Theory vs. observation

I wrote the following for another context, but I think it might be of interest here.

What it's all about is a debate between people with two different views of how the scientific process operates. One group claims that science is based, first, on careful observation of the world, followed by construction of a theory to account for the data. The other group claims that theories and hypotheses are constructed first, followed by collection of data to provide evidence or refutation for the theory or hypothesis.

My opinion's different from that of either group...

Science relies on both observation and theory. Neither alone is sufficient, but the mixture that any particular science or scientist uses can vary a lot from case to case. Kind of like blind men describing the elephant.

It's an iterative process. Scientists use theory to guide observation, and observation to guide theory. In working on any particular problem, one can enter at different phases of the process. Sometimes one starts with puzzling observations in need of a better theory. (Quote: "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'" -- Isaac Asimov) And sometimes one starts with theoretical ideas in need of observational support.

Which comes first, theory or observation? That's a less important question than may be apparent. As noted, any particular individual enters the process at a specific point, which may more heavily involve theory or observation. In either case, it's always (nowadays) true that every investigator is standing "on the shoulders of giants". (A large topic in itself. The metaphor, supposedly, is due to Newton. Famous book on the subject by Robert K. Merton. Basic idea: there are antecedents to everything, including the metaphor.)

But which is the absolute first? Sure, it has to be observation, but only in a somewhat trivial sense, in that all "knowledge" ultimately comes in through the physical senses. Or you could say that it's "only a theory" that your observations have a direct relationship to reality. Now we're in the territory of epistemology, which is generally not the concern of working scientists.

However, when one is thinking about the philosophy of science, one has to take into account the idea that theory determines what can be observed, and in fact what the "meaning" of observations can be. This leads into the realm of Thomas Kuhn and "paradigms" that control what is observed and how it is interpreted. This can be, and has been, taken to the extreme relativist position that science is meaningful only in terms of somewhat arbitrary cultural constructs. Almost all working scientists, of course, think that's going way too far.

Nevertheless, there are plenty of cases where theory has run far ahead of observation. Example just in physics include quantum mechanics, the big bang theory, cosmic inflation, and black holes. Indeed, the gold standard of theory is to make correct predictions of observations that have NOT already been made. A theory that merely accommodates existing observations is suspect of being fudged to fit the facts. Yet that's the right way to go in some cases, where the theory has "free parameters", like the Standard Model of particle physics. (Physicists still want to find a theory that predicts the parameters, and that goal remains quite elusive.) Climate models are the same way. They are adjusted to fit what has been observed in the past, with the hope that forward predictions will also be correct.

And that brings us back to relativity, in the Einsteinian, not cultural, sense (which have very little to do with each other).

The foundation of special relativity is Einstein's rather unorthodox (at the time) idea that the speed of light is the same in all reference frames. If one takes that to be axiomatic, then some quite surprising consequences inevitably follow, such as the equivalence of mass and energy (E=mc²). Nobody was expecting that, or had any observations to even suggest it. Two of Einstein's (five) amazing papers of 1905 resulted from following the axiom to its logical conclusion.

Now, one might think that the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887 gave the observational basis for Einstein's special theory. But the evidence for this is very unclear. Einstein himself was quite vague about the issue. Pais' biography devotes more than 10 pages to the topic. One thing is clear: Einstein didn't cite the experiment in his 1905 paper, even though it would have bolstered his case. But at various times he acknowledged having been aware of it in 1905. In any event, the experiment doesn't seem to have been anything like the key motivation for special relativity.

General relativity (1916) is an even more interesting case. One of the foundations of GR was special relativity, of course. Another key insight was Einstein's "equivalence principle", which posited that the behavior of a moving object in a gravitational field was the same as the observed behavior of the object in a reference frame that is accelerating with respect to the object.

Again, Einstein took theoretical principles as axioms. He worked for about 10 years to figure out what the consequences had to be. While some observation obviously supported his principles, there was no other observational input after making them axioms. Interestingly, Einstein was not a strong mathematician, which may be why it took him 10 years after 1905 to come up with GR. He had to rely on a friend, Marcel Grossman, who was much better at math. (Of course, what they needed was very cutting edge math at the time.) Einstein also obtained the help of other eminent mathematicians, like Tullio Levi-Civita.

