This week is kind of slow at work and school and so I find myself perusing the news much more often between tasks. I came across this article about scientific integrity last night between Organic Chem lecture and lab.
The long and short of it is that this committee was formed to review stem cell research done by Haruko Obokata on stem cell research where stress was applied to a cell that had already specialized for a particular function and the stress triggered it to revert to an unspecialized form called a stem cell. The ability to force cells to revert to a stem cell form would take medicine to the next level and the implications are endless. The reason why I wanted to bring this to your attention is to show you how the scientific method and process of publishing research actually works. I feel this is important for the public to understand so they realize that true science is completely without bias or subjectivity.
First let me break down how papers are publish:
1.) You have a question based on an observation you've made
2.) You form a hypothesis that you think will explain what you have witnessed and you go about testing it. (Note: Hypotheses need to be testable and falisifiable. The scientific process is more about the process of elimination than setting out to "prove" something is true. The mindset is that nothing can be proved absolutely true but by limiting variables down to a single one then you can prove something false.)
3.) An experiment is devised and conducted with thorough documentation. This part is the most important part of any research. There are certain rules about how field note books should be kept and errors in this note keeping will assume bias when review time comes. Below are some examples of how notes should be kept - note uniformity, observations (even pictures are included), and endless details on temperatures/pressures etc. You even need to number each page and put your name and date and you only write on one side of the page.
[Source: instruct.uwo.ca]
[Source: Australian National Botanic Gardens]
[Source: flshorebirdalliance.org]
4.) Conclusions are drawn from results of your experiment that falsify or fail to falsify the one variable you were trying to test. This usually brings up more questions to be tested and that is all recorded, as well as, how you would modify the experiment or what went wrong. The level of detail that goes into these papers is for other researchers who are doing similar work or want to run the same experiment. Being able to reproduce results is key to turning your hypothesis into a widely accepted theory or law.
5.) So you did all this work now you need to submit it to a committee of your peers who will review your notes and look for holes or errors. In the above researchers case, she had modified graphs to make them look more presentable and that was enough to cast doubt. She was also missing pages from her notebooks which is a huge no-no. The review board must see all the good and bad that happened and being willing to show this gives you scientific integrity. So this board will so yes or no to your paper and then it will or won't be published in a scientific journal.
This process takes years often and is long and tiresome but it is crucial to the progress of science and also why innovation sometimes takes longer than we'd expect to be available to the public. But who wants to be taking medicines or using technology that wasn't thoroughly tested, right?
For myself, I love the simplicity and objectivity that is true science. It reminds me of this quote from Neil deGrasse Tyson that I heard the other week...
[Source]
Anyways that's it for me today, if you see something in the news that's stirring up questions, message me here and we'll get to the bottom of it! Have a great week everyone!
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