Tag Archives: Philosophy of Science

Ethics in Science II

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Yesterday I discussed some of the ethical concerns within the Medical science field. This case most likely has the most frequent cases of fraud and unethical behavior. Why? Because there’s a ton of money involved. Clinical trials relate to drugs, which is a multibillion dollar industry. Additionally, there is no requirement by the National Institute of Health to list any potential conflicts of interest. According to Nature there was a plan in the works to require this. However, it got scuttled. In business people go to jail for these types of things.

However, medical science is not the only place where fraud happens. As this ethic blog notes there are a lot of several different kinds of fraud. Some are intentional, others are less intentional. The biggest problem is intentional fraud. Where the author makes up some result. There are two pretty big examples of this. The first is the fake human clone from South Korea by a scientists named Dr. Hwang Woo Suk. This  guy was rather quickly outed as a fraud. However, this wasn’t until there was a HUGE debate in the mainstream media about the ethics of cloning human stem cells. This helped push the US and much of Europe to ban cloning of human embryos.

The second most famous case of fraud is the case of cold fusion. What is cold fusion though, why would people want to make claims of making that happen? Well, fusion is what the sun does, if we could manage to do that on earth without burning ourselves up that would be pretty awesome. Basically, as the PopSci article states, is that with fusion you get more energy than what you put into it. It basically would solve all world energy problems. The first person that does it would basically be a savior to the human race. So, it’s something that people really want to do. There’s debate if it’s even possible, it’s theoretically possible, but physically possible is still up for debate.

So, accidental fraud comes about from introducing a personal bias or from misinterpreting data. Both of these happen fairly often in science. Why? because we’re human, and this is what the scientific method is supposed to eliminate over time. Before publishing results you typically need to have been able to reproduce them and show that there is a trend that is consistent over time for the phenomena that you are studying. This is one of the biggest requirements for science. Which is why in clinical trials there are at least three stages to ensure repeatability of the data.

The other good thing about the scientific method is the fact that other people can take your results and findings and test them. IF the results are different they can be published and used to dispute the previous findings. This happens all the time in regular scientific discourse. In fact there’s a great example of this going on right now. This debate has been going on for about a hundred years now or so. Recently a group debunked Gould’s bias argument. Basically a guy back in the late 1800’s measured a big set of skulls to see if there were any size differences. Stephen Jay-Gould, basically the Richard Dawkins of his day, re-analyzed the data because he felt there was bias in it, and found that there was in fact bias! Well, this recent group actually remeasured the skulls and found out that it was Gould that was biased and that if anything the original sample was more correct.

Science is supposed to be totally objective. As we can see from this discussion it’s not, and cannot be. Why? We’re human. However, the system works really well as a whole. In my next blog I’ll discuss some of the ways we can address issues of fraud other concerns that I’ve mentioned over the past two days.

Ethics in Science

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So, right now the UK is in a big uproar about ethics in science. There have been parliamentary hearings which have deeply concerned scientists. In one opinion piece from the guardian the author argues that it’s been too long going that the scientific community has been able to function without some sort of regulation. Scientists of course object to this. Because there is a method to the manner in which they work. Many, from the tone at the hearings, feel this is another assault on the scientific community.

However, it maybe that there’s some scientific work that is more likely to have fraudulent activity in it. Today the Guardian published an article about scientific ghost writers. Scientific Ghost writers can come in two forms. The first is harmless where the author is really the person that got the funding. Depending on the journal these authors are either the second or very last author on the paper. This is normal, as typically you’re working in that person’s lab and they are paying you. So they should get some credit for the work done as they may also have had an advising role. The second kind of ghost writing is much worse. These writers were in no way associated with the research and their names are put on the article to give it weight, or if they were the ones supposed to be doing the research and some one else did it. In the Guardian article they are focusing on clinical trials for medicines.

This isn’t the only country where fraud, exaggerating claims or ghost writing occurs. Although, the UK has had one of the most famous cases with the retracted article linking MMR vaccine to Autism (meaning it was fraud). This also happens in the US and in many clinical trials. In fact a Greek doctor has made it his mission to unearth clinical trial fraud and really understand what was going on there. The Atlantic had a great write up about this in November of 2010. The doctor  Ioannidis has been making a career out of debunking claims as well as researching the causes of these problems. He argues that the double blind clinical trial isn’t giving us the best results we could possibly be getting in medical science. Although, he doesn’t offer a huge amount of alternatives. 