Out of this collaboration emerged the theoretical idea that gravity should not be regarded as a traditional Newtonian force, but instead as a phenomenon due to curvature of space itself. There was nothing particularly observational about this idea. It was simply a beautiful theoretical idea. Indeed, people still have a tough time conceptualizing what it means for space to be curved. Just as people have a hard time conceptualizing the 4 dimensions of spacetime. These kinds of ideas simply do NOT come out of everyday observation.

The story gets even better. Einstein and his collaborators decided that the right equation to describe gravity should have certain very technical, theoretical properties. The equation had to have a "covariant tensor" form. It should describe the geometry of space in terms of a mathematical construct called a "metric". And in the boundary case where no gravitational mass is present, the metric should be, specifically, the "Lorentz metric" used for spacetime in special relativity. From these theoretical considerations, rather than from any specific observations, the collaborators came up with a tensor equation, which is the essential part of GR.

From that equation it was possible to predict that light has to bend in the presence of (large) masses. Nobody had ever observed that, or even suspected it. Not only was the fact of bending correct, but the equation even correctly predicted the amount of bending. This is why Eddington's measurement in 1919 of the bending of light during a solar eclipse caused quite a sensation, including headlines in the NYT. It's part of the reason Einstein acquired his "genius" reputation. (Few ordinary people knew anything about the 1905 papers.)

And the story goes on. Einstein was, in fact, misled by observations to modify his GR equation. He inserted into it what he called a "cosmological constant", so that the equation would predict what observations at the time (around 1920) seemed to indicate - namely that the universe was not collapsing under the force of gravity, but appeared to be static. At times, it is actually better to rely on theory than observation.

Subsequent observations by Hubble (later 1920s) indicated that the universe was in fact expanding. (Even those observations turned out to be quite inaccurate, though qualitatively correct.) So Einstein tossed out the cosmological constant in disgust. That was (apparently) a mistake, as in 1997 new observations indicated that the universe was not only expanding, but actually doing so at an accelerated rate. The cosmological constant - if chosen correctly - in fact predicts that.

Now, the actual value of the constant does depend on observations. It has to have the value that gives the correct amount of observed acceleration. All attempts to use theory to compute this value a priori have been miserable failures... so far.

And that view of the cosmological constant depends on other theoretical assumptions (such as the near perfect flatness of spacetime due to inflation) which have conceptual appeal, but (at least until fairly recently) little independent observational support. Indeed, much of modern cosmology itself depends largely on theoretical assumptions (isotropy and homogeneity) that observationally are only approximations, and could be substantially wrong.

Bottom line: theory and observation in the scientific process cannot be separated. It's kind of like trying to imagine one hand clapping.

Tags: relativity, scientific method

Good science/bad science

On a private email list someone brought up the subject of "good science" vs. "bad science", and suggested a couple of other categories: "ugly science" and "not even wrong science". (The latter refers to a remark reportedly made by the acerbic physicist Wolfgang Pauli when asked about a certain piece of research he evidently considered utterly ridiculous.)

I'm not especially comfortable with such categories. Taking the categories of faulty science first, a little thought suggests that there are a number of ways that some scientific idea or hypotheses can be wrong. A hypothesis can simply be mistaken, though plausible given available knowledge at some point in time. Even the very best scientists can make such mistakes, especially regarding phenomena that have not been amenable to proper research at the time. The concept of a "luminiferous aether", prior to the Michelson-Morley experiment, is a suitable example. Even Einstein made this kind of mistake, for instance in believing that the universe was static rather than expanding, before Edwin Hubble demonstrated otherwise.

But "bad science" is something worse than mistaken. It is an idea or hypothesis that is based on errors in methodology or reasoning or understanding that a competent scientist simply should not make, given available knowledge at the time. "Intelligent design" may be the canonical example of this sort of thing, but there is no lack of other examples throughout the history of science.

"Not even wrong science" is even worse. It's usually the product of an earnest, well-meaning individual who has an enthusiasm for some branch of science, but hardly any actual training or understanding of the subject. Examples of this sort of thing include cosmological theories involving "dynamic energy vortices", "proofs" that the theory of special relativity is obviously wrong, etc. Alternatively, some would place in this category any purportedly scientific theory that has no testable predictions -- superstring theory being a favorite (alleged) example. I won't get into that debate right now.

But then where do we put other kinds of "bad science"? For instance, plausible results which are nevertheless fraudulent because the experimental data has been fudged or simply fabricated. Some, but not all, of Korean stem cell scientist Hwang Woo-suk's work is the currently best-known example. Or how about the "results" of scientists employed by tobacco companties, which failed to find a link between smoking and lung cancer?

