When science is turned on its side and upside down

Published important scientific findings are all too often, ignored, misinterpreted by the lay public, misjudged in the process of peer review, and sometimes simply fraudulent. Two very different articles in the magazine section of the New York Times (April 28) provide some dramatic illustrations of science gone amok.

One of the articles describes the world of clinical and scientific research on breast cancer. Peggy Orenstein, a breast cancer survivor provides a poignant review of the evolving history of what we ‘know’ about breast cancer covering topics that include the value of screening, early detection, and methods used to treat the disease. It also provides a clear picture of how research that is clear and informative is often not only ignored but distorted by strongly held unsubstantiated beliefs of women who may be or become breast cancer victims. In addition highly trained professionals also allow their biases to overrule evidence that is inconsistent with what they believe is so. Why bother with data when our minds are already made up?

A few pages later we read an account of the scientific fraud committed by a well-known and respected social psychologist. In Yudhijit Bhattacharjee’s article entitled ‘The Mind of a Con Man’ we read about how scores of published highly visible articles were based on imaginary (made up) data. The NY Times author provides a chilling and tragic picture of a scientist who commits scientific fraud, perhaps in part because of some personal quirks and pathology. The end of the story is not simply that the renegade scientist is caught and disgraced. There is much more to the story that is just beneath the surface of the fraud. There is, in part, the aggressive and highly competitive nature of scientific research that is one ingredient in the creation of the fraud. That culture (journals, scientific meetings) values well told simple, dramatic science stories leaving out qualifiers and uncertainties. The journal editors who published the fraudulent articles were smart enough to know that experiments often fail and results are rarely clear-cut, especially in the social sciences. Negative findings rarely see the light of day. Scientist are encouraged to tell a (true) story when presenting their research at scientific meetings. I have often asked, one on one, a scientist who reported what I thought were really valuable and important new findings to let me know about which facets of their reported findings were ones that they thought would hold up reliably and which were perhaps built on shaky foundations. My question was never seen as an insult or hostile. In addition it is well understood that while inventing scientific data is rare ‘messaging data, ignoring some findings is understood to happen was some frequency. The problem often gets resolved because it is only the visible and important research that others look at closely (and sometimes try to replicate) so that in the end if the research is important the fraud will be discovered. The trivial findings that are based on a fraudulent scientist’s imagination is undiscovered, in part because no one cares.