Gather 'round, kids, and let me tell you a story about science ethics. (thread)
TLDR: Yesterday at 4pm my intern (Julien Kuhn de Chizelle) handed me the data that demonstrates that OTHER data I've been working on since is 2011 fatally flawed.
So I'm not going to go into what the data was, it's not all mine, and it's not what I normally do for a living
But I did start working on it in 2011. And it was amazing! Surely a science or Nature paper in the making.
(Funny, the topic of study will still probably will be a nature paper, but the data we've looking at for years is wrong)
Anyway, I got sick and nearly died in 2012. Took me a long time to get back on my feet literally and figuratively.
So this project got sent to the back burner. As I said, it wasn't what I normally do.
But in the last year or we finally got a manuscript ready to submit.
This manuscript is sitting on my desk, and will probably never see the light of day.
BECAUSE MY INTERN RUINED* EVERYTHING
*Did a cool experiment we couldnt do before, got a totally unexpected result and proved that our old data was flawed
*Did a cool experiment we couldnt do before, got a totally unexpected result and proved that our old data was flawed
Now it does suck to work on something for 6+ years to have it turn into nothing.
But if I'd submitted that manuscript the day before, I would be retracting it, and that is worse.
The only thing worse would be to publish something, and discover it is wrong, and have to retract a published paper.
That's not true. There is one thing that is EVEN WORSE: We could have just submitted the paper knowing that it was wrong.
Nobody else can easily do this test we just did to prove the old data is wrong.
Trust me when I tell you lots of scientists would have submitted the manuscript anyway.
I can't give you names, but if they published two papers that say the exact opposite thing in the same year, then . . . well . . . that sure is weird!
Especially if one of those is in Science or Nature.
So if you've read this far, you might be asking, "Why aren't you more upset about this setback?"
Reason #1: This is science. Science is neither cruel nor kind, just brutally fair.
Science doesn't give you the answer you want when you want it, it gives you the answer you deserve at the time you ask.
Reason #2: We have other much more robust data that proves the original hypothesis was right.
The old data is meaningless, but that doesn't mean the hypothesis is false. That's an important point.
There will still be a REALLY COOL paper, it just won't be mine. This is also fine with me.
Reason #3 I got to teach my intern a valuable lesson about one aspect of the ethics of science. Maybe that is the most important thing of all. (end)
