I’ve been letting the story of the South Korean stem cell research, conducted (now known to be frauduently), simmer in my mind since early December. Like many other scientists, likely young ones like myself, I at first recoiled in shock and horror at the revelations that were slowly peeling away from the original, alleged scientific discovery. First, there were alleged ethics violations in using embryos from members of the research team. Then there was the withdrawl from the published paper by the American collaborator in the group. Then there were the allegations of complete falsification of data, the withdrawl of the paper, and now the pronouncement by a panel of experts attesting to the falsification of results.
Many of the talking heads in the media, most of whom have no formal training in science (but they do try really hard), seem to be tempted to frame this as a “failure of science”. In fact, by saying that they are not only exhibiting a *complete* misunderstanding of science, but also missing the larger point: we’ll never know if this was a failure of science.
This was definitely a failure of ethics. Not only were ethics violated in the obtaining of embryos from team members (where coercion could easily have been used), but there was the complete falsification of data and the submission of results to a journal under false pretenses. But, I would argue that this so far wasnot a failure of science at all.
First, let me explain again what science is. Science is a process by which a hypothesis is made (either based on an existing law or theory, or as a means to explain a pre-existing observation), an experiment is devised to test the hypothesis, the data are collected and analyzed, and an interpretation based on the facts is made which either verifies or rejects the hypothesis. A successful test allows the original proposal to be tested again, perhaps by other scientists. When the talking heads on TV and radio call this a failure of science, they have already betrayed the fact that they do no understand this definition. Science is a process, not a result. A bad result, like this stem cell cloning result, will be fed back into the process (e.g. another scientist will try to use the technique to duplicate, or apply, the published result) and through experimentation and observation be found to be absolutely false. Papers suggesting the error of the original result will be submitted, more scientists will try to reproduce the original result, and after much trial and error the scientific process will ultimately demonstrate that the original result was false. That’s science, and that’s how it would have worked to correct the false result.
This is what I mean when I say that we’ll never know if this was a failure of science. A true failure of science would have occurred if nobody tried to reproduce or use the results, and thus nobody ever discovered the error. However, since the whole lie unraveled before anybody even had a chance to retool their lab to confirm the results, science was never given a chance to act.
Talking heads who argue that this was failure of science because the peer review process failed are as narrow-minded as those who say that evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics. Evolution only violates this law, by decreasing entropy over time, if the Earth is a closed and isolated thermal system. Of course, the Earth **is not isolated** – it is warmed by the sun, bombarded by comet and asteroid impacts, and energy from internal geonuclear reactions are constantly injecting energy into the planet. In the same way, peer review is like the Earth – it is not sufficient to consider science’s success or failure as predicated on that process, but rather necessary to see the **whole** process: experimentation, peer-review, publication, and more experimentation absorbing the published results. That long and cyclic chain must operate more than once before the scientific process can be judged as successful or not. It’s a long, tedious, and necessary process.
So I see this as being far from a travesty of science. Certainly, this researcher and most of his colleagues are totally discredited, and it may be decades before anybody else takes them seriously. Certainly, there were **severe** ethics violations that must be addressed, and fed back into the community in a “lessons learned” process. However, to call this a failure of science is short-sighted, and in and of itself demonstrative of a public with a wide misperception of the scientific method. To fix that much more fundamental problem, we as scientists must step up to the challenge of being friends and educators of the community, the press, and the government.
