Call for acid-bath stem-cell paper to be retracted | Hacker News Reader

Call for acid-bath stem-cell paper to be retracted

blogs.nature.com

63 pointsdfjorque33 comments

I'm uncomfortable with the sweeping-generalizations of this comment from the article, but I do think there's some insight to it concerning independent thinking and science. Science is a creative endeavor:

Steve Jackman said:

"Foreigners have an image of the Japanese as very thorough, detail-oriented, and meticulous. However, my experience in Japan over more than a decade has been just the opposite of this. Things got so bad at my Japanese company that everytime I would check my Japanese subordinates’ work, for me it was never a matter of if I would find mistakes, but how many mistakes would I eventually end up finding. Many of these were due to pure sloppiness, carelessness, an inability to think independently, critically or to ask questions, a blind allegiance to protocol and heirarchy, and a fear of being perceived as a troublemaker or someone who is not a team player.

"This helped me understand why Japanese companies place such importance on manuals, rules and doing things by the book, since the Japanese are usually very good at following rules that have been written down for them. This style may work well for manufacturing industries, but not for research, STEM fileds (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths), or in the knowledge and service industries of the future."

Isn't then the solution to write a manual that tells people precisely how and when to be creative and lays out a protocol for raising issues? One that looks like a very rigid structure, but in fact allows for good creativity.

and some would argue that you place a lot of focus on the artifact (manuels) than on creative thought.

Here is commentary from the group blog by science journalists Retraction Watch on this story, "Co-author of controversial acid STAP stem cell papers in Nature requests retraction: report":

http://retractionwatch.com/2014/03/10/co-author-of-controver...

Stem cell research is a "hot" research area, because it can be hyped as a cure-all, so we should all be especially skeptical of initial reports on new stem cell research. In general, we have to distinguish submissions to Hacker News based on press releases (there are way too many of those) from review articles by experienced researchers that digest the primary research done by a variety of researchers around the world. The latter kind of submission (a review article from a peer-reviewed journal or a book chapter from a practitioner's handbook) would be an excellent submission to Hacker News if it has a link that lives online for free reading, but it would also mean reading something longer than something that can be summed up with a one-line lt;dr summary. Otherwise, a thoughtful article by a science journalist who interviews scientists besides the scientists hyping a new discovery can be much better than a new "peer-reviewed" preliminary research finding. All too often, in our haste for "news" here about medical research, all the hackers here can be led astray about what is really established knowledge in medicine.

This isn't correct, consider that the whole scientific community was excited about this paper. And why not? It was published in a good journal and there are a few people trying similar methods.

Could be big if it works, although not sure it is HN content as opposed to some biology community.

Everyone gives Science, Cell and Nature way too much credit. They are flashy, but tend to have less substance than other journals. Their retraction rate is also much higher.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3187237/figure/F...

I'm not even going to go into why the correlation between influence and retraction rate exists, that should be blatantly obvious to any with a background in any of the sciences. Also, we want retractions, it means science works.

Retractions are good in when the original paper was the best efforts of its authors. This kind of big-news nonsense paper is far less forgivable.

What I find surprising about this is that the work was apparently conducted by separate groups at Riken, Japan, and Harvard, USA. It would take a fair degree of negligence/incompetence/subterfuge for a basic error such as that proposed to occur (i.e. there were no stem cells produced by this method).

Apparently the paper was in review for 9 months, which suggests at least two back-and-forth discussions between reviewers and authors. If there was that degree of misbehavior suggested, I would probably give the editors and reviewers a pass. Their job is not to detect outright fraud.

PubPeer explains how their commenters helped identify some fraud there: http://blog.pubpeer.com/?p=117

So what's the role of Nature group here? Print colourful printouts of sloppily-reviewed papers? I feel somehow these "publishers" (basically, they're just glorified PDF repositories) aren't really worth the money they're getting.

Again the people who say Philosophy is dead to science I say UGH learn from history. Philosophy and Ethics are still the heart of progress.

How many Scientific papers that were "peer reviewed" have we now learned that the science behind the scientific papers have seriously been lacking.

The cost is in the suffering and deaths of patients who didn't get help needed that research would have found if they didn't have to chase all these rabbit trails.

