Wishful Thinking

By Tim Radford

There are no second prizes in science. The glittering prizes go to those who deliver experimental results that change scientific thinking. The winners measure their success in research funding, enthusiastic acolytes, tempting professorships and the number of times their science is cited as authority by other scientists.

The money doesn’t matter much. Few go into science to get rich, and the most competitive are in it for the fun of being ahead of the game, for setting the pace. And the sure way to set the pace is to publish first. There is an automatic check on fraud: scientific experiments must be reproducible. But there is always a temptation for scientists to claim success before they are sure of it. If experimental results don’t measure up to the prediction, then there is always a temptation to massage the results.

Woo-suk Hwang, the Korean scientist who thrilled the world with a procession of advances in cloning and stem cell therapy, has in effect admitted to doing such things in May 2005. He and colleagues claimed to have cloned embryos from skin cells donated by 11 patients and then created lines of embryo stem cells that could in theory be used to treat a range of intractable illnesses. In November, one of his US colleagues began to raise doubts about Hwang’s methods, and within a few weeks others were asking questions. Just before Christmas, Hwang announced that he would retract his latest publication.

He is not alone. Science is littered with cases of researchers who have rushed into print with claims that have turned out to be premature, wishful thinking, or downright wrong.

In 1988, two distinguished physicists based in Utah claimed to have achieved cold fusion: the spontaneous creation of thermonuclear energy. For 50 years, scientists have dreamed of building a reactor to deliver unlimited electricity: the technology has so far delivered sustained energy for only fractions of a second. The Utah team claimed to have obtained better results by running an electric current through water and a lump of palladium in a jar. Huge sums of money were promised for research and the cold fusion stampede began. Bizarrely, one or two other university groups, anxious to gain a lead in the field, announced that they too had observed cold fusion. It took several months to prove that the Utah results were entirely illusory.

For much of the same decade, there were also bitter murmurings about the American "discovery" of the HIV virus. The French were convinced that the Americans had merely discovered a specimen sent to them by the Pasteur Institute in Paris. The matter was in the end settled by international diplomacy, but the dispute left a nasty atmosphere and enduring criticism of laboratory practices in one US institute.

In 1999, a famous US laboratory extended the periodic table. Scientists claimed to have discovered elements 116 and 118, lumps of superheavy, unstable stuff with a shelf life measured in fractions of a second. Colleagues were first admiring and then suspicious: by 2002 the discoveries had been withdrawn and a physicist fired for cooking the books.

Some publications have misled researchers for years. The British psychologist Cyril Burt used suspect data to "prove" that IQ was inherited, and warped academic thinking for at least a decade. The Russian biologist Trofim Lysenko dominated Soviet agriculture for 25 years with claims that were regarded elsewhere as preposterous. And in the Philippines in 1971 a government expert claimed to have found a Stone Age tribe untouched by modern civilization. The Tasaday, who became a symbol of innocence, turned out to be a hoax and their discoverer disappeared 12 years later with millions of dollars raised to "protect" them from modernity.

Science is a democracy: in a healthy intellectual climate, errors tend to be corrected and dishonesty exposed. But only in a healthy intellectual climate.