In last week's BMJ they drew attention to an outbreak of scientific fraud. There was mention of the pharmaceutical company GSK, paying $3 billion to settle a dispute with the US government over the incorrect marketing of Rosiglitazone (Avandia) and bupropion (Wellbutrin), a London GP was struck off the register by the GMC for using inappropriate tests and treatment for chronic fatigues syndrome, The Fraud Agency investigated conflicts of interest at the European Medicines Agency over the use of benfluorex (Mediator) as an appetite suppressant, the Dutch Health Minister was quizzed about excessive contacts with the tobacco industry, US organizations challenged the financial interests behind the recommendation of the use of HPV vaccine for boys and a Dutch psychologist was shown to have falsified data in dozens of studies in one of the biggest cases of scientific fraud on record. Diederik Stapel from Tilburg was responsible for 150 papers.
Then there was ongoing coverage of the MMR fraud committed by Andrew Wakefield, indicating that several of his colleagues were also culpable and that there seems to have been an ongoing cover-up at University College, London.
There is a good article by Elizabeth Wager of COPE detailing the ways of coping with scientific misconduct.
Showing posts with label fraud. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fraud. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Spinach - I was right for the wrong reason
Twenty-nine years ago I wrote an article in the British Medical Journal about scientific fraud, fakes and medical mistakes in which I revealed that spinach is not a good source of iron. I further revealed that a German Chemist made a mistake by misplacing the decimal point. Here's what I wrote:
In the year that Popeye became once again a major movie star it
is salutary to recall that his claims for spinach are spurious.
Popeye's superhuman strength for deeds of derring-do comes
from consuming a can of the stuff. The discovery that spinach
was as valuable a source of iron as red meat was made in the
1890s, and it proved a useful propaganda weapon for the meatless
days of the second world war. A statue of Popeye in Crystal
City, Texas, commemorates the fact that single-handedly he
raised the consumption of spinach by 33%. America was "strong
to finish 'cos they ate their spinach" and duly defeated the Hun.
Unfortunately, the propaganda was fraudulent; German
chemists reinvestigating the iron content of spinach had shown
in the 1930s that the original workers had put the decimal point
in the wrong place and made a tenfold overestimate of its value.
Spinach is no better for you than cabbage, Brussels sprouts, or
broccoli. For a source of iron Popeye would have been better off
chewing the cans.
I was never quite sure where I got that information. At the time I was making a reputation as an author of humorous articles for the popular magazine World Medicine. I was also interested in scientific fraud and was asked to write an article on it for the Christmas edition of the BMJ by the then editor, Stephen Lock. It was to be a light hearted article without the usual scrupulous references that I would normally supply for a journal like the BMJ. Given that I was debunking a number of frauds that included examples of plagiarism, I was uncomfortable with this suggestion and we agreed that I should provide a bibliography at the end. This is what I wrote:
Having spent so much of my time talking about people whose work
was unoriginal, I should mention that little of my article is based on
original work but has been derived from the publications of others.
Among these I should particularly like to mention:
Arther Koestler: Case of the Midwife Toad. London, Hutchinson.
Malcolm Bowden: Ape Men-Fact or Fallacy. Bromley, Sovereign
Publications.
William J Broad: Science 208:1438-40,209:249,210:38-41, 171-3.
Colin Tudge: World Medicine 1974 Jul 17:34.
Leon Kamin: New Society 1976 Dec 2:460-1.
Marjorie Sun: Science 1981 ;212:1366-7.
D D Dorfman: Science 1978;201:1177-88.
Ian St James Roberts: New Scientist 1976 Nov 25:466-7.
C Joyce: New Scientist 1981 Apr 9:68-9.
D Dickson: Nature 1981 ;289:227.
Nature 1980;286:433, 831-2.
Lancet 1976;ii: 1066-7.
British Medical Journal 1980 ;281 :41-2.
I have rechecked these references but none of them refer to Popeye. When people have asked me about it (including the late, great, Martin Gardiner) I have always replied that I thought I remembered reading it in Reader's Digest but I have never been able to find the article.
