{"id":85,"date":"2018-11-09T00:22:49","date_gmt":"2018-11-09T00:22:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/?p=85"},"modified":"2018-11-09T00:22:49","modified_gmt":"2018-11-09T00:22:49","slug":"the-stem-cell-saga-in-cumulative-research-error-and-fraud-will-always-out-2005-12-25","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/2018\/11\/09\/the-stem-cell-saga-in-cumulative-research-error-and-fraud-will-always-out-2005-12-25\/","title":{"rendered":"The Stem-Cell Saga: In Cumulative Research, Error and Fraud Will Always Out   2005-12-25"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yes, the <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/world\/asia-pacific\/4555478.stm\">Hwang truth<\/a> came out, fast, on the web. But it would have come out anyway, because one cannot build on a fake foundation. It was science&#8217;s public, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ecs.soton.ac.uk\/~harnad\/Hypermail\/Amsci\/2323.html\">self-corrective<\/a> nature that triumphed; the web merely accelerated it (as with cold fusion). My guess is that Hwang was not really a conscious, deliberate fraudster, but merely (merely!) incompetent and self-deluded.  It is the rapid pace of celebrity and also the (peculiar to biomedicine) precipitate push toward clinical applications (partly for justifiable, partly unjustifiable reasons) that puts biomedical research at greater risk of short-term damage from error or fraud before, inevitably, it is discovered. The only undetected fraud is the harmless kind &#8212; the noncumulative, hit-and-run research that no one cares about because it goes nowhere (and serves only to earn a PhD or promotion)&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yes, the Hwang truth came out, fast, on the web. But it would have come out anyway, because one cannot build on a fake foundation. It was science&#8217;s public, self-corrective nature that triumphed; the web merely accelerated it (as with cold fusion). My guess is that Hwang was not really a conscious, deliberate fraudster, but &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/2018\/11\/09\/the-stem-cell-saga-in-cumulative-research-error-and-fraud-will-always-out-2005-12-25\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The Stem-Cell Saga: In Cumulative Research, Error and Fraud Will Always Out   2005-12-25&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3074,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3074"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":86,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions\/86"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}