Friday
May272011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Minority event
May 27, 2011 Journals There is an interesting live chat at Sciencemag with Laura Manuelidis, a scientist who opposes the prion theory of BSE. Her story has a familiar ring:
Unfortunately, self-interest makes a few "expert" powerful scientists less than open to those who disagree with them. In TSEs, they populate most of the grant committees and are also the same people who are on the the editorial boards of most journals. Anonymous "peer" review allows people with a clear conflict of interest to make false statements. Without transparency they can never be held accountable. Their success is a poor ethical model for young scientists. And it also limits financial support for more creative approaches to a problem
Reader Comments (12)
It isn't surprising that lack of transparency is a widespread problem, not a local issue specific to the AGW debate. At some point, the scientific community will have to admit that scientific bureaucracy is little better than any other type of bureaucracy and actually do something about it.
I lost my enchantment with science in the early 1980's, for this very reason.
Sadly of course none of this is new.
Iain McCalman's fine book on Darwin's Armada describes how Darwin, Huxley, Hooker, Wallace et al formed The "X Club".
In the interest of promoting evolution versus creationism (which most of would agree was a fine objective) they met socially and conspired with one another. As Iain says (p356) "They nominated each other for jobs, published each other's work, refereed for each other, sponsored each other's lecture tours and awarded each other grants.
As a result five were awarded Royal Society medals, three the Copley medal and one the Rumford medal. Three were presidents of the Royal Society, six were presidents of the British Association for tha Advancement of Science. They rotated these influential jobs with one another, dominated the scientific journals and founded "Nature".
Our modern day scientific elite are merely continuing in this rich tradition. The only trouble is that in the modern manifestation, their joint moral crusade is in favour of what some of us would think was more akin to a modern form of creationism.
An interest in TSEs have been one of my hobbies since I studied them at university and realised that the concensus science made no sense and failed on empirical evidential tests.
I have drawn the parallels between CACC and TSE research a number of times, bolstered by my occasional contact with Laura.
The last article I wrote on the subject—which is more of an update of an earlier one—is here.
DK
Devil's Kitchen:
Thanks for the links in your post. I have always followed you since finding your HARRY_READ_ME story. That story has yet to be fully explored.
It is a particularly pertinent parallel.
This quote rings several bells:
"Some very smart and famous scientists (deserving of credit in their field) have developed a false voice of authority in other fields without even having read the relevant literature in any depth."
same 'ol story. but isnnt the problem govt money. where does private money cut out 'creative approaches'?
As Dave W has noted, the real indictment, of all of science really, is that this is not new; I feel like one encountering a book from his childhood on the new bestsellers shelf, as if no one ever thought of it before. I am continually reminded of the words above the entrance to the CU Boulder (Colorado) library, "WHO KNOWS ONLY HIS OWN GENERATION REMAINS ALWAYS A CHILD". But then, my professional scientific view is unique. The various debates, over my lifetime of 63 years, are so far behind the curve on what is happening, what has been happening in science since Darwin's time, that one has to wonder how the current generation can ever catch up -- almost everyone won't listen, so far, to things they don't already believe, so it is almost all about dogmatic argument, rather than learning the truth. There is no law but public opinion, given the endemic corruption in peer review, and the public is not competent to judge, being divided by passionate beliefs itself, as well as by lack of education. That is why I have tried to stick solely to the critical, definitive facts, which everyone yet thinks they can safely ignore. And people need to start seeing that the current problems are the result of fundamental mistakes in thinking, and the accumulated accretion of errors, since the time of Darwin particularly, and of mankind's continual acceptance of dogmas and magical thinking, throughout history (and yes, Darwinian evolution is magical thinking, the problem is that much bigger than you think).
By the late 60s it was understood there were diseases, scrapie and Aleutian disease of mink, which had an odd causative agent; very small, appeared to contain little or no nucleic acid and withstood heat and chemicals. They appeared to have very long incubation periods and no remission. Generally they had no more than a paragraph in the textbooks. Scrapie had been known for centuries.
When BSE came on the scene it was intensely political as the social consequences were enormous. The government was very keen to have "scientists" pronounce on it. As a colleague of mine pointed out, "scientists" really can't come out with much more than guesswork, because to do anything else they'd need facts, and this thing obviously has a long incubation period making it hard to study.
It did strike me that the scientific establishment was being arm-twisted to make statements the government found acceptable.
The measures to deal with it seemed strangely penny pinching, as I understood, farmers were left with tons of condemned feed to dispose of somehow. There were rules about maximum age for slaughter and nervous tissue, which seemed rather like papering over the problem.
The prion hypothesis and the route from scrapie didn't seem outrageous, but there did seem undue haste to claim that was the solution and award a Nobel prize for the discovery of prions.
I'm seeing a lot more strong talk these days from many different sources. This time last year there was no such outspokenness.
A new dawn has awakened. The edifice is definitely crumbling now.
Harry Dale Huffman
Thank you for those comments, young Harry (I can give you ten years). Perceptive and depressing... but perhaps if someone know then all is not lost. Hold the bridge!
From the introductory blurb:
"Some scientific views, .. like the idea that climate change isn't happening, become marginalized as data build up to counter them."
I guess Jennifer Couzin-Frankel must be thinking about the dramatic rise in surface temperatures over the last dozen years. Or the submersion of the Maldives. Or the loss of the Arctic. Or Polar Bear extinction. Or, most likely, 'thinking' just isn't entailed by her job description.