Now some fascinating research by Mike Sutton has found out the whole truth behind the decimal point and the iron in spinach myth and I am pleased to be able to say that I was right about spinach being useless as a source of iron, but utterly wrong about why the myth has taken hold.
Dr Mike Sutton is the originator of the Market Reduction Approach to theft. He is the General Editor of the Internet Journal of Criminology and is Reader in Criminology at Nottingham Trent University in England. He is an alumnus (BA hons. Law and PhD) of the University of Central Lancashire.
In an earlier article Dr Sutton accused me of inventing the story. I knew that to be untrue, but I couldn't remember where I had read it. I still don't remember, but I now know where the information came from although I'm sure it wasn't in the Spectator that I read it in as Dr Sutton implies. Some other author must have picked it up from the Spectator and written it down elsewhere for me to pick up.
It appears that the original published source of this story was nutritionist, Arnold E. Bender. He first mentioned it in his inaugural professorial lecture in 1972 and later in an article in the Spectator where he claimed, according to Sutton, that "a German textbook on nutrition (Noorden and Salomon 1920; 476) replicated an earlier decimal point data mistake made by generations of textbooks that unquestioningly replicated erroneous data first published in 1870 by the German scientist E. von Wolff":
“For a hundred years or more spinach has been (and clearly still is) renowned for its high iron content compared with that of other vegetables, but to the joy of those who dislike the stuff this is quite untrue. In 1870 Dr E. von Wolff published the analyses of a number of foods, including spinach which was shown to be exceptionally rich in iron. The figures were repeated in succeeding generations of textbooks – after all one does not always verify the findings of others – including the ‘Handbook of Food Sciences’ (Hundbuch der Ernahrungslehre) by von Noorden and Saloman (sic) [1] 1920.
In 1937 Professor Schupan eventually repeated the analyses of spinach and found that it contained no more iron than did any other leafy vegetable, only one-tenth of the amount previously reported. The fame of spinach appears to have been based on a misplaced decimal point.”
My article in the BMJ has been the spur to countless other articles perpetuating the decimal point myth. So what is the truth? You can read it for yourself if you click the link, but for those who don't have the time, it does seem that Emil von Wolff did over estimate the amount of iron in spinach. In 1871 he reported that fresh spinach contained 3350mg of iron per 100g. This is from Professor Bender's article in the Spectator:
One common belief, that spinach is good for you, appears to be due to experimental error since the belief predates the Hollywood nutrition films based on the muscular development of the film star Popeye. I am indebted to Professor den Hartog of Holland for tracing the possible origin of this belief. It appears to date soon after 1870 when Dr E. von Wolff published food analysis showing spinach to be exceptionally rich in iron, a figure that was repeated in many generations of textbooks; it was in the Handbook of Food Sciences (Handbuch der Ernahrungslehre) by von Noorden and Saloman in 1920. In 1937 Professor Schupan analysed spinach for its iron content with µ-µ’-dipyridyl and found the figure to be one tenth of that reported by von Wolff – the fame of spinach may well have grown from a misplaced decimal point.”
There seems no published work of Professor den Hartog that makes this claim and Sutton concludes that the information may have been conveyed in informal conversation.
Quoting Sutton: "Noorden and Salomon’s (1920 Handbuch Der Ernährungslehre Erster Band Allgemeine Diätetik. Berlin. Verlag Von Julious Springer.) figure for the amount of iron in dried spinach is 445 mg of iron per 100g. This figure is derived from Haensel, who presented the iron content of spinach in percentage terms as 0.445 per cent. To convert this figure to mg per 100g it is simply multiplied by 1000 - which is 445.
Professor Bender was completely wrong about the source of Noorden and Salomon’s data on the iron content of spinach. Absolutely none of it came from von Wolff. Not one single figure. The figure Bender thinks came from the work of Wolff in the 1870’s in fact came from Haensel (Haensel, von. E. (1909) uber den eisen- und phosphorgehalt unserer Vegetabilien. Biochem. Zeitschr 16. 9."