Biased and mad

PS Theology/Philosophy Degree holder and my son is named after my favorite Philosopher.

PSS My other son died of cancer (Bone Cancer) where there has been zero progress in mortality rate over the last 30 years.

I don't understand your argument at all. What does philosophy have to do with any of this? Are you claiming that if more people were to study philosophy, this would make the world more "moral", leading to less scientific fraud?

I see things like this as part of the cost of doing more and more advanced research at a fast pace. You are bound to have a few misses, but all in all you still make progress.

Popper, Kuhn etc where laying the groundwork for how to validate phenomena and add facts to our models of the world.

The black swan is a good example of this problem (i.e. what lead to why we try to falsify things.)

Without a discussion about scientific methods no science and therefore Philosophy is important.

> Biased and mad

And sour grapes. And you are not doing any credit to Philosophers by making it sound like it's science vs philosophy. Or by dismissing everyone else's work from your armchair without showing any hint of your own work or any alternatives. And finally, we should listen to you because you have a Degree?

A scientist would respond: How many ethical theories were accepted by contemporaries, only to later be shown to be flawed?

If you want to attribute deaths to bad science, then you must also attribute far more to bad philosophy.

Thats not really fair.

The point I think the Parent is trying to make is. Remember what science is and how it works and why it's useful.

It's perfectly fair. What's not fair about it?

Science is a loose methodology. But scientific institutions are fallible. Scientists are fallible. And the methodology is fallible as well, especially in the short term. The whole point is that even if mistakes are made in the small, progress is made in the large.

I don't really understand the point you (or the parent) are trying to make.

You are cherry picking one part of his argument and claiming that this is what he claims.

He isn't only talking about ethics.

What is he talking about?

I have only to [partly, not in such a clear-cut way] agree with this. Our era will be part of "The Age of the Feuilleton," as in the Glass-Bead Game...

What a pity, what a shame.

I also like the Futurama description: "The Stupid Ages"

Nothing like being given a fake cure and forcing researchers to go down the wrong rabbit hole for that cure because the original research paper had fudged the numbers to pass the test and the peer review was done by a sock puppet.

My father died of cancer in 2010, now like him I have a lump in my chest and it is really painful.

The Philosophy in science came from many different religions, so naturally skeptics just reject it because a religion came up with it. Might lead to a cure for cancer, but got to reject it because it was made by a religion?

Socrates came up with the theory of the atom, Francis Bacon helped bring about the scientific method. Yet do we reject those things because of the religion involved?

Where does religion come into play here? I'm unaware of anyone rejecting the atomic theory or the scientific method (seriously, what scientist could reject the scientific method?)

This is fantastic news.

I wish more blog articles and newspapers had a similar feature: not just let the author edit, but openly retract their core affirmation. Sounds like it could have been useful to Newsweek recently.

Japan has a strange culture: Their scientific funding is based largely on hanging out naked at a hot spring with the guy that controls the budget.

And in US/Europe it would be going to the same parties as the guy who controls the budget. I don't see any difference in substance.

The biggest difference that I see is that women are usually invited to parties. There is a huge gender imbalance in Japanese science research, and I think the culture around funding is responsible.

I would really love to see proof of this claim.

The funding in Japan flows through a senior researcher who organizes the research for an entire department. This is very different from the US where each PI applies to the funding agency (NSF, NIH...). In 2010 I attended a department level conference (~75 people) in Japan and the the Japanese graduate students explained that when you meet with someone for a few days you get to know them and their research, and then when you go to the hot springs you really get to know them. After all of the formal sessions the organizer would say, "Ok, now lets all go to the hot springs and discuss what we heard today". Clothing is not permitted in these "baths". The goal of the above post wasn't to make fun of the culture, but it does point out the system where friends of the lead researcher get a huge advantage. This system is also very hostile to women who are unable to participate in the part of the meeting where the real business happens.

If anyone knows this to be untrue please let me know.

I guess I was more hoping for some old facebook photo of some semi-famous Japanese PI.

this is true in the US too, except without the bath part.

Such jealousy in academic land...

Academics have dug their own grave here. They keep pushing for last century's publishing model and then they use this publishing model to gauge their own academic value.

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