Many people use the term "junk science". Where does that fit in? Unfortunately, it's used rather loosely, sometimes in good faith and sometimes not, by anyone who wants to disparage unwelcome scientific claims. Both believers and skeptics of human-caused climate change use the term to describe the claims of their adversaries.

But enough about "bad science". You can find many lists of alleged examples, for instance at the site appropriately called Not Even Wrong. (That's the work of Will Kinney, rather than the perhaps better-known blog dedicated to arguments against superstring theory.) See also the newwpaper column called Bad Science, by Ben Goldacre.

But I've gone on much longer than I intended to regarding bad science. What about "good science"? Can we consider it to be any science that is fairly generally accepted as being correct? I'm not comfortable with that either. The problem is that there's no good set of operational criteria for certifying some scientific theory to be "generally accepted as correct". Indeed, for any given scientific theory or claim, there's a whole spectrum of confidence about whether the results can be considered as "proven".

Of course, there are certain necessary conditions a theory must meet in order to be considered "good science". It needs to be internally consistent and consistent with other "facts" that are also considered to be "known". (That can be a can of worms.) It needs to be falsifiable (i. e. there has to be some conceivable experiment that could rule out the theory). There ought to be at least some evidence that actually supports the theory. And so forth.

Finding sufficient conditions, however, for a theory to be considered "good science" is a lot harder. I'll present a list, in a moment, that offers several examples. The overall point is that for any given theory, it is often reasonable to regard both the theory and its negation as plausibly correct to some extent. Which means that both the supporters and opponents of a theory can be reasonably regarded as advocating "good science", even though at least one side is actually wrong... if and when we could determine the "real" truth.

And so, I tend to regard as "good science" any reasonable, plausible hypotheses that meet the necessary conditions and have "some" evidence in their favor, even if they haven't yet been fully "proven". Do we need to have a name for this category, such as "good but not fully proven science"? I don't know, because in fact most hypotheses which are still being researched naturally reside in this category -- even if they are pretty generally accepted as correct.

Herewith, some examples (I won't clutter this up with links to Wikipedia, but you may consult it, or the reference of your choice, for names and terms you're not clear about):

1. Black holes. At first almost everyone, even Einstein, thought this was a crazy idea. Eddington nearly destroyed Chandrasekhar's career over this issue, though the evidence for black holes, lately, has been pretty darn good. But there are still doubters, and very recently a proposal has been made that could give an alternative account of black holes, and the controversial theories of dark matter and dark energy as well. See here.

2. Dark energy/cosmological constant. Although a small cosmological constant used in the Friedmann equation gives a very good fit with universe expansion data from supernovae, other (still quite controversial) observations of very distant gamma-ray bursts do not fit. And there are alternative accounts -- see above, and for a different one see here.

Further, there is no decent theoretical explanation of a small cosmological constant.

3. Dark matter. The evidence for this is very good, and of many kinds. Yet many people keep trying to come up with alternatives. Again see above. A very reputable physicist, Jacob Beckenstein, has recently claimed to have reconciled MOND (modified newtonian dynamics) with relativity so as to provide another viable alternative. There's an article on this in NewScientist for 29 April, though I find that magazine has a penchant for pushing iconoclastic theories. See also here.

4. Inflationary cosmology and hypotheses about its antecedents. There are sound mathematical theories for such things, but little (for inflation) or nothing (for antecedents) in the way of physical evidence. The "standard" hypotheses is the Big Bang, but there are many variants and alternatives, associated with big names like Hawking, Steinhardt, Linde, Turok, etc. Unlike the previous examples, there's scant evidence, in spite of much elegant theory. Such theories need a category other than good/bad/wrong/ugly/not-even-wrong.

5. Quantum mechanics and determinism. Some quite reputable physicists keep trying to find some sort of determinism underlying QM. Most recently nobelist Gerard 't Hooft (NewScientist 5 May and here). Of course, this presents issues with the Conway/Kochen free will theorem. See here and here.

6. The Alvarez asteroid theory to explain the Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction. Since the discovery of the Chicxulub impact crater, people have become pretty convinced of this theory, despite heavy early skepticism. Yet evidence keeps turning up that the impact crater was formed long (ca. 300,000 years) before the extinctions began. See here.

There are many more examples, of course, including life sciences and medicine -- contentious stuff like megadose vitamin C, (denial of a relation between) AIDS & HIV, RNA-world, panspermia, etc. And that's without even getting into the squishy "sciences" like psychology, sociology, economics.