Sutton believes that "The source of Bender’s decimal error belief derives from the fact that accepted knowledge at the time when Bender was writing quite correctly held that dried spinach contained 44.8 mg of iron per 100g (e.g. Jackson 1938Determination of Iron in Biological Material. Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Analytical Edition. 10 (6), 302-304). Subsequent research has recorded a figure of 44.6 (Rewashdeh et al 2009 Iron Bioavailabilty of Rats Fed Liver, Lentil, Spinach and other Mixtures. Pakistan Journal of Biological Sciences. 12 (4) 367-372.) From this it is easy to see where the decimal error idea in Bender’s spinach story came from. Had Haensel (1909) moved his decimal point to give a figure of 0.0445 per cent iron he would have had an accurate figure for the amount of iron in dried spinach of 44.5 mg per 100g."
It is clear that von Woolf's result cannot be corrected by simply moving the decimal point one place - his result is at least 50 times too great. It is far more likely that the method that he employed was faulty and Sutton has discovered that other measurement made during this period was similarly awry. Certainly there has been confusion between the amount of iron in fresh spinach and dried spinach and the water content of spinach depends on how recently it was picked, nevertheless, even by the turn of the twentieth century errors in earlier measurements were readily apparent without the need to invoke decimal places.
In fact most foodstuffs whether green vegetables or meat have similar amounts of iron; what matters is whether the iron is available for absorption by the human gut. Whereas the iron in meat is readily available this is not true for green vegetables. Whatever the result of measurements of iron, you cannot prevent or cure iron deficiency by eating spinach. Meat, red or white, (but not from shellfish) is what you need.
The moral of this story is that a good story is not necessarily a true story.
In the year that Popeye became once again a major movie star it
is salutary to recall that his claims for spinach are spurious.
Popeye's superhuman strength for deeds of derring-do comes
from consuming a can of the stuff. The discovery that spinach
was as valuable a source of iron as red meat was made in the
1890s, and it proved a useful propaganda weapon for the meatless
days of the second world war. A statue of Popeye in Crystal
City, Texas, commemorates the fact that single-handedly he
raised the consumption of spinach by 33%. America was "strong
to finish 'cos they ate their spinach" and duly defeated the Hun.
Unfortunately, the propaganda was fraudulent; German
chemists reinvestigating the iron content of spinach had shown
in the 1930s that the original workers had put the decimal point
in the wrong place and made a tenfold overestimate of its value.
Spinach is no better for you than cabbage, Brussels sprouts, or
broccoli. For a source of iron Popeye would have been better off
chewing the cans.
I was never quite sure where I got that information. At the time I was making a reputation as an author of humorous articles for the popular magazine World Medicine. I was also interested in scientific fraud and was asked to write an article on it for the Christmas edition of the BMJ by the then editor, Stephen Lock. It was to be a light hearted article without the usual scrupulous references that I would normally supply for a journal like the BMJ. Given that I was debunking a number of frauds that included examples of plagiarism, I was uncomfortable with this suggestion and we agreed that I should provide a bibliography at the end. This is what I wrote:
Having spent so much of my time talking about people whose work
was unoriginal, I should mention that little of my article is based on
original work but has been derived from the publications of others.
Among these I should particularly like to mention:
Arther Koestler: Case of the Midwife Toad. London, Hutchinson.
Malcolm Bowden: Ape Men-Fact or Fallacy. Bromley, Sovereign
Publications.
William J Broad: Science 208:1438-40,209:249,210:38-41, 171-3.
Colin Tudge: World Medicine 1974 Jul 17:34.
Leon Kamin: New Society 1976 Dec 2:460-1.
Marjorie Sun: Science 1981 ;212:1366-7.
D D Dorfman: Science 1978;201:1177-88.
Ian St James Roberts: New Scientist 1976 Nov 25:466-7.
C Joyce: New Scientist 1981 Apr 9:68-9.
D Dickson: Nature 1981 ;289:227.
Nature 1980;286:433, 831-2.
Lancet 1976;ii: 1066-7.
British Medical Journal 1980 ;281 :41-2.
I have rechecked these references but none of them refer to Popeye. When people have asked me about it (including the late, great, Martin Gardiner) I have always replied that I thought I remembered reading it in Reader's Digest but I have never been able to find the article.
