Petr
02-03-2006, 03:32 PM
Interesting approach. I think that creationists and IDers have pioneered this sort of healthy suspicion towards the "Big Science" racket.
Evolutionist dogmatists are of course that sub-section of scientists that demand the most research money, give the least practical value to public in return and have the most exalted opinion of their own importance.
That would be an excellent place to start cutting funds! (SETI comes to mind) Hit the materialists where it hurts! :p
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/01/15/INGMDGMDSV1.DTL&hw=oderberg&sn=001&sc=1000
The unholy lust of scientists
It may be time to curtail public financing of scientific research
David S. Oderberg
Sunday, January 15, 2006
In our secular, post-religious society, the figure of the cassock-clad priest has been replaced by that of the white-coated scientist. Dispensing wisdom from the laboratory -- the secular sanctuary -- his every word is awaited breathlessly by a world thirsting for knowledge.
In Britain, the BBC has a weekly ritual of broadcasting the leading Big Discovery, whatever it may be, from the current issue of the Lancet. Dr. Robert Winston, in-vitro fertilization pioneer, has lately been on our screens "in search of God." The last time I looked he did not have any theological qualifications, but what does that matter? After all, he's a scientist, all glasses and gravitas, therefore qualified -- as he has shown during the past few years -- to tell the masses about, well, just about anything.
It's all very well having secular shamans, but when they're caught cooking the holy books once too often, the faithful start to get worried. Scientific fraud, like that perpetrated by South Korean stem-cell researcher Hwang Woo Suk, is not new. Newton did it; Dalton did it; even Sigmund Freud did it. In more recent times, IQ researcher Sir Cyril Burt (wanting to show in his studies of twins than genetics trumped environment) committed fraud, as did Australian gynecologist William McBride (he of thalidomide fame).
In the mid-1860s Ernst Haeckel, in his eagerness to defend evolution, spun pictures of human and animal embryos out of whole cloth in order to show that they shared primitive evolutionary similarities. The year 2002 saw the uncovering of apparent frauds by physicists Victor Ninov at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (in attempting to create new atomic elements), and Jan Hendrik Schön at Bell Labs (in attempting to perfect a transistor the size of a molecule).
Some scientists fudge data; others omit inconvenient evidence; yet others misrepresent the evidence they do have, obtaining levels of precision discordant with what may reasonably be expected from frequently messy experimentation with its many variables. Some scientists do all of this and more. How rare cheating is in science is hard to answer.
William Broad and Nicholas Wade, authors of the groundbreaking 1982 study "Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science," claimed in 1983, for instance, that one-third of all pesticides then on the market had been approved on the basis of falsified safety tests. More generally, the Office of Research Integrity claims that between 1992 and 2001 reports of academic misconduct in general have steadily increased, though actual reported cases leading to a positive finding remain very small. It is nigh impossible to gauge with precision just how severe the problem is, but one should expect it to be significant and getting worse.
Typical is the remark by Oh Il-Hwan, a geneticist at South Korea's Catholic Medical Center, on the case of erstwhile "top scientist in Korea" and now disgraced fraudster Hwang Woo Suk: "I understand what drove Hwang into this state. The pressure to achieve something was enormous." When your government calls you "top scientist" and issues a postage stamp in your honor showing a paralyzed man rising from his wheelchair and running to his lady love, you know you'd better come up with the goods.
When I spoke last year on the ethical wrongs of human embryonic stem cell research at the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research in San Francisco, I observed the hushed tones of reverence with which the name of Professor Hwang was mentioned. The eyes of eager graduate students lit up as they spoke of his work; the Big Fish declaimed with messianic zeal the new pathways that his and related research had opened up. Surely the blind would see and the lame would walk! I never heard any doubts openly expressed about the authenticity of Hwang's work, and even an habitual doubter about the latest Great Discovery such as myself was lulled into dismissing the thought that maybe the results were too good to be true.
Fortunately, as a professional philosopher, I do not have the temptation of billions of dollars of government and private money potentially flowing my way were I only able to save the world. Philosophers tend not to get postage stamps issued in their honor, and there's no Nobel Prize for our line of work. Perhaps that makes it easy for me to step on a high moral horse and condemn the fact that the most august science periodicals in the world, Science and Nature, could have had their peer review and editorial processes held up to ignominy (and not for the first time). Yet as philosophers we are -- at any rate should be -- dedicated solely to the pursuit of truth, and if we can't rely beyond a shadow of doubt on what the scientists are telling us, what hope have we of theorizing about the significance of what they assert?