Having categories like good/bad/ugly may sometimes be helpful -- but they're definitely over-simplifications. Reality is messy.

The stem cell research scandal

With relatively few exceptions, most of the major news in science, including genuine breakthroughs, gets little coverage in the media. Some topics, of course, do make news -- things like major space missions, health crises (AIDS, avian flu), and politically controversial topics (evolution, climate change, stem cells).

But scientific scandals involving faked research hardly ever fail to draw attention, especially when related to topics already in the news -- like stem cells. Is it possible that the relative rarity of such events (think of "man bites dog") has something to do with all the commotion? Major scandals don't seem to come up as often as once a year, worldwide.

In any case, one does not want to excuse scientific malfeasance. It's bad for everyone concerned. It hurts the reputations of most parties that are involved, and the reputation of science itself. And science is an area of human activity in which reputation is of rather more than averaage importance.

However, major scandals also tend to evoke somewhat melodramatic overreaction. I think the following is in that category:

Scandal over Stem-Cell Research / A hospitable environment for scientific fraud

It's an opinion piece by Spyros Andreopoulos, who is credited as "director emeritus of the Office of Communication and Public Affairs at the Stanford University School of Medicine". Some of his other writings tend to train their critical focus on scientists and scientific institutions. This, for example, argues that "We need to improve scientists' understanding of the public." That's certainly a reasonable point, but not one to get into right now.

The scientific enterprise as a whole needs critique just as much as individual scientific research. But one may also disagree about the details, so let's look at Andreopoulos' take on the stem cell scandal.

South Korean scientist Dr. Hwang Woo Suk has been regarded as one of the most brilliant researchers in his field. So why would he concoct an elaborate hoax in the pages of Nature, as his critics claim, that he had cloned a dog, and written in Science that he had created human embryonic stem cells matched to patients who might benefit from them?

Since the time that was published, the dog cloning claim has been verified as correct, but of course all the other claims have been shown to be faked. So the important questions include why the fakery was perpetrated.

Perhaps the answer is nothing more than ego. But another explanation could be the culture of science itself, which puts a premium on originality, on being first to make a scientific discovery. Being second, or third, hardly counts at all.

Stop right there. In a causal sense, Andreopoulos is most likely correct with respect to Hwang Woo Suk and the rather small number of others who have been responsible for similarly egregious instances of fakery.

But consider what he's saying, which is that a very competitive and intellectually challenging profession puts great pressure on individuals to succeed and even excel to the limits of their ability -- and sometimes beyond. This isn't any different from other professions like law, politics, journalism, medicine, and (especially?) business. Fraud and scandal are no strangers to any of those other professions either. I would dare to say that the levels of fraud found in science are a lot lower than in any other of those professions.

Competitiveness and striving are part of human nature, and affect large percentages of individuals in almost any type of endeavor. But there also would seem to be some positive correlation between the prestige of a profession and the degree of competitiveness one finds in it. This is understandable -- the larger the rewards, the harder people will work for them. That does produce undesirable side-effects. Occasional breaches of ethics -- and sometimes outright fraud -- are one kind. A different kind is the toll on the quality of life experienced by people who are caught up in the rat race to succeed.

Yet competitiveness within a profession has its positive effects as well. One is obviously the fact that honors and rewards (in whatever form -- wealth, power, self-esteem, or even a more active sex life) motivate people to produce the best results they can. Science certainly can't do without such motivating factors any more than the other prestige professions.

But there's also another positive effect, which benefits the scientific endeavor itself as much as those who win in competition. Science, more than most professions, needs to have a way to rate individuals in terms of the reliability and authority of their accomplishments. Reputation is all-important in science. In any given field, it is vital to recognize the individuals who have the most correct and accurate grasp of reality. And so science provides honors and rewards to identify the best and brighetest. These rewards come in a variety of forms -- academic tenure at top institutions, publication in the most prestigious journals, top scores in citation indexes, membership in National Academies and the like, conference speaking invitations, prizes and awards (including Nobels and numerous ones less famous). Most everyone in any given field knows, by such tokens, who the "alphas" are, since these awards are visible to anyone who's paying any attention at all.

Of course, this is elitism. It offends our egalitarian sensibilities. But science simply can't do without such things. Life is too short to read anything but the best of the literature in any particular field. Nobody can read it all. There need to be indicia of what's best. These reputational rewards which are part of the social system of science are the scientific community's method of voting for those of its members who seem most deserving of attention -- and, of course, future research grants.