Now some fascinating research by Mike Sutton has found out the whole truth behind the decimal point and the iron in spinach myth and I am pleased to be able to say that I was right about spinach being useless as a source of iron, but utterly wrong about why the myth has taken hold.
Dr Mike Sutton is the originator of the Market Reduction Approach to theft. He is the General Editor of the Internet Journal of Criminology and is Reader in Criminology at Nottingham Trent University in England. He is an alumnus (BA hons. Law and PhD) of the University of Central Lancashire.
In an earlier article Dr Sutton accused me of inventing the story. I knew that to be untrue, but I couldn't remember where I had read it. I still don't remember, but I now know where the information came from although I'm sure it wasn't in the Spectator that I read it in as Dr Sutton implies. Some other author must have picked it up from the Spectator and written it down elsewhere for me to pick up.
It appears that the original published source of this story was nutritionist, Arnold E. Bender. He first mentioned it in his inaugural professorial lecture in 1972 and later in an article in the Spectator where he claimed, according to Sutton, that "a German textbook on nutrition (Noorden and Salomon 1920; 476) replicated an earlier decimal point data mistake made by generations of textbooks that unquestioningly replicated erroneous data first published in 1870 by the German scientist E. von Wolff":
“For a hundred years or more spinach has been (and clearly still is) renowned for its high iron content compared with that of other vegetables, but to the joy of those who dislike the stuff this is quite untrue. In 1870 Dr E. von Wolff published the analyses of a number of foods, including spinach which was shown to be exceptionally rich in iron. The figures were repeated in succeeding generations of textbooks – after all one does not always verify the findings of others – including the ‘Handbook of Food Sciences’ (Hundbuch der Ernahrungslehre) by von Noorden and Saloman (sic) [1] 1920.
In 1937 Professor Schupan eventually repeated the analyses of spinach and found that it contained no more iron than did any other leafy vegetable, only one-tenth of the amount previously reported. The fame of spinach appears to have been based on a misplaced decimal point.”
My article in the BMJ has been the spur to countless other articles perpetuating the decimal point myth. So what is the truth? You can read it for yourself if you click the link, but for those who don't have the time, it does seem that Emil von Wolff did over estimate the amount of iron in spinach. In 1871 he reported that fresh spinach contained 3350mg of iron per 100g. This is from Professor Bender's article in the Spectator:
One common belief, that spinach is good for you, appears to be due to experimental error since the belief predates the Hollywood nutrition films based on the muscular development of the film star Popeye. I am indebted to Professor den Hartog of Holland for tracing the possible origin of this belief. It appears to date soon after 1870 when Dr E. von Wolff published food analysis showing spinach to be exceptionally rich in iron, a figure that was repeated in many generations of textbooks; it was in the Handbook of Food Sciences (Handbuch der Ernahrungslehre) by von Noorden and Saloman in 1920. In 1937 Professor Schupan analysed spinach for its iron content with µ-µ’-dipyridyl and found the figure to be one tenth of that reported by von Wolff – the fame of spinach may well have grown from a misplaced decimal point.”
There seems no published work of Professor den Hartog that makes this claim and Sutton concludes that the information may have been conveyed in informal conversation.
Quoting Sutton: "Noorden and Salomon’s (1920 Handbuch Der Ernährungslehre Erster Band Allgemeine Diätetik. Berlin. Verlag Von Julious Springer.) figure for the amount of iron in dried spinach is 445 mg of iron per 100g. This figure is derived from Haensel, who presented the iron content of spinach in percentage terms as 0.445 per cent. To convert this figure to mg per 100g it is simply multiplied by 1000 - which is 445.
Professor Bender was completely wrong about the source of Noorden and Salomon’s data on the iron content of spinach. Absolutely none of it came from von Wolff. Not one single figure. The figure Bender thinks came from the work of Wolff in the 1870’s in fact came from Haensel (Haensel, von. E. (1909) uber den eisen- und phosphorgehalt unserer Vegetabilien. Biochem. Zeitschr 16. 9."
