Dear Colleagues, A different type of, post publication, fraud is the case of the discovery of streptomycin. See :- http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(12)61202-1/fulltext I am just returned from the ICSTI Conference on Science, Law and Ethics in Washington DC representing IUCr where I learnt of this very disturbing case. I explained to the book's author and speaker Peter Pringle that, on behalf of Universities today, procedures are now in place, at least in the University of Manchester, for graduate students and supervisors to both sign within 'eprog' that they have discussed matters of authorship etiquette and rules as well as IP sharing formalities. Have a good weekend, John
Prof John R Helliwell DSc On 19 Oct 2012, at 13:08, "Carter, Charlie" <car...@med.unc.edu> wrote: > > > Begin forwarded message: > >> Date: October 19, 2012 4:40:35 AM EDT >> To: Randy Read <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! >> >
