Spot On London 2012

The debate that happened in London a few hours ago is an interesting one, they're discussing the prevalence of fraud in scientific research and published literature. Do scientists reward "good" results rather than good use of method and honest publishing of results? In all honesty this brings the whole Andrew Wakefield scandal to mind for me (for those of you who don't recognise the name, he's the guy who caused all the MMR vaccine controversy in the UK).



The big cause of this problem is the publication and funding processes available to scientists. It's all very competitive, and the people who have the money don't want to waste it on studies that aren't producing the right results. This creates a conflict of interests, scientists tend to be very passionate about their work. There was a recent study of 2,047 papers on PubMed that found that two-thirds of retracted papers were down to scientific misconduct, not error.

This defeats the purpose of science. We're meant to be working to progress our knowledge as a species, not for our own personal gains. You can see comments from the people who were at the debate under twitter #solo12fraud (currently number 1 trend, hooray for science!)