In her recent op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times, Professor Laurie Zoloth, wringing her hands in anguish, appealed to the spirit of Immanuel Kant in her plea for a "truthful narrative" from scientists. Yet she should realize that Kant himself thought we could never know how things really were, and that for humans truth lay, to put it crudely, "in the head." If calling up the ghost of a skeptic (albeit a subtle one) such as Kant -- one of the fathers of that tarnished project called the Enlightenment -- is the best we can hope for, what chance is there that scientists will forget their prizes and the mammoth paychecks dangled in front of their eyes?
It may be inviting poison e-mails to say it, but I venture to suggest that contemporary science is now so corrupted by the lust for loot and glory that nothing less than root-and-branch reform can save it. For a start, although I distance myself wholly from his anti-rationalism and methodological anarchy, I share the late philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend's demand for a separation of science and state, or at the very least a radical curtailment of public financial sponsorship of scientific research. How could the millions thrown at scientists be anything other than a veritable inducement to misconduct? When you combine it with the innumerable honors and awards that await the next would-be secular savior of humanity, one wonders that fraud is not even more common than it appears to be.
This is egregiously so when it comes to medical and other clinical research that has potential direct benefits to life and health. When we look at embryonic stem cell research, however, the matter becomes even more acute. For not only are there the temptations already mentioned, but the research itself is inherently ethically flawed and so invites dissimulation, for instance, in the case of sourcing human eggs -- as we saw at the outset of the Hwang debacle.
It would be an act of utter folly and of contempt for honesty and integrity were Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's beloved California Institute for Regenerative Medicine now to go ahead. Were a bishop to be caught doctoring the Gospels, I doubt any scientists would be rushing to approve the Church's latest request for help to build a new cathedral. Why it should be any different for the secular bishops of science is difficult to discern.
David S. Oderberg is professor of philosophy at the University of Reading, England, and author of, among many publications, the book "Moral Theory" and "Applied Ethics" (Blackwell, 2000).
Evolutionist dogmatists are of course that sub-section of scientists that demand the most research money, give the least practical value to public in return and have the most exalted opinion of their own importance.
That would be an excellent place to start cutting funds! (SETI comes to mind) Hit the materialists where it hurts! :p
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/01/15/INGMDGMDSV1.DTL&hw=oderberg&sn=001&sc=1000
The unholy lust of scientists
It may be time to curtail public financing of scientific research
David S. Oderberg
Sunday, January 15, 2006
In our secular, post-religious society, the figure of the cassock-clad priest has been replaced by that of the white-coated scientist. Dispensing wisdom from the laboratory -- the secular sanctuary -- his every word is awaited breathlessly by a world thirsting for knowledge.
In Britain, the BBC has a weekly ritual of broadcasting the leading Big Discovery, whatever it may be, from the current issue of the Lancet. Dr. Robert Winston, in-vitro fertilization pioneer, has lately been on our screens "in search of God." The last time I looked he did not have any theological qualifications, but what does that matter? After all, he's a scientist, all glasses and gravitas, therefore qualified -- as he has shown during the past few years -- to tell the masses about, well, just about anything.
It's all very well having secular shamans, but when they're caught cooking the holy books once too often, the faithful start to get worried. Scientific fraud, like that perpetrated by South Korean stem-cell researcher Hwang Woo Suk, is not new. Newton did it; Dalton did it; even Sigmund Freud did it. In more recent times, IQ researcher Sir Cyril Burt (wanting to show in his studies of twins than genetics trumped environment) committed fraud, as did Australian gynecologist William McBride (he of thalidomide fame).
In the mid-1860s Ernst Haeckel, in his eagerness to defend evolution, spun pictures of human and animal embryos out of whole cloth in order to show that they shared primitive evolutionary similarities. The year 2002 saw the uncovering of apparent frauds by physicists Victor Ninov at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (in attempting to create new atomic elements), and Jan Hendrik Schön at Bell Labs (in attempting to perfect a transistor the size of a molecule).
