Opinion Please
The meat fraud affair
Category: Since you asked
» article in pdf
The Dutch scientific world is staggered. The renowned psychologist Diederik Stapel, who recently told the world that he and some colleagues had found that meat-eaters were more egotistical than vegetarians, admitted to having made up the research data. He said that he had been making up data for years.
Is this fraud committed by Stapel, who worked at Tilburg University, a rare and sad excrescence of science? Or is it just the tip of the iceberg? Biophysicist, Professor Cees Dekker (AS), believes that scientific fraud is very rare. “If you publish false data in high level journals, you are bound to get caught,” he says. “It’s a stupid strategy. People who do it have a twisted mind.”
In 2003 Dekker was himself involved in the unmasking of fraud, which lead to the so-called Schön scandal. A post doc in his group tried in vain to redo certain experiments done earlier by the German physicist, Jan Hendrik Schön. Schön unjustly claimed that he had developed a transistor on the molecular scale using organic material.
Material researcher, Professor Barend Thijsse (3mE), also believes that fraud is rare. He attributes that fact to peer review, but not just the standard type of peer review in which scientist assess papers of their peers prior to publication. He believes scientists are always looking over each other’s shoulders. “The whole idea in science is that people can elaborate on each other’s work”, he explains. “So scientists always keep in mind that they have to perform their research in such a way that it can be repeated.”
Prof. Thijsse however also believes that the pressure to publish is increasing: “You either publish or perish. Research money is being distributed via a system of competition. You only get money if you have proven to be better than the others. When I was young, research was more of a fair game.”
According to hydrologist, Professor Huub Savenije (CEG), this fraud had nothing to do with publication pressure, but rather “with a craving for media attention”. “The fact that Stapel got away with it for such a long time may also say something about his research field,” Prof. Savenije adds. “I cannot image getting away with fraud in hydrology. This could in part have to do with the fact that in physics and earth sciences experiments are often relatively easy to repeat. In psychology, experiments can be vague and hard to repeat under the exact same circumstances.”
But scientific misconduct isn’t always that straightforward, as in the meat fraud affair. All scientists cope with outliers, data that do not fit the rest of the numbers, presumably because something went wrong with an experiment. The boundary between good research and falsification can then be very subtle.
Prof. Dekker however believes that is a different debate: “In our group we have daily discussions about outliers and about the way we present our results in general. We seek the way things are, not to fabricate a way things should be. There is no hint of fraud in that.” (TvD)
