Dom, You've opened a pandora's box here, which I won't try to contain. The short answer is both of the above.
I feel it is becoming increasingly difficult as a referee to be on top of every paper I review, and as an editor it is becoming increasingly difficult to find willing referees. Both phenomena are diagnostic of the cost of eliminating fraudulent publications, which gall me pretty much as much as they do many others, but which do not drive me apoplectic, either. I've been amused over the years by the frantic efforts to bring crystallographic charlatans to justice, even as I've been angered by publication in high-impact journals of material I myself view as fraudulent, but which obviously survives peer review. On the second of your alternatives, I'll give you two examples of highly celebrated frauds that wound up moving science forward, despite their scurrilous background. The first is the story of Hasko Paradies, whose only legitimate publication, as far as I know, was a first-author paper on the crystallization of tRNA. In that paper, he was, I think, the first author to describe the use of spermine/spermidine and Mg++ ions in improving crystallization conditions. These two contributions proved useful in the actual generation by others of suitable crystals. Paradies apparently went on to make a habit of filching precession photographs from dark rooms and then presenting them elsewhere and at meetings as if he had taken them and as if they were from "hot" problems of the day. His story was chronicled by Wayne Hendrickson, Ed Lattman, and others in Nature many years later. He dropped out of science and became a pediatrician, I believe in Munich, where, despite not having attended medical school, he was much beloved by his patients and their families. Paradies had been an associate of my own post-doctoral mentor, Sir Aaron Klug. I've no way of knowing whether or not he actually faked the data in his report of tRNA crystallization. His "crystals" did not diffract in any case, which may have driven him to short cuts. The other celebrated Fraud was Mark Spector, who embarrassed (and indeed victimized) Ephraim Racker at Cornell by using 125Iodine to construct gel autoradiographs to support his remarkable notion of the use of phosphorylation and dephosphorylation in cell signaling. His data were entirely fictitious, but it turned out that his ideas were pregnant indeed. I still view the cross-checking he provoked in serious students of signaling as having stimulated the entire field and actually accelerated it. Both Paradies and Spector are gifted fakes. Their work deserves appreciation for the intelligence that went into the tales they told. A lay homolog was Ferdinand Waldo Demara, who had very little formal education, but who established himself as outstanding in several fields, including open heart surgery, which he performed on a Japanese sailor rescued from after a battle, and who had shrapnel very close to his heart. Apparently, the sailor lived, and Demara saved his life. His story is told in a wonderful film with Tony Curtis in the roll, called The Great Imposter. I hope I've answered your question about what I meant to say on the subject. Charlie On Oct 19, 2012, at 11:25 AM, <dom.bell...@diamond.ac.uk<mailto:dom.bell...@diamond.ac.uk>> wrote: Dear Charlie, Do you mean that small doses of fraud should be accepted as a form of natural evolution? Or perhaps you were suggesting that genuine errors/mistakes are acceptable in 1/10000 due to the high costs of spotting them? D From: CCP4 bulletin board [mailto:CCP4BB@JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On Behalf Of Carter, Charlie Sent: 19 October 2012 13:09 To: ccp4bb Subject: [ccp4bb] Fwd: [ccp4bb] PNAS on fraud Begin forwarded message: Date: October 19, 2012 4:40:35 AM EDT To: Randy Read <rj...@cam.ac.uk<mailto:rj...@cam.ac.uk>> Subject: Re: [ccp4bb] PNAS on fraud This thread has been quite interesting to me. I've had a long interest in scientific fraud, which I've generally held to be victimless. While that view is unsupportable in a fundamental sense, I feel strongly that we should understand that error correction costs exponentially more, the smaller the tolerance for errors. In protein synthesis, evolution has settled on error rates of ~1 in 4000-10000. Ensuring those rates is already costly in terms of NTPs hydrolyzed. NASA peer review provided me another shock: budgets for microgravity experiments were an order of magnitude higher than those for ground-based experiments, and most of the increase came via NASA's insistence on higher quality control. Informally, I've concluded that the rate of scientific fraud in all journals is probably less than the 1 in 10,000 that (mother) nature settled on. I concur with Randy. Charlie On Oct 18, 2012, at 2:43 PM, Randy Read wrote: In support of Bayesian reasoning, it's good to see that the data could over-rule our prior belief that Nature/Science/Cell structures would be worse! -- This e-mail and any attachments may contain confidential, copyright and or privileged material, and are for the use of the intended addressee only. If you are not the intended addressee or an authorised recipient of the addressee please notify us of receipt by returning the e-mail and do not use, copy, retain, distribute or disclose the information in or attached to the e-mail. Any opinions expressed within this e-mail are those of the individual and not necessarily of Diamond Light Source Ltd. Diamond Light Source Ltd. cannot guarantee that this e-mail or any attachments are free from viruses and we cannot accept liability for any damage which you may sustain as a result of software viruses which may be transmitted in or with the message. Diamond Light Source Limited (company no. 4375679). Registered in England and Wales with its registered office at Diamond House, Harwell Science and Innovation Campus, Didcot, Oxfordshire, OX11 0DE, United Kingdom