Sutton believes that "The source of Bender’s decimal error belief derives from the fact that accepted knowledge at the time when Bender was writing quite correctly held that dried spinach contained 44.8 mg of iron per 100g (e.g. Jackson 1938Determination of Iron in Biological Material. Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Analytical Edition. 10 (6), 302-304). Subsequent research has recorded a figure of 44.6 (Rewashdeh et al 2009 Iron Bioavailabilty of Rats Fed Liver, Lentil, Spinach and other Mixtures. Pakistan Journal of Biological Sciences. 12 (4) 367-372.) From this it is easy to see where the decimal error idea in Bender’s spinach story came from. Had Haensel (1909) moved his decimal point to give a figure of 0.0445 per cent iron he would have had an accurate figure for the amount of iron in dried spinach of 44.5 mg per 100g."
It is clear that von Woolf's result cannot be corrected by simply moving the decimal point one place - his result is at least 50 times too great. It is far more likely that the method that he employed was faulty and Sutton has discovered that other measurement made during this period was similarly awry. Certainly there has been confusion between the amount of iron in fresh spinach and dried spinach and the water content of spinach depends on how recently it was picked, nevertheless, even by the turn of the twentieth century errors in earlier measurements were readily apparent without the need to invoke decimal places.
In fact most foodstuffs whether green vegetables or meat have similar amounts of iron; what matters is whether the iron is available for absorption by the human gut. Whereas the iron in meat is readily available this is not true for green vegetables. Whatever the result of measurements of iron, you cannot prevent or cure iron deficiency by eating spinach. Meat, red or white, (but not from shellfish) is what you need.
The moral of this story is that a good story is not necessarily a true story.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
More scientific fraud
In the 1980s I was very interested in scientific fraud which was then rife in the Ivy League institutions in America. I wrote an article, Fake! , which details the many frauds that were then revealed. The article is available for free if you want to download it. At about the same time New Scientist published a cartoon which showed an old tramp playing a violin for pennies on a street corner with a caption which read, "He learned his trade fiddling at Harvard."
Another Harvard fraud has apparently now surfaced. It concerns the psychologist Marc Hauser who is on a year's leave of absence while the dodgy data are investigated. Hauser's research focuses on the evolutionary roots of the human mind. In a letter he wrote to colleagues, he described the inquiry as painful. The letter said that his lab has been under investigation for three years by a Harvard committee, and that evidence of misconduct was found. He alluded to unspecified mistakes and oversights that he had made, and said he will be on leave for the upcoming academic year.
According to the Boston Globe, "Hauser’s work falls at the intersection of psychology, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience, and he has studied everything from the cognitive and evolutionary underpinnings of language to the idea that morality is innate. He began teaching at Harvard in 1992 and several times has been voted one of Harvard’s most popular professors by graduating students, according to his CV. He is writing a book titled 'Evilicious: Explaining Our Evolved Taste for Being Bad.’"
"A paper in the journal Cognition has been withdrawn. The paper tested cotton-top tamarin monkeys’ ability to learn generalized patterns, an ability that human infants had been found to have, and that may be critical for learning language. The paper found that the monkeys were able to learn patterns, suggesting that this was not the critical cognitive building block that explains humans’ ability to learn language. In doing such experiments, researchers videotape the animals to analyze each trial and provide a record of their raw data. The Harvard investigation, said video records and field notes of one of the co-authors were incomplete. The investigation also raised questions about two other papers co-authored by Hauser. The journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B published a correction last month to a 2007 study. Science, another top journal, was notified of the Harvard investigation in late June and told that questions about record-keeping had been raised. Science has requested a copy of Harvard’s report of its investigation and will “move with utmost efficiency in light of the seriousness of issues of this type."
This isn’t the first time Hauser’s work has been challenged.
"In 1995, he was the lead author of a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that looked at whether cotton-top tamarins are able to recognize themselves in a mirror. Self-recognition was something that set humans and other primates, such as chimpanzees and orangutans, apart from other animals, and no one had shown that monkeys had this ability."
