpses, Bulgakows proletarian derived from a dog and Sloterdijks Menschenzüchtung by a fancy idea. There is only a minor difference at the end of 2006 – technical possibilities of genetic testing and genetic engineering are much higher developed. Yea, yea.
Open culture podcasts
As a frequent traveller I like podcasts. Here is a quick link to Open culture that have a huge university podcast collection including many foreign language selections (Boston College, Bowdoin College, Collège de France, Duke University Law School, Harvard University, Haverford College – Classic Texts, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern University, Ohio State, Princeton University, Stanford University, Swathmore College, University of California (the best collection), The University of Chicago, The University of Glasgow, The University of Pennsylvania, The University of Virginia, The University of Wisconsin-Madison, Vanderbilt University, Yale University and Ecole normale supérieure). If you don´t like proprietary formats you need to find the good and the bad apples.
Dr. med. Sigmund Rascher, KL Dachau
On my way to work I am crossing every morning in Dachau East the former Nazi concentration camp/Konzentrationslager (KL). Its a monument of inhumanity and the deepest point in the history of “science”. A large number of prisoners were abused by SS doctors for medical experiments; an unknown number of prisoners suffered agonizing deaths in the course of atmospheric pressure, hypothermia, malaria and other experiments.
photo by 11 Dec 06
Having a longstanding interest in history (and even published on the 50th anniversary of the Nuremberg trials) I have now been very interested in a new book by Sigfried Bär, one of the outstanding German science writers “Der Untergang des Hauses Rascher”, a history of the life of Dr. Sigmund Rascher, anthroposophic scholar, medical student, DFG-scholar, minion of of Heinrich Himmlers, air pressure and hypothermia researcher at KL Dachau and finally prisoner who died by being shot in the neck.
Dr. Bär spent several years researching the life of this mass murderer. He contacted relatives of Rascher, looked at family photos, talked to people who knew Rascher and went to archives. This is a unique document showing the avidity of a researcher for recognition by scientific colleagues. Other books from my own library that I recommend:
We can put an end to word attachments
Colleagues, funding agencies and journals – all want word attachments.
Richard Stallman has a comment on that. Yea, yea.
The mind has a thousand eyes
The night has a thousand eyes,
And the day but one:
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun.
The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one.
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.
Francis William Bourdillon
(found 7/12/06 on the inside cover of an old book with title “Perdita” in the patient library of a university clinic)
Assets minus debts
Slashdot reports a United Nations study that
the richest 2% of adults in the world own more than half of all household wealth… Most previous studies of economic disparity have looked at income, whereas this one looks at wealth – assets minus debts.
Looks similar to science budgets, yea, yea.
Addendum
An interview with Richard Münch in Laborjournal 12/2006, p.23 confirms this: 17 out of 100 German universities consume 50% of all funds provided by DFG. He furthermore believes that SFBs and research networks are a kind of ideological framework; projects are not assessed retrospectively; there is an overkill of management costs where a considerable part of third-party funding is used to get more third-party funding.
Tit-for-tat or altruism in science
No, this essay will not deal with altruism in science but with the science of altruism. There are two new papers from the Fehr group (one in Science on Nov, 3 about diminished reciprocal fairness after magnetic stimulation of the right prefrontal cortex and a second in Nature on Aug, 24 about altruism in two indigenous groups in Papua New Guinea). I was, however, much more impressed by their recent review of human altruism.
Cooperation between genetically unrelated groups is a typical human behaviour (otherwise seen only in ants, bees and the naked mole rat) where there seems a strong reciprocity between selfishness and altruism. Cooperation is rarely stable and may deteriorate under worse conditions. Altruistic rewarding and reputation seeking seem to be the most powerful determinants of future donors’ behaviour where effects of punishing behaviour seem to be underestimated: Cooperation in larger group continues only if punishment of defectors and non-punishers is possible.
Prevention of fraud
Donald Kennedy is writing in this week’ Science editorial about Responding to Fraud. The editorial is even more about prevention of fraud: The external reviewers ask for future risk assessment of potential fraud. Science will think in the future
… which papers deserve particularly careful editorial scrutiny. Papers that are of substantial public interest, present results that are unexpected and/or counterintuitive, or touch on areas of high political controversy may fall into this category…
I appreciate such an initiative and I agree that science is based on an assumption of trust – no procedure will be immune to deliberate fraud. However, looking both at people and at papers could be worthwile. I would give extra score points for
- too ambitious institutional environments
- large and anonymous organizations
- poor social and scientific interaction at a local level
- limited scientific qualification or background of researchers or department heads
- time pressure, too many projects, no longterm goals
- direct financial compensation in return of scientific impact
- past history of minor misconduct
Looking at papers will also reveal inconsistencies
- contradictory numbers
- suspicious modifications of figures
- original data not public available
- original documentation not public available
- constructs, cell lines, animals not public available
- inadequate point by point response to review
- insufficient documentation of IRB and authorship
Another option is to pay reviewers – the review process is becoming more and more time consuming – and even to plan on-site evaluation. An option probably not feasible is to delay publication until the main findings are independently reproduced.
Finally, I see a large gap between the attempts of Science and Nature to improve their performance while some average impact journals never respond if you ask them to correct or withdraw a highly distorted paper. Yea, yea.
Addendum
Guide to promoting integrity in scientific journals published by the Council of Science Editors
I agree with everything you said
“I agree with everything you said that was correct, and I disagree with everything you said, that was incorrect” (Adlai Stevenson according to AJRCM 2006;174:1056) – a nice comment that fits every situation.
The German Spiegel has an interview with Tim O’Reilly about the quality of internet resources. It seems that everybody can voice his or her opinion while the final decision about a feature or a patch is done in the “inner circle”. Entry to the inner circle is limited to those who qualify by previous contributions – probably a very similar system in science. O’Reilly talks in this interview also about Jaron Larnier’s warning that Wikipedia may be dangerous for creating mono-culture-knowledge. He agrees that Wikipedia has been abused in the past but believes that the mechanisms behind Wikipedia to identify abuse are much better than in any political system, yea, yea.