Scientists Behaving Badly

You may think that science is a noble activity carried out by dedicated souls thinking only of the search for understanding and of improving the lot of society. Wrong! According to an item published in Nature ( https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02035-2) there is rot in the core. A survey of 64,000 researchers at 22 universities in the Netherlands was carried out, 6,813 actually filled out the form and returned it, and an estimated 8% of scientists who so returned their forms in the anonymous survey confessed to falsifying or fabricating data at least once between 2017 and 2020. Given that a fraudster is less likely to confess, that figure is probably a clear underestimate.

There is worse. More than half of respondents also reported frequently engaging in “questionable research practices”. These include using inadequate research designs, which can be due to poor funding and hence more understandable, and frankly this could be a matter of opinion. On the other hand, if you confess to doing it you are at best slothful. Much worse, in my opinion, was deliberately judging manuscripts or fund applications while peer reviewing unfairly. Questionable research practices are “considered lesser evils” than outright research misconduct, which includes plagiarism and data fabrication. I am not so sure of that. Dismissing someone else’s work or fund application hurts their career.

There was then the question of “sloppy work”, which included failing to “preregister experimental protocols (43%), make underlying data available (47%) or keep comprehensive research records (56%)” I might be in danger here. I had never heard about “preregistering protocols”. I suspect that is more for the medical research than for physical sciences. My research has always been of the sort where you plan the next step based on the last step you have taken. As for “comprehensive records, I must admit my lab books have always been cryptic. My plan was to write it down, and as long as I could understand it, that was fine. Of course, I have worked independently and records were so I could report more fully and to some extent for legal reasons.

If you think that is bad, there is worse in medicine. On July 5 an item appeared in the British Medical Journal with the title “Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?” One example: a Professor of epidemiology apparently published a review paper that included a paper that showed mannitol halved the death rate from comparable injuries. It was pointed out to him that that paper that he reviewed was based on clinical trials that never happened! All the trials came from a lead author who “came from an institution” that never existed! There were a number of co-authors but none had ever contributed patients, and many did not even know they were co-authors. Interestingly, none of the trials had been retracted so the fake stuff is still out there.

Another person who carried out systematic reviews eventually realized that only too many related to “zombie trials”. This is serious because it is only by reviewing a lot of different work can some more important over-arching conclusions be drawn, and if a reasonable percentage of the data is just plain rubbish everyone can jump to the wrong conclusions. Another medical expert attached to the journal Anaesthesia found from 526 trials, 14% had false data and 8% were categorised as zombie trials. Remember, if you are ever operated on, anaesthetics are your first hurdle! One expert has guessed that 20% of clinical trials as reported are false.

So why doesn’t peer review catch this? The problem for a reviewer such as myself is that when someone reports numbers representing measurements, you naturally assume they were the results of measurement. I look to see that they “make sense” and if they do, there is no reason to suspect them. Further, to reject a paper because you accuse it of fraud is very serious to the other person’s career, so who will do this without some sort of evidence?

And why do they do it? That is easier to understand: money and reputation. You need papers to get research funding and to keep your position as a scientist. It is very hard to detect, unless someone repeats your work, and even then there is the question, did they truly repeat it? We tend to trust each other, as we should be able to. Published results get rewards, publishers make money, Universities get glamour (unless they get caught out). Proving fraud (as opposed to suspecting it) is a skilled, complicated and time-consuming process, and since it shows badly on institutions and publishers, they are hardly enthusiastic. Evil peer review, i.e. dumping someone’s work to promote your own is simply strategic, and nobody will do anything about it.

It is, apparently, not a case of “bad apples”, but as the BMJ article states, a case of rotten forests and orchards. As usual, as to why, follow the money.

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Evidence that the Standard Theory of Planetary Formation is Wrong.

Every now and again, something happens that makes you feel both good and depressed at the same time. For me it was last week, when I looked up the then latest edition of Nature. There were two papers (Nature, vol 541 (Dauphas, pp 521 – 524; Fischer-Gödde and Kleine, pp 525 – 527) that falsified two of the most important propositions in the standard theory of planetary formation. What we actually know is that stars accrete from a disk of gas and dust, the disk lingers on for between a million years and 30 million years, depending on the star, then the star’s solar winds clear out the dust and gas. Somewhere in there, planets form. We can see evidence of gas giants growing, where the gas is falling into the giant planet, but the process by which smaller planets or the cores of giants form is unobservable because the bodies are too small, and the dust too opaque. Accordingly, we can only form theories to fill in the intermediate process. The standard theory, also called oligarchic growth, explains planetary formation in terms of dust accreting to planetesimals by some unknown mechanism, then these collide to form embryos, which in turn formed oligarchs or protoplanets (Mars sized objects) and these collided to form planets. If this happened, they would do a lot of bouncing around and everything would get well-mixed. Standard computer simulations argue that Earth would have formed from a distribution of matter from further out than Mars to inside Mercury’s orbit. Earth the gets its water from a “late veneer” from carbonaceous chondrites from the far side of the asteroid belt.