"Gordon G. Gallup Jr., a professor of psychology at State University of New York at Albany, questioned the results and requested videotapes that Hauser had made of the experiment. “When I played the videotapes, there was not a thread of compelling evidence — scientific or otherwise — that any of the tamarins had learned to correctly decipher mirrored information about themselves," Gallup said in an interview.""
What strikes me now and what struck me in 1981 was how many of these frauds seem to concern evolution. Starting with Piltdown Man, scientists have fabricated data so as to get out from under a creator God. If we have been created by God then we owe him submission and obedience, something that modern man can't abide.
Another Harvard fraud has apparently now surfaced. It concerns the psychologist Marc Hauser who is on a year's leave of absence while the dodgy data are investigated. Hauser's research focuses on the evolutionary roots of the human mind. In a letter he wrote to colleagues, he described the inquiry as painful. The letter said that his lab has been under investigation for three years by a Harvard committee, and that evidence of misconduct was found. He alluded to unspecified mistakes and oversights that he had made, and said he will be on leave for the upcoming academic year.
According to the Boston Globe, "Hauser’s work falls at the intersection of psychology, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience, and he has studied everything from the cognitive and evolutionary underpinnings of language to the idea that morality is innate. He began teaching at Harvard in 1992 and several times has been voted one of Harvard’s most popular professors by graduating students, according to his CV. He is writing a book titled 'Evilicious: Explaining Our Evolved Taste for Being Bad.’"
"A paper in the journal Cognition has been withdrawn. The paper tested cotton-top tamarin monkeys’ ability to learn generalized patterns, an ability that human infants had been found to have, and that may be critical for learning language. The paper found that the monkeys were able to learn patterns, suggesting that this was not the critical cognitive building block that explains humans’ ability to learn language. In doing such experiments, researchers videotape the animals to analyze each trial and provide a record of their raw data. The Harvard investigation, said video records and field notes of one of the co-authors were incomplete. The investigation also raised questions about two other papers co-authored by Hauser. The journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B published a correction last month to a 2007 study. Science, another top journal, was notified of the Harvard investigation in late June and told that questions about record-keeping had been raised. Science has requested a copy of Harvard’s report of its investigation and will “move with utmost efficiency in light of the seriousness of issues of this type."
This isn’t the first time Hauser’s work has been challenged.
"In 1995, he was the lead author of a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that looked at whether cotton-top tamarins are able to recognize themselves in a mirror. Self-recognition was something that set humans and other primates, such as chimpanzees and orangutans, apart from other animals, and no one had shown that monkeys had this ability."
"Gordon G. Gallup Jr., a professor of psychology at State University of New York at Albany, questioned the results and requested videotapes that Hauser had made of the experiment. “When I played the videotapes, there was not a thread of compelling evidence — scientific or otherwise — that any of the tamarins had learned to correctly decipher mirrored information about themselves," Gallup said in an interview.""
What strikes me now and what struck me in 1981 was how many of these frauds seem to concern evolution. Starting with Piltdown Man, scientists have fabricated data so as to get out from under a creator God. If we have been created by God then we owe him submission and obedience, something that modern man can't abide.
Saturday, February 06, 2010
Scientific Fraud
It is nearly thirty years ago that I wrote a piece for the Christmas edition of the British Medical Journal, entitled Fake! In it I detailed some well known fakes, frauds and mistakes made by scientists and doctors. Among them were the misconception that spinach was a good source of iron (a German chemist put the decimal point in the wrong place), the Piltdown fraud (and there are many others concerning ape-men) and Gregor Mendel's statistics (they were too perfect - he must have fiddled them).
At that time there had been a rash of scientific frauds, particularly from the North Eastern states of the USA, that had hit the headlines. The whole paper is available on line so I won't list them. The most remarkable concerned a Jordanian (or perhaps Iraqi) research fellow, called Elias A K Alsabti, who had plagiarized 63 papers. He made use of the fact that many scientific articles are hardly ever read. (I have to confess that of more than 700 articles that I have written, more than 100 have never been cited - though many of them like book reviews and polemical pieces were not written to be cited.) Alsabti used to raid his boss's filing cabinet at night and photocopy articles that had been sent for review. A new title and new authors, and it was apparently a new article, ready to be sent to an obscure journal. The amazing thing was that he went on for so long without being caught.