The New York Times also ran a story about in September of last 2010 about some of the ethics behind clinical trials. This article discusses how two cousins ended up in the same trial and one cousin was given the treatment and the other was not. It was a story that was really questioning the ethics of the clinical trial, because it was obviously working. However, pushing through these treatments without fulling testing them can be just as dangerous. Granted these people were near the end as it was. The cousin that didn’t receive the new treatment died from only getting the chemo.

One the one hand we want to get promising medicine out as fast as possible. However, we want to ensure we are properly testing these medicines to ensure safety. This leads to a great deal of ethical concerns. For promising medicines do we make exceptions? Do we allow fully untested medicine into the wild? These are difficult questions. From an ethical and moral standpoint allowing a patient to die because of a randomized test is very questionable, which is what happened in the case above. However, in some cases rushing through medicines like these end up causing deaths in other manners. In the case of Vioxx this is exactly what happened. In many people it reduced the risk while in others it out right killed them. Where is the balance? I think this is why the UK is pushing for more oversight in these cases.

*Note: my dad, a nurse practitioner pointed out that i was slightly wrong about Vioxx. He’s correct. There were more ethical problems than the fact it was a bad drug. Simply the creators of Vioxx hid the fact that it impacted african americans differently than white americans. If Vioxx hadn’t done this it wouldn’t have been a problem for the drug to stay on the market. If you want to read more about Vioxx there’s a chapter in the book Denialism By Michael Specter

In my next blog I’ll discuss scientific fraud and ethics in other fields.

Controversies III – Evolution

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So, we have some ideas for how to deal with climate change. Will they work? I don’t know. I hope my friends that read my last post will discuss will educate themselves on climate change and work to talk with their friends about it. Also, let me know if you do and how it goes!

How do we deal with evolution though? This one is a lot trickier, not that dealing with climate change is easy (but I think my idea is a step in the right direction). People who are much smarter than I am have been attempting to tackle this one for some time, including Richard Dawkins who is extremely knowledgeable about the topic. He wrote a fantastic book about evolution called “The greatest show on Earth” where he discusses each of the “counter” claims of ID (Intelligent design) advocates.

However, in some ways this is even besides the point. The major issue is that people are trying to remove evolution from the classroom. This is the biggest problem. This would destroy our capabilities to compete in the future in biomedical applications.

Why are people trying to fight evolution? Well, they feel that it will drive people to atheism. This isn’t true. There are many people that have figured out ways to reconcile their religious beliefs with evolution. The biggest problem is that it directly contradicts the bible. Which in the US there is a growing minority that take the bible literally. The next issue is the growing minority that falsely claim the US is a “Christian Nation” which this CNN contributor debunks.

It appears that we need to not just worry about scientific accuracy but also historical. For it is impossible to really understand the “controversy” without understanding the context that it is being framed within. Without this claimed backdrop there would be no basis under which to fight having evolution in school classes. Evolution is not a religion. With the pope accepting it, it’s as much of a part of catholicism as it is part of secular humanism or part of the accepted scientific facts of an atheist. Since the supporters of ID place the argument within this framework though we must first refute the framework of a christian nation and from there we can show that it is impossible to teach ID in school while evolution must be taught in school.

Additional ponderable thoughts:
“Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution” is a 1973 essay by the evolutionary biologist and Russian Orthodox Christian Theodosius Dobzhansky, criticising anti-evolution creationism and espousing theistic evolution. The essay was first published in the American Biology Teacher, volume 35, pages 125-129. (Wikipedia)


We teach our vets, doctors, nurses and pharmacists biology. Without a clear understanding of biology from a young age the quality of our healthcare can only go down. As a country we will not be able to stay on top of the life sciences research and pharmaceutical production.


If we fail to education our students on biology how do we keep up, and how to we keep our economy running?

But it’s JUST a theory.

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The point of this post is not to defend evolution, but to investigate the different meanings behind the word theory. However, this point comes up most frequently when people discussion evolution and possibly climate change. The word theory has become a very loaded word during discussions between scientists and non-scientists. It causes scientists to come across as arrogant to non-scientists. What causes people to believe that these scientists are arrogant? Well in Professor Dawkin’s documentary “Root of all Evil” Ted Haggard claims it has to do with how certain scientists are about their “theories.” Where scientists look down upon non-scientists in their ignorant views. For science this is a dangerous proposition where the people scientists need to convince the most that many different forms of scientific research needs to be conducted and funded publicly, scientists come across as arrogant know it alls that refuse to explain anything to the common person. This has also been noted in a Pew Science Survey.