It is also well known that certain elements in bodies in the solar system have isotopes that vary their ratio depending on the distance from the star. Thus meteorites from Mars have different isotope ratios from meteorites from the asteroid belt, and again both are different from rocks from Earth and Moon. The cause of this isotope difference is unclear, but it is an established fact. This is where those two papers come in.

Dauphas showed that Earth accreted from a reasonably narrow zone throughout its entire accretion time. Furthermore, that zone was the same as that which formed enstatite chondrites, which appear to have originated from a region that was much hotter than the material that, say, formed Mars. Thus enstatite chondrites are reduced. What that means is that their chemistry was such that there was less oxygen. Mars has only a small iron core, and most of its iron is as iron oxide. Enstatite chondrites have free iron as iron, and, of course, Earth has a very large iron core. Enstatite chondrites also contain silicates with less magnesium, which will occur when the temperatures were too hot to crystallize out forsterite. (Forsterite melts at 1890 degrees C, but it will also dissolve to some extent in silica melts at lower temperatures.) Enstatite chondrites also are amongst the driest, so they did not provide Earth’s water.

Fischer-Gödde and Kleine showed that most of Earth’s water did not come from carbonaceous chondrites, the reason being, if it did, the non-water part would have added about 5% to the mass of Earth, and the last 5% is supposed to be from where the bulk of elements that dissolve in hot iron would have come from. The amounts arriving earlier would have dissolved in the iron and gone to the core. One of those elements is ruthenium, and the isotope ratios of Earth’s ruthenium rule out an origin from the asteroid belt.

Accordingly, this evidence rules out oligarchic growth. There used to be an alternative theory of planetary accretion called monarchic growth, but this was soon abandoned because it cannot explain first why we have the number of planets we have where they are, and second where our water came from. Calculations show it is possible to have three to five planets in stable orbit between Earth and Mars, assuming none are larger than Earth, and more out to the asteroid belt. But they are not there, so the question is, if planets only grow from a narrow zone, why are these zones empty?

This is where I felt good. A few years ago I published an ebook called “Planetary Formation and Biogenesis” and it required monarchic growth. It also required the planets in our solar system to be roughly where they are, at least until they get big enough to play gravitational billiards. The mechanism is that the planets accreted in zones where the chemistry of the matter permitted accretion, and that in turn was temperature dependent, so specific sorts of planets form in zones at specific distances from the star. Earth formed by accretion of rocks formed during the hot stage, and being in a zone near that which formed enstatite chondrites, the iron was present as a metal, which is why Earth has an iron core. The reason Earth has so much water is that accretion occurred from rocks that had been heat treated to about 1550 degrees Centigrade, in which case certain aluminosilicates phase separated out. These, when they take up water, form cement that binds other rocks to form a concrete. As far as I am aware, my theory is the only current one that requires these results.

So, why do I feel depressed? My ebook contained a review of over 600 references from journals until a few months before the ebook was published. The problem is, these references, if properly analysed, provided papers with plenty of evidence that these two standard theories were wrong, but each of the papers’ conclusions were ignored. In particular, there was a more convincing paper back in 2002 (Drake and Righter, Nature 416: 39-44) that came to exactly the same conclusions. As an example, to eliminate carbonaceous chondrites as the source of water, instead of ruthenium isotopes, it used osmium isotopes and other compositional data, but you see the point. So why was this earlier work ignored? I firmly believe that scientists prefer to ignore evidence that falsifies their cherished beliefs rather than change their minds. What I find worse is that neither of these papers cited the Drake and Righter paper. Either they did not want to admit they were confirming a previous conclusion, or they were not interested in looking thoroughly at past work other than that which supported their procedures.

So, I doubt these two papers will change much either. I might be wrong, but I am not holding my breath waiting for someone with enough prestige to come out and say enough to change the paradigm.