But the fraud that I want to draw attention to was that committed by Sir Cyril Burt. Burt was the doyen of educational psychologists. He was editor of a major psychology journal and an advisor to the British government. He believed that intelligence was inherited and set about to prove it. He reported on pairs of identical twins separated at birth by being adopted by families of different social class. He tested their IQs and demonstrated that they were virtually identical despite one being brought up by, say, a factory worker and the other by, say, an academic.
His conclusion encouraged the government to design an examination at the age of 11 which would segregate children into those who would benefit from an academic education and those who would not. Since intelligence was genetically determined there would be no need for multiple tests at different ages. In America his work was cited by those who believed that intelligence was racially determined.
Years later, a psychologist called Leo Kamin, a man of the Left who had different prejudices, investigated Burt's work. What he found was astonishing. At different stages Burt had reported on 21, more than 30, and 53 pairs of identical twins raised apart, but in each report the correlation factor was precisely 0.771, while the correlation for the twins raised together, no matter how many, was always 0.944. This is clearly an impossibility. A little later, in 1976, Oliver Gillie, a British journalist, sought out Burt's co-workers, Jane Conway and Margaret Howard. They could not be found. They were just as much inventions of Burt's fertile mind as his separated twins.
Why do I drag up these old cases? Because we may be witnessing a fraud of even greater proportions. The Climategate e-mails have shaken people's confidence in anthropogenic global warming. In the UK more people disbelieve it than believe it. I am not a climate scientist and I would not be any good at disentangling the data that has been presented, but have some experience of scientific fraud.
The e-mails seem to be saying that there was a conspiracy to deny doubters access to the raw data on climate measurements. Freedom of information requests can be troublesome for researchers. They may involve a good deal of time which would be better spent on getting on with the job. But the e-mails seem to be saying that data were destroyed rather than allowing them to be seen by sceptics. It wasn't only the University of East Anglia involved; other climate change researchers seem to have been collaborating in what must be called a cover-up. There seems to have been a conspiracy to 'peer-review' particularly harshly any papers suggesting an alternative explanation for the data so as to prevent their publication.
I find it hard to come to any other conclusion about what was going on.
On these two points alone I am extremely worried for the reputation of this field of science. The purpose of publication is to invite criticism. How ever much evidence you accumulate to support your hypothesis, it cannot be proved to be true. It may be contingently true; contingent on someone not coming up with contrary evidence. But if you refuse to look for that contrary evidence then your hypothesis is very weak indeed.
Consider the hypothesis that ALL SWANS ARE WHITE. You might travel up an down the land from Cornwall to the Shetland islands and demonstrate that every swan you see is white, but unless you travel to Australia, you really haven't tested your hypothesis. The climate conspiracy is worse. It is like they have seen early stamps form South Australia that were adorned with a black swan, but they refuse to go and look there, declaring that the picture was a figment of the artist's imagination.
Worse still is the hiding of data. Several frauds have involved fictitious or manipulated data. Publication of raw data in electronic form has become the norm in many scientific fields, and it should always be available to journals if a question is raised about the article. Malcolm Pearce, a British obstetrician reported that he had rescued an ectopic pregnancy by reimplanting the fetus in the womb. He was exposed as a fraud because he could not produce the patient's record. Imagine if he had said, "The records are confidential. I am not going to reveal them to those silly individuals who don't believe me."
Science involves two things: 1] imagining an explanation for an observation; 2] designing an experiment to prove the explanation wrong. I am worried that climate scientists are very good at 1] but instead of doing 2] they have become polemicists whose role is to convince others that their view is right. The Himalayan glaciers were an instance of polemicism rather than science.
