Can we trust science?
Mildred Cho says we can, but it’s important to keep asking questions.
Mildred Cho is Associate Director at the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics and Associate Professor of Pediatrics (Genetics). She is a member of national advisory boards for the National Human Genome Research Institute and for the American Association for the Advancement of Science Public Policy Directorate. Dr. Cho’s major areas of interest are the ethical and social impacts of genetic research, genetic testing and gene therapy, and how conflicts of interest affect the conduct of academic biomedical research. Earth & Sky’s Jorge Salazar spoke to Cho in January, 2006, shortly after a leading science journal “announced”: the retraction of two fraudulent papers based on research led by South Korean stem cell scientist Woo Suk Hwang.
Salazar: Can the public trust science?
Cho: I think the public can trust science, and fraud in science that involves fabrication of data is very rare.
But I do think that it’s important for the public to realize that the publication of a single paper is not necessarily the definitive statement and the end of that line of questioning. So, the fact that people find results that might contradict an earlier finding doesn’t mean that the first finding was fraudulent, or that the researchers even made a mistake. It’s just part of the nature of science that people should really be aware of.
The nature of science is moving forward in small steps, and sometimes those steps lead down blind alleys. The nature of science, and the nature of publication of science is that it should be replicated, ideally more than once, in order to gain confidence in those results.
So, I think that when people ask questions about the peer–review process, it’s good to ask those questions about whether everything is being done to minimize the chance of fraud and fabrication. The purpose of publication is an invitation to other scientists to look at this result and try to replicate it.
Salazar: How do inaccuracies and falsifications slip through the peer–review process?
Cho: It’s very easy for a researcher to fabricate data if a scientist really wants to do that, not unlike the findings of newspaper articles being fabricated.
If someone is really trying very hard and is very clever they can create results that can fool any reviewer. The whole scientific process really depends on trust, and the ultimate test of a publication is not the review process but other scientists replicating that after the fact. So, the peer–review process is not designed to weed out outright fraud. It’s designed to evaluate the plausibility and the rigor of the methods and the conclusions based on those methods.
Salazar: So how would you characterize the extant of scientific fraud? Is it rare like you mentioned earlier, or could the widely publicized cases recently be just the tip of the iceberg?
Cho: The amount of research that gets done that is replicated later will determine how much we can be assured of the findings afterwards. That is, if a piece of research is really important, other researchers will try to replicate it and build on it and quickly be able to determine whether they are able to reproduce those results themselves. If there’s research that’s not very important, it could be that that research might be fraudulent because nobody else is trying to replicate it and it might well be fraudulent.
Salazar: Why does scientific fraud happen?
Cho: Perhaps the stakes are getting higher. Scientists, I think, want to prover their pet theories, and sometimes there are monetary stakes, large amounts of research funding, personal fame, and media attention.
So, there are many reasons for scientists to want their results to come out in a certain way. But those that are doing important research should realize, and I think that for the most part they do realize, anything that comes out in publications will be immediately scrutinized by their colleagues, and those colleagues will try to replicate those results. And if they can’t, suspicions will fall on the person who publishes that original research. So, it would be foolish to try to fabricate or falsify results that anyone else is going to be interested in later.
Salazar: What are the repercussions of the Hwang scandal? Will it hurt stem cell research in general?
Cho: Some of the unfortunate consequences of the stem cell scandal are that the public has less faith and confidence in the scientific community as a whole, and maybe specifically the stem cell community. On the positive side, I think that some researchers might be more encouraged to enter the field of stem cell research knowing that not all of the major questions have been solved, by any means, and pick up where the Korean researchers have left off and try to push that forward.
Salazar: How would you define a scientific truth? Is it an absolute truth or just a way of looking at the world?
Cho: There is no such thing as absolute scientific truth. You only have to read the newspapers to see studies one day that say, for example, coffee’s bad for your heart. And then, a couple of weeks later you might find another study that say’s no, it’s not, it’s good for you. And that’s not because science is wrong, or that the methods are misleading. It’s a process of inquiry that takes a long time. It’s a process that first starts with observations and generates hypotheses and then tries to develop ways of testing those hypotheses. The methods, and the techniques, and the tools don’t always serve us 100% towards trying to solve those questions immediately. Eventually, we move forward, but not always as quickly, and as cleanly, and as certainly as we would like.
Salazar: Thank you, Dr. Cho.
