I thought we had evidence for hackers doing this already. J
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v477/n7365/full/477373e.html (no flames, please-'tis intended to be funny, not factual) Bryan From: CCP4 bulletin board [mailto:CCP4BB@JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On Behalf Of Jacob Keller Sent: Monday, April 02, 2012 1:25 PM To: CCP4BB@JISCMAIL.AC.UK Subject: Re: [ccp4bb] very informative - Trends in Data Fabrication I like your point--somehow we should enlist the evil inclination to power our science, a la Faust. How is it that those hackers are so innovative for so little reward? I remember a Smithsonian article years ago which quoted the calculated mean $/hr rate of money counterfeiters as being ~pennies/hr, and I assume hackers would fit right in there... JPK On Sun, Apr 1, 2012 at 11:45 PM, Artem Evdokimov <artem.evdoki...@gmail.com> wrote: I can't resist asking: If we assume that the data fabrication techniques and the techniques for discovery of such activities should have the same sort of arms race as the development of viruses and anti-malvare software (but of course on a much more modest scale since structural biology is a relatively niche discipline) - can we then speculate further that eventually the most sophisticated fabrication techniques would be equivalent to de novo structure prediction :) It's really too bad that there's no real money in this (again, relatively speaking - not as much money as there is in software development), because if there was then the structural biology equivalent of 'virus hackers' would in reality approximate the same development trajectory as the most successful (and legitimate) protein modelers. Given the ingenuity of hackers and like-minded people in general, I sometimes wonder if this isn't a better way to develop structure prediction tools... Artem On Sun, Apr 1, 2012 at 10:09 AM, Paul Emsley <paul.ems...@bioch.ox.ac.uk> wrote: > On 31/03/12 23:08, Kevin Jin wrote: > > > I really wish PDB could have some people to review those important > structures, like paper reviewer. > > > So do the wwPDB, I would imagine. > > But they can't just magic funding and positions into existence... > > If the coordinate is downloaded for modeling and docking, people may not > check the density and model by themself. However this is not the worst case, > since the original data was fabricated. > > > 1. All of data was correct and real, > > > Hmmm... > > It will be very difficult for people to check the density and coordinated > if he/she is not a well-trained crystallographer. > > > I hope and believe that this is not the case. Even basically-trained > crystallographers should be able to calculate and interpret difference maps > of the kind described by Bernhard. And with the EDS and PDB_REDO server, > one does not even need to know how to make generate a difference map... > > Paul. > > -- ******************************************* Jacob Pearson Keller Northwestern University Medical Scientist Training Program email: j-kell...@northwestern.edu ******************************************* -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Confidentiality Notice: This message is private and may contain confidential and proprietary information. If you have received this message in error, please notify us and remove it from your system and note that you must not copy, distribute or take any action in reliance on it. Any unauthorized use or disclosure of the contents of this message is not permitted and may be unlawful.