At that time there had been a rash of scientific frauds, particularly from the North Eastern states of the USA, that had hit the headlines. The whole paper is available on line so I won't list them. The most remarkable concerned a Jordanian (or perhaps Iraqi) research fellow, called Elias A K Alsabti, who had plagiarized 63 papers. He made use of the fact that many scientific articles are hardly ever read. (I have to confess that of more than 700 articles that I have written, more than 100 have never been cited - though many of them like book reviews and polemical pieces were not written to be cited.) Alsabti used to raid his boss's filing cabinet at night and photocopy articles that had been sent for review. A new title and new authors, and it was apparently a new article, ready to be sent to an obscure journal. The amazing thing was that he went on for so long without being caught.
But the fraud that I want to draw attention to was that committed by Sir Cyril Burt. Burt was the doyen of educational psychologists. He was editor of a major psychology journal and an advisor to the British government. He believed that intelligence was inherited and set about to prove it. He reported on pairs of identical twins separated at birth by being adopted by families of different social class. He tested their IQs and demonstrated that they were virtually identical despite one being brought up by, say, a factory worker and the other by, say, an academic.
His conclusion encouraged the government to design an examination at the age of 11 which would segregate children into those who would benefit from an academic education and those who would not. Since intelligence was genetically determined there would be no need for multiple tests at different ages. In America his work was cited by those who believed that intelligence was racially determined.
Years later, a psychologist called Leo Kamin, a man of the Left who had different prejudices, investigated Burt's work. What he found was astonishing. At different stages Burt had reported on 21, more than 30, and 53 pairs of identical twins raised apart, but in each report the correlation factor was precisely 0.771, while the correlation for the twins raised together, no matter how many, was always 0.944. This is clearly an impossibility. A little later, in 1976, Oliver Gillie, a British journalist, sought out Burt's co-workers, Jane Conway and Margaret Howard. They could not be found. They were just as much inventions of Burt's fertile mind as his separated twins.
Why do I drag up these old cases? Because we may be witnessing a fraud of even greater proportions. The Climategate e-mails have shaken people's confidence in anthropogenic global warming. In the UK more people disbelieve it than believe it. I am not a climate scientist and I would not be any good at disentangling the data that has been presented, but have some experience of scientific fraud.
The e-mails seem to be saying that there was a conspiracy to deny doubters access to the raw data on climate measurements. Freedom of information requests can be troublesome for researchers. They may involve a good deal of time which would be better spent on getting on with the job. But the e-mails seem to be saying that data were destroyed rather than allowing them to be seen by sceptics. It wasn't only the University of East Anglia involved; other climate change researchers seem to have been collaborating in what must be called a cover-up. There seems to have been a conspiracy to 'peer-review' particularly harshly any papers suggesting an alternative explanation for the data so as to prevent their publication.
I find it hard to come to any other conclusion about what was going on.
On these two points alone I am extremely worried for the reputation of this field of science. The purpose of publication is to invite criticism. How ever much evidence you accumulate to support your hypothesis, it cannot be proved to be true. It may be contingently true; contingent on someone not coming up with contrary evidence. But if you refuse to look for that contrary evidence then your hypothesis is very weak indeed.
Consider the hypothesis that ALL SWANS ARE WHITE. You might travel up an down the land from Cornwall to the Shetland islands and demonstrate that every swan you see is white, but unless you travel to Australia, you really haven't tested your hypothesis. The climate conspiracy is worse. It is like they have seen early stamps form South Australia that were adorned with a black swan, but they refuse to go and look there, declaring that the picture was a figment of the artist's imagination.
Worse still is the hiding of data. Several frauds have involved fictitious or manipulated data. Publication of raw data in electronic form has become the norm in many scientific fields, and it should always be available to journals if a question is raised about the article. Malcolm Pearce, a British obstetrician reported that he had rescued an ectopic pregnancy by reimplanting the fetus in the womb. He was exposed as a fraud because he could not produce the patient's record. Imagine if he had said, "The records are confidential. I am not going to reveal them to those silly individuals who don't believe me."
Science involves two things: 1] imagining an explanation for an observation; 2] designing an experiment to prove the explanation wrong. I am worried that climate scientists are very good at 1] but instead of doing 2] they have become polemicists whose role is to convince others that their view is right. The Himalayan glaciers were an instance of polemicism rather than science.
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