Scientist Flubs and Flops #8

Link

 

                Press button to watch video

• "Fundamentally, we have a poor understanding of how any internal organ forms." -- Timothy Saunders, developmental biologist (link).
• "Biochemistry cannot provide the spatial information needed to explain morphogenesis...Supracellular morphogenesis is mysterious...Nobody seems to understand the origin of biological and cellular order."  -- Six medical authorities (link).  
• "Quite simply, scientists' supposed referred expertise about fields of science distant from their own is nearly always based on mythologies about science rather than science itself." -- H.M. Collins and R. Evans, "THE THIRD WAVE OF SCIENCE STUDIES: STUDIES OF EXPERTISE AND EXPERIENCE."
• "This is mostly in line with a sobering recent realization of NIH in the US that around 90% [of] all biology science results are NOT repeatable. Scientist publish what worked not a majority of experiments that do not, even if this is the same experiment." -- Boginslaw Stec PhD (link). 
• "My experiences at four research universities and as a National Institutes of Health (NIH) research fellow taught me that the relentless pursuit of taxpayer funding has eliminated curiosity, basic competence, and scientific integrity in many fields. Yet, more importantly, training in 'science' is now tantamount to grant-writing and learning how to obtain funding. Organized skepticism, critical thinking, and methodological rigor, if present at all, are afterthoughts....American universities often produce corrupt, incompetent, or scientifically meaningless research that endangers the public, confounds public policy, and diminishes our nation’s preparedness to meet future challenges....Universities and federal funding agencies lack accountability and often ignore fraud and misconduct. There are numerous examples in which universities refused to hold their faculty accountable until elected officials intervened, and even when found guilty, faculty researchers continued to receive tens of millions of taxpayers’ dollars. Those facts are an open secret: When anonymously surveyed, over 14 percent of researchers report that their colleagues commit fraud and 72 percent report other questionable practices....Retractions, misconduct, and harassment are only part of the decline. Incompetence is another....The widespread inability of publicly funded researchers to generate valid, reproducible findings is a testament to the failure of universities to properly train scientists and instill intellectual and methodologic rigor. That failure means taxpayers are being misled by results that are non-reproducible or demonstrably false." Edward Archer PhD, "The Intellectual and Moral Decline in Academic Research," (link).
• "The images from a total of 20,621 papers published in 40 scientific journals from 1995 to 2014 were visually screened. Overall, 3.8% of published papers contained problematic figures, with at least half exhibiting features suggestive of deliberate manipulation....The results demonstrate that problematic images are disturbingly common in the biomedical literature and may be found in approximately 1 out of every 25 published articles containing photographic image data."  -- Bik, Casadevall and Fang, "The Prevalence of Inappropriate Image Duplication in Biomedical Research Publications" (link). 
• "I am merely pointing out that a large proportion of our scientists are being subsidized by the government in the name of might, and none, to my knowledge, in the name of right. Here we have science in an age of rampant nationalism and materialism." -- Harvard psychologist Henry Murray (link). 
• "Can so many scientists have been wrong over the eighty years since 1925? Unhappily yes. The mainstream in science...is often wrong...Scientists are often tardy in fixing basic flaws in their sciences despite the presence of better alternatives. Think of the half century it took American geologists to recognize the truth of drifting continents, a theory proposed in 1915 by -- of all  eminently ignorable people -- a German meteorologist." -- economist Stephen Thomas Ziliak (link).