Casting doubt on a research track is probably easier said than done, no? To use a ridiculous hypothetical example: “Cold fusion” has been the punchline of jokes to 99.9% of scientists ever since the 1989 experiment garnered a ton of publicity without an ounce of replicability, yet Wikipedia suggests that the remaining 0.1% decades later still includes a few serious research teams and a few million dollars of funding. If Pons & Fleischmann were secretly trying to steer the world away from some real results by discrediting the field with embarrassing false results, it seems like a very risky gamble that still hasn’t fully paid off.
The fact that I had to resort to a ridiculous hypothetical example there shows an unavoidable problem with this article, by the way: no history of successful ethical concern about scientific publication can exist, since almost by definition any success won’t make it into history. All we get to hear about is unconcern and failed concern.
If Pons & Fleischmann were secretly trying to steer the world away from some real results by discrediting the field with embarrassing false results, it seems like a very risky gamble that still hasn’t fully paid off.
Of course, no-one has found any dangerous results; so if that’s what they were trying to hide, perhaps by leaving a false trail, then they’ve succeeded admirably, sending future researchers up the wrong path.
In real life, I’m pretty sure that nobody has found any dangerous results because there aren’t any dangerous results to find. This doesn’t mean that creating scandals successfully reduces the amount of scientific interest in a topic, it just means that in this case there wasn’t anything to be interested in.
Casting doubt on a research track is probably easier said than done, no? To use a ridiculous hypothetical example: “Cold fusion” has been the punchline of jokes to 99.9% of scientists ever since the 1989 experiment garnered a ton of publicity without an ounce of replicability, yet Wikipedia suggests that the remaining 0.1% decades later still includes a few serious research teams and a few million dollars of funding. If Pons & Fleischmann were secretly trying to steer the world away from some real results by discrediting the field with embarrassing false results, it seems like a very risky gamble that still hasn’t fully paid off.
The fact that I had to resort to a ridiculous hypothetical example there shows an unavoidable problem with this article, by the way: no history of successful ethical concern about scientific publication can exist, since almost by definition any success won’t make it into history. All we get to hear about is unconcern and failed concern.
Of course, no-one has found any dangerous results; so if that’s what they were trying to hide, perhaps by leaving a false trail, then they’ve succeeded admirably, sending future researchers up the wrong path.
In real life, I’m pretty sure that nobody has found any dangerous results because there aren’t any dangerous results to find. This doesn’t mean that creating scandals successfully reduces the amount of scientific interest in a topic, it just means that in this case there wasn’t anything to be interested in.