Some scientists fudge data; others omit inconvenient evidence; yet others misrepresent the evidence they do have, obtaining levels of precision discordant with what may reasonably be expected from frequently messy experimentation with its many variables. Some scientists do all of this and more. How rare cheating is in science is hard to answer.
William Broad and Nicholas Wade, authors of the groundbreaking 1982 study "Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science," claimed in 1983, for instance, that one-third of all pesticides then on the market had been approved on the basis of falsified safety tests. More generally, the Office of Research Integrity claims that between 1992 and 2001 reports of academic misconduct in general have steadily increased, though actual reported cases leading to a positive finding remain very small. It is nigh impossible to gauge with precision just how severe the problem is, but one should expect it to be significant and getting worse.
Typical is the remark by Oh Il-Hwan, a geneticist at South Korea's Catholic Medical Center, on the case of erstwhile "top scientist in Korea" and now disgraced fraudster Hwang Woo Suk: "I understand what drove Hwang into this state. The pressure to achieve something was enormous." When your government calls you "top scientist" and issues a postage stamp in your honor showing a paralyzed man rising from his wheelchair and running to his lady love, you know you'd better come up with the goods.
When I spoke last year on the ethical wrongs of human embryonic stem cell research at the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research in San Francisco, I observed the hushed tones of reverence with which the name of Professor Hwang was mentioned. The eyes of eager graduate students lit up as they spoke of his work; the Big Fish declaimed with messianic zeal the new pathways that his and related research had opened up. Surely the blind would see and the lame would walk! I never heard any doubts openly expressed about the authenticity of Hwang's work, and even an habitual doubter about the latest Great Discovery such as myself was lulled into dismissing the thought that maybe the results were too good to be true.
Fortunately, as a professional philosopher, I do not have the temptation of billions of dollars of government and private money potentially flowing my way were I only able to save the world. Philosophers tend not to get postage stamps issued in their honor, and there's no Nobel Prize for our line of work. Perhaps that makes it easy for me to step on a high moral horse and condemn the fact that the most august science periodicals in the world, Science and Nature, could have had their peer review and editorial processes held up to ignominy (and not for the first time). Yet as philosophers we are -- at any rate should be -- dedicated solely to the pursuit of truth, and if we can't rely beyond a shadow of doubt on what the scientists are telling us, what hope have we of theorizing about the significance of what they assert?
In her recent op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times, Professor Laurie Zoloth, wringing her hands in anguish, appealed to the spirit of Immanuel Kant in her plea for a "truthful narrative" from scientists. Yet she should realize that Kant himself thought we could never know how things really were, and that for humans truth lay, to put it crudely, "in the head." If calling up the ghost of a skeptic (albeit a subtle one) such as Kant -- one of the fathers of that tarnished project called the Enlightenment -- is the best we can hope for, what chance is there that scientists will forget their prizes and the mammoth paychecks dangled in front of their eyes?
It may be inviting poison e-mails to say it, but I venture to suggest that contemporary science is now so corrupted by the lust for loot and glory that nothing less than root-and-branch reform can save it. For a start, although I distance myself wholly from his anti-rationalism and methodological anarchy, I share the late philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend's demand for a separation of science and state, or at the very least a radical curtailment of public financial sponsorship of scientific research. How could the millions thrown at scientists be anything other than a veritable inducement to misconduct? When you combine it with the innumerable honors and awards that await the next would-be secular savior of humanity, one wonders that fraud is not even more common than it appears to be.
This is egregiously so when it comes to medical and other clinical research that has potential direct benefits to life and health. When we look at embryonic stem cell research, however, the matter becomes even more acute. For not only are there the temptations already mentioned, but the research itself is inherently ethically flawed and so invites dissimulation, for instance, in the case of sourcing human eggs -- as we saw at the outset of the Hwang debacle.
It would be an act of utter folly and of contempt for honesty and integrity were Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's beloved California Institute for Regenerative Medicine now to go ahead. Were a bishop to be caught doctoring the Gospels, I doubt any scientists would be rushing to approve the Church's latest request for help to build a new cathedral. Why it should be any different for the secular bishops of science is difficult to discern.
David S. Oderberg is professor of philosophy at the University of Reading, England, and author of, among many publications, the book "Moral Theory" and "Applied Ethics" (Blackwell, 2000).