Hello all, I started to write a response to this thread yesterday. I thought the title was great even the content of Eleanor's email was very helpful. What I didn't like was the indictment in the next to last paragraph. This has been followed up with the word fabrication by others. No one knows definitively if this was fabricated. You have your suspicions, but you don't "know." Fabrication suggests malicious wrong-doing. I actually don't think this was the case. I'm probably a bit biased because the work comes from an office down the hall from my own. I'd like to think that if the structure is wrong that it could be chalked up to inexperience rather than malice. To me, this scenario of inexperience seems like one that could become more and more prevalent as our field opens up to more and more scientists doing structural work who are not dedicated crystallographers.
Having said that, I think Eleanor started an extremely useful thread as a way of avoiding the pitfalls of crystallography whether you are a novice or an expert. There's no question that this board is the best way to advance one's knowledge of crystallography. I actually gave a homework assignment that was simply to sign up for the ccp4bb. In reference to the previously mentioned work, I'd also like to hear discussion concurring or not the response letter some of which seems plausible to me. I hope I don't ruffle anyones feathers by my email, but I just thought that it should be said. Cheers- Todd -----Original Message----- From: CCP4 bulletin board on behalf of Randy J. Read Sent: Thu 8/16/2007 8:22 AM To: CCP4BB@JISCMAIL.AC.UK Subject: Re: [ccp4bb] The importance of USING our validation tools On Aug 16 2007, Eleanor Dodson wrote: >The weighting in REFMAC is a function of SigmA ( plotted in log file). >For this example it will be nearly 1 for all resolutions ranges so the >weights are pretty constant. There is also a contribution from the >"experimental" sigma, which in this case seems to be proportional to |F| Originally I expected that the publication of our Brief Communication in Nature would stimulate a lot of discussion on the bulletin board, but clearly it hasn't. One reason is probably that we couldn't be as forthright as we wished to be. For its own good reasons, Nature did not allow us to use the word "fabricated". Nor were we allowed to discuss other structures from the same group, if they weren't published in Nature.