It's not a perfect system. But nothing's perfect in human social arrangements. Votes are not at all weighted equally. Those who have already achieved the hightest rankings have the most heavily weighted votes. But would any other system work much better? In an egalitarian system, how would you identify people not among your immediate acquaintances who are the most deserving of having their papers read? Or most deserving of very scarce research funds? Or who run the research group that you most want to join because it has the best success prospects. These are not trivial matters.

So the bottom line is, there are limited quantities of rewards available, it's a zero-sum game, hence people compete fiercely. How could it be any other way?

It's always possible there could be another way, or at least improvements. And it would be nice if sociologists of science would apply scientific method to the fullest extent in order to determine, first, how the reward systems of science actually operate, and, second, where and how some mechanisms are "better" (in some sense) than others. With such actual information, we'd then be in a better position to make decisions about improvements.

But we've drifted quite a way from Andreopoulos' article. Let's get back to that. He has further remarks on why fakery occurs:

The causes of fakery in science are a matter of debate. Its incidence, whether episodic or widespread, could be due to individual aberrations. In "The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science," author Horace Freeland Judson blames it on inadequate mentoring of scientists, veneration of a high volume of published research, chases for grants and glory and political pressures for practical results.

These are valid points, but in light of what I wrote above, I think that they miss the forest for the trees. Competitiveness is both inevitable and beneficial. Ideas for remediation ought to be aimed at detecting and controlling fraud and abuses rather than reigning in competition.

In a quite different sphere, that of business, competition is regarded as an almost unalloyed virtue -- provided that fraud and abuses are controlled. Anti-competitive phenomena such as monopolies and cartels are seen as undesirable (at best) or evil (except by would-be monopolists themselves). Mechanisms apart from free markets themselves -- such as government regulation -- for controlling fraud and abuse are also regarded as necessary evils (at best). But even the most ardent libertarians realize that fraud is a significant enough problem that we need a legal system to control it.

I'm not the world's most ardent libertarian, but I don't think it's a big stretch to take a similar attitude in science for controlling fraud and abuse. Respect and encourage competition, but have "appropriate" control mechanisms in place. That would limit the debate somewhat to identifying such mechanisms.

What does Andreopoulos suggest?

[A]nother probable cause contributing to lapses in individual behavior could be the scientific journals themselves. I have long suspected that the insidious rise of publication costs and fierce competition among journals may have contributed a hospitable environment for fraud.

He then devotes most of the remainder of his essay to dissecting the problem with journals and offering advice to journal editors and publishers on how to reform themselves.

I'm going to mostly skip over that for a simple reason: There is a tectonic shift underway in the journal publishing business. At the same time as publication costs and prices are ballooning -- to the point where academic libraries must continually cut back on their subscriptions -- technology is threatening to transform the whole academic publishing business beyond recognition. We now have "open access" journals like those of the Public Library of Science. In physics (and allied fields like mathematics and computer science) we have arXiv.org. And we have the elephant in the room -- Google (and a few similar efforts), with things like Google Scholar and Google Book Search.

In 10 years, the journal publishing business most probably won't look anything like it does now, so trying to "reform" it is very much trying to aim at a fast-moving target. On the other hand, some of the new electronic forms of publishing, such as arXiv, have much lower standards of peer review than present journals. That's certainly a worrisome matter as far as fraud is concerned.

So, to finally return to the consideration of dealing with fraud, do I have any recommendations (not that anyone's probably going to pay much attention)?

What I would say is this: At the grave risk of seeming too complacent, I think science's fraud control system is already pretty good, in spite of this nasty stem cell scandal. Human social systems are nothing if not imperfect. A great deal of "scientific method" consists of social mechanisms for controlling imperfections (of which ordinary fraud is only one kind) in human acquisition and cataloging of reliable knowledge about the real world. The method fails to the extent that any errors creep in, regardless of whether they are due to fraud or simply sloppy technique. It's amusing how even careless or fraudulent practices have occasionally managed to yield good science. One example is Robert Millikan's measurement of the electron's charge. Another is Edwin Hubble's measurement of the Hubble constant that describes the expansion of the universe. Because of erroneous assumptions about the intrinsic brightness of certains types of stars, which Hubble used to estimate distances, the value he originally estimated for the Hubble constant was off by a factor of seven. Even though it was decades before the value of this constant was better known, the general conclusions about the evolution of the universe were pretty much on target.

