Deception in Scientific Studies
Science is one of those subjects that almost everyone is fascinated by. I know I am. I love the idea of human effort to understand or to understand better of how things work in this world. People are constantly introduced to new studies almost every day from the Internet, magazines, social Medias, and so on. Yet, many do not realize that majority of those studies are fraud or lack significance. Most of the times, it leaves non-scientists people like me with confusion. Every morning at breakfast table, I watch news and morning talk shows where majority of the talks are about new promising studies claiming to fix something. One week, coffee causes cancer and another week, coffee cures cancer. Some studies claims …show more content…
It was one of the hot topics in medical science. It claimed to cure wide range of diseases. It quickly gained many audience and donators to further advance the research. In theory, there is no limit to the types of diseases that could be treated with stem cells. I am very supportive of the research because it claims to cure rheumatoid arthritis which my mother has been suffering from for many years. However, it is devastating when scientists take advantage of research funding and put forth false findings. According to an article, Deception and dishonesty with data: fraud in science, scientific community was stunned when a Korean biomedical scientist Woo Suk Hwang, a leading stem cell and cloning researcher was accused of making up his results. He paid women for their eggs which raised many ethical questions. Furthermore, he was charged with fraud in March 2006. The investigation reported that he invented majority of his data regarding stem cell research. He was also charged with using $3 million of the $40 million of research funding for personal use such as, buying a car for his wife and giving some money to politicians for personal benefits (Hand, 2007). Hwang is not the only one who deceived people. Take Geoff Pearson, who was a sport management and law professor at the University of Liverpool. He wanted to study violent soccer fans in U.K. Instead of simply surveying the fans, he decided to go undercover …show more content…
It is difficult to tell how well those data are observed and recorded. In many cases, majority of those data are misrepresented, completely made up, or just simply too accurate to be true. “These flawed findings, for the most part, stem not from fraud or formal misconduct, but from more mundane misbehavior: miscalculation, poor study design or self-serving data analysis” (Hotz, 2007). According to the article written by David Hand, surveying 3247 scientists revealed that 0.3% scientists acknowledged tinkering with the data at some point in their career and 6% denied presenting their data because it challenged their previous research. In addition, due to publication pressure, many do tend to manipulate their data to get the paper published. Because of advancement in software tools, this manipulation becomes easy by adjusting few observations to add significance to the data so the paper could get published. Take Jan Hendrik Schön as an example. He was very popular for “co-authoring one paper every 8 days in 2001—but other researchers spotted apparent anomalies in his results: in particular, that they seemed too accurate”(Hand, 2007). After further investigation, it was found that it was not collected experimentally, but rather generated by mathematical computer software tools (Hand, 2007). I was taught in school that science is self-correcting process, but it is clearly not the case
Science is one of those subjects that almost everyone is fascinated by. I know I am. I love the idea of human effort to understand or to understand better of how things work in this world. People are constantly introduced to new studies almost every day from the Internet, magazines, social Medias, and so on. Yet, many do not realize that majority of those studies are fraud or lack significance. Most of the times, it leaves non-scientists people like me with confusion. Every morning at breakfast table, I watch news and morning talk shows where majority of the talks are about new promising studies claiming to fix something. One week, coffee causes cancer and another week, coffee cures cancer. Some studies claims …show more content…
It was one of the hot topics in medical science. It claimed to cure wide range of diseases. It quickly gained many audience and donators to further advance the research. In theory, there is no limit to the types of diseases that could be treated with stem cells. I am very supportive of the research because it claims to cure rheumatoid arthritis which my mother has been suffering from for many years. However, it is devastating when scientists take advantage of research funding and put forth false findings. According to an article, Deception and dishonesty with data: fraud in science, scientific community was stunned when a Korean biomedical scientist Woo Suk Hwang, a leading stem cell and cloning researcher was accused of making up his results. He paid women for their eggs which raised many ethical questions. Furthermore, he was charged with fraud in March 2006. The investigation reported that he invented majority of his data regarding stem cell research. He was also charged with using $3 million of the $40 million of research funding for personal use such as, buying a car for his wife and giving some money to politicians for personal benefits (Hand, 2007). Hwang is not the only one who deceived people. Take Geoff Pearson, who was a sport management and law professor at the University of Liverpool. He wanted to study violent soccer fans in U.K. Instead of simply surveying the fans, he decided to go undercover …show more content…
It is difficult to tell how well those data are observed and recorded. In many cases, majority of those data are misrepresented, completely made up, or just simply too accurate to be true. “These flawed findings, for the most part, stem not from fraud or formal misconduct, but from more mundane misbehavior: miscalculation, poor study design or self-serving data analysis” (Hotz, 2007). According to the article written by David Hand, surveying 3247 scientists revealed that 0.3% scientists acknowledged tinkering with the data at some point in their career and 6% denied presenting their data because it challenged their previous research. In addition, due to publication pressure, many do tend to manipulate their data to get the paper published. Because of advancement in software tools, this manipulation becomes easy by adjusting few observations to add significance to the data so the paper could get published. Take Jan Hendrik Schön as an example. He was very popular for “co-authoring one paper every 8 days in 2001—but other researchers spotted apparent anomalies in his results: in particular, that they seemed too accurate”(Hand, 2007). After further investigation, it was found that it was not collected experimentally, but rather generated by mathematical computer software tools (Hand, 2007). I was taught in school that science is self-correcting process, but it is clearly not the case