There is a bird-flu style epidemic of bad science. The  clearly ludicrous bad science examples  in the Guardian columns may be just pale moons of the dark star of bad hard science.

For example, a South Korean scientist, Hwang Woo-suk, has just been sacked from Seoul National University and 6 of his colleagues have been suspended or fined(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4824486.stm).  They were found to have faked stem cell research from cloned embryos.

A scientist who claims to have created bubble fusion in the lab is also facing an investigation this week by an American  university, which is looking at his colleagues’ claims that he won’t let them look at his data or challenge his claims. 

In many of the currently fashionable research fields (stem cell research, cloning, nanotechnology) there are examples of  exaggerated claims or results that can’t be replicated. These are all the big money topics and must be very tempting to the greedy and those who want to make a global reputation quickly. Should we care if duff scientists want to rip off the big corporations who fund this stuff? It suggests the old saying that you can never con an honest person.  Classic cons play on the victim’s greed. Clearly, the funding for most of these fakeries comes from organisations that expect to get even richer than they are already.

However, quite apart from the arguments that government and big business only get their resources from the rest of us and only have finite amounts to invest so aren’t putting money into other projects and so on, most of these phoney projects play on sick people’s desperation, just like predatory mediums and faith healers.

They make huge promises for what their research will achieve – cures for cancer, heart disease, arthritis, Alzheimers or an end to dependence on fossil fuels and global warming.

A shady alternative mystical crystal aromatherapy hoeopathic flower remedy diet guru can usually only raise false hopes in a limited number of not very bright people. Most of us have enough basic sense of cause and effect to suspect the logic behind their claims. What does this say about the people who commission research?  More charitably, very few people have the knowledge to challenge claims for genetic and nano-technologies. (That’s supposed to be the point of peer evaluation.)

MY particular rant here is that we do have ethical standards. We are so used to assuming we can’t understand what scientists are doing that we also assume that they are just pursuing knowledge for its own sake. Research scientists are somehow nobler than everybody else and wouldn’t do experiments that might be socially disastrous or unspeakably cruel or even just pointless. We tend to assume the ethical goodness of pure research despite knowing intellectually that much research is funded by people we would saw off our left foot rather than buy a used car from and scientists are as greedy, manipulative and dishonest as non-scientists.

So this rant is basically saying that formal highbrow opera science can be as spurious as the soap opera science that Bad Science identifies.

How do we counteract this sort of thing? Not accepting a claim on the basis of the authority of the person who’s making it. Questioning and testing every “fact” that we are told. Questioning our own assumptions. Abandoning ideas when they prove to be mistaken. Accepting that no one learns except by making mistakes.

Science teaching is in a particular bind here. The nature of science is supposed to be experimentation but science education necessarily mainly consists of learning lots of “facts” and memorising them.  Even arts and social science courses currently reward students most for citing endless authorities like so many medieval monks.