There are several reasons that science is pretty effective at self-correction. One of these lies in the very competitiveness of the process. In addition to encouraging fraud, which it can do, it is even more effective at rooting out fraud for the same reasons. For better or worse, one of the best ways for a scientist to compete is to demonstrate that some other scientist is wrong. And the more well-known and influential a scientist is, the more points can be gained by successfully discovering an error in his/her work. This can be very confusing to outside observers. A big news story may come out one month that receives attention in the popular press. And then a few months later someone comes along with evidence that the earlier results are wrong. (This happens a lot with research in health and medicine, to say nothing of the social science, but no branch of science is immune.)

It's instructive to look at how rapidly self-correction actually happens. Hwang Woo Suk's first paper found to be fraudulent was published in March 2004, and the second more important (but faked) paper in May 2005. The first public reports of problems appeared in November 2005. Hwang resigned his university post on December 23, 2005, and finally on January 10, 2006 it was announced that both the 2004 and 2005 stem cell papers were based on fabricated data. Although it took more than a year and a half for doubts to be raised, less than two months elapsed before the case was effectively closed. Hwang has admitted that mistakes were made, but not accepted full guilt. (Criminal charges may still be filed.)

Compare that with how slowly scandals in other fields are resolved. Take business for example, say the Enron and Worldcom scandals. Controversy swirled around Enron for months before it declared bankruptcy in late 2001. Top offcials of Enron (Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling) still haven't admitted guilt and have not yet gone on trial for their (alleged) malfeasance. The Worldcom case was similar. It declared bankruptcy in July 2002 after the company had been under suspicion of inflating its assets for a year and a half. The company's CEO (Bernard Ebbers) never admitted guilt, but was finally convicted of fraud, and sentenced to prison in July 2005.

Or how about politics. The Watergate scandal dragged on for two years from the break-in to Nixon's resignation. It was constantly in the news. All that time most of the guilty parties continued to protest their innocence. Today we have the Abramoff and DeLay scandals (among others) with the same pattern. Hardly anyone but the lowlier figures admit guilt. Resistance to release of relevant information is found at every turn. Only lengthy judicial processes have much chance of sorthing it all out. But religion seems to provide the worst example -- the Catholic Church and its pedophile priests. The Church has known about child sexual abuse incidents for at least two decades, and done little more (before public exposure) than move the perpetrators around. One Cardinal of the Church (Bernard Law), in particular, was notorious for negligence in taking action. Although he resigned as Cardinal in December 2002, the Church subsequently rewarded him with cushy appointments in the Vatican.

It's clear enough why the wheels of justice turn pretty slowly in business and political scandals. In the case of business, the people immersed in scandal are generally quite wealthy and able to drag things out with talented teams of lawyers. In politics, those involved in a scandal generally have friends (and quite possibily accomplices) in very high places, who can directly affect law enforcement and legal proceedings, as well as the release of crucial information. Scientists charged with malfeasance generally have none of these advantages, so once wrongdoing is suspected, justice can move swiftly to investigation, verification, and correction.

So let's get back to science. Another social mechanism it uses to deter fraud is the way young scientists are socialized. Basically, they are on probation from the time they enter graduate school until they receive academic tenure -- if they ever do. Until a young scientist manages to establish a good reputation, the onus is always on him or her to establish credibility and rigorously justify his/her research results. Young scientists have very little power compared to senior scientists (like Hwang). They just don't have the means to coerce others to help fabricate results. And in the present time, most science is very much a team effort.

Not to seem too idealistic about it, but if that weren't enough, the culture of science continually reinforces the idea that science is all about the search for truth. Fraud is simply antithetical to that ideal. In contrast, the culture of business and politics is much more about misleading marketing and cunning propaganda and what one can get away with rather than what is true. That's just the obvious (but sad) fact of the matter. And in contrast to science, business and politics (and law and other professions) have a culture where it's much more every man or woman for themselves, rather than a team effort.

We shouldn't be complacent about scientific quality, ever. I don't want to whitewash the situation. Maybe the take-away from all this is that we could certainly try to understand the sociology of science better. What factors make it work as well as it seems to actually do? What factors effectively deter deviance from the norms of good scientific content? What factors, on the other hand, induce deviance and abuse and fraud.

So maybe part of the answer is more systematic application of science to itself.

Tags: stem cell scandal, scientific scandals, sociology of science