So, why are scientists “arrogant” about their “theories?” Well, first it’s not arrogance. It’s extreme confidence in the current understanding of the world. The “theories” describe the state of the world and how we interact with it. However, there is a misunderstanding about the word theory. This can come from two ways. First, intentional intellectual dishonesty. In this case there is not much to be done, other than attempt to bring out this fraud and discredit the person on this basis. The second is an honest misunderstanding of the word. This may be difficult for many scientists to actually believe, but I think this can legitimately happen. While people who are actively interested in science are constantly being refreshed and reminded of how science works why it works and all the great things it has done for us, people who aren’t interest forget these things. Many of them haven’t had a refresher on how science works since high school, and that’s if they were paying attention to their teacher. They believe that a theory is a general idea of how something works, a educated guess.

I plan to elaborate on the differences in definitions through using a model presented through psychology in 1986. The study claims there are folk theories on how technology works, specifically thermostats. It is clear that there is the correct “scientific” theory of how the thermostat works, so it will be easy to compare the differences in the two different thermostat theories.

Willet Kempton’s article “Two theories of home heat control” is a survey of residents of Detroit Michigan of how the thermostat works in their house. The survey shows two prevailing theories. The valve theory and the feedback theory. The feedback theory is fairly straight forward, the thermostat detects the temperature and either turns on or off the furnace based on the deviation from the set temperature. The valve theory is a little different, this theory claims that when you turn up the thermostat you are increasing the flow of hot air the furnace is producing, which will increase the rate the house warms up. There maybe some reasons why this theory was popular, the fact that the thermostat was a knob and that many people were used to using radiators to heat their house previously. These two theories were defined as “Folk Theories” which fall into the general category of educated guess or a hunch of how it works.

However, we know that both of these cannot be correct. So at this point we have competing paradigms or research programs. So to determine which one is correct we conduct experiments. We collect temperature data of the air coming from the ventilator at various different thermostat settings. This allows us to test our hypothesis that the thermostat is actually a valve. Since the feedback theory is basically correct our data would show that the temperature of the air is constant or near constant regardless of the temperature setting on the thermostat.

Now we can move onto test the theory of the feedback mechanism. We can create more sophisticated tests to determine what the on/off points are for the furnace and create a model of how the thermostat interacts with the furnace to maintain the heat in a house. Over time we can build confidence in our model and other people can test our model in their own home and check the validity.

When people accept this model based on empirical evidence we then can say we have a scientific theory. However, this theory, while it may have been formed from a folk theory, has been thoroughly tested and replicated by many individuals. We can find many different examples of this in science, from biology, theories of gravity, relativity, the origin of the world, the list goes on and on.

Folk theories are hunches and educated guesses. Scientific theories are verifiable, testable and may be contradictory to our personal intuition.

What is Science?

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In my first two post I haven’t really touched on any of the three main points of my blog. So, i’m going to start from the beginning with what I mean by science. Science to me is the searching for an understanding of the natural world using rigorous tests to validate the data. This is a bit vague as I don’t define on which side the hypothesis needs to be formed. In most cases, if you remember the scientific method, the hypothesis is formed first and then it is tested. This is true for the most part. However, some times you have the data first and you have to get an understanding of the data before you can do that. Once you understand the data you are free to create hypotheses where you use the given data to test these hypotheses.

There is a great deal of debate over how science actually functions. There are three main philosopher’s of science, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos and Richard Feynman. The first two are basically related to creating paradigms or “research programs” which are similar but slightly different than paradigms. Basically a paradigm is something like Newtonian physics. This had a large set of assumptions and rules that were both confirmed by the data and had issues with the data. For instance Newtonian physics couldn’t explain the motion of Mercury. So, there is a shift from one paradigm to the next through a revolution. Basically, the support for the first paradigm is so degraded it gives way and another one replaces it. In the case of Newtonian physics it was replaces with relativistic physics, based on Einsteinian  principles. Research programs are similar but more than one can be going on at the same time. You could say string theory and m-theory, which are very similar and part of each other, but some people support only string theory and don’t agree with m-theory, while supporting m-theory means you support all of string theory, but there are also people that reject both theories. The large hadron collider is being used to test these theories.

I think science does have radical shifts between major though processes and it can be very disorientating for people within the field. They tend to fight these changes, as we all do. They are human.

Regardless, I feel that science illuminates truths of how this world works and improves the human condition. While it may not always directly intend to do this, there are spill over effects that make this happen. Astronomy is a science that in no way directly impacts humanity (unless they find an asteroid that will hit earth or alien life) there have been spill overs that have made life better for people.

Science is a noble pursuit that does have ambitions larger than itself. It attempts to be the fully objective observer, but it’s not completely. However, it’s the best thing we have. It will continue to get better the more we do it. It has created wonders for us, and I for one am deeply indebt to all the scientists out there. Thank you for your hard work and helping me appreciate the wonders of the world.