• Question: If you could change any past scientists methods. Who would it be and how would you change it?

    Asked by doctorwhomadperson to Davie, Gemma, James P, James V, Nuala on 28 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: James Verdon

      James Verdon answered on 28 Jun 2012:

      Hi doctorwho,

      So long as scientists are genuinely trying to find out the truth about the world, then I wouldn’t criticise their methods too much (so long as they are ethical). However, unfortunately there have been cases of intentional scientific fraud, where a scientist fakes his results in order to prove their theory when their experiments don’t work. This behaviour is completely unacceptable for scientists – we have to accept the results of our experiments, whatever the results may be. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to rely on other people’s results.

      One of the most recent and well known cases was Hwang Woo-Suk. He was a South Korean, working on cloning and genetics. He published a series of high profile scientific papers that won him a lot of accolades. However, it turned out that the whole thing had been faked. In 2006 the fraud was uncovered, and Hwang ended up with a suspended prison sentence.

      So if I could go back in time and change anything it would be to prevent anyone from committing scientific fraud and faking their data.

    • Photo: James Pope

      James Pope answered on 28 Jun 2012:

      Hi doctorwhomadperson,

      I tink the most serious case of bad practise in science in the UK, was around the MMR Vaccine. Dr Anderw Wakefield wrote a paper that said 12 kids had developed autism because of the MMR injection and this got a lot of media attention.

      Wakefield’s work was shown to be really bad because he had ignored all the cases were the MMR vaccine hadn’t caused autism and his failures were so severe he was struck off (banned from being a doctor). The paper he wrote was retracted in 2010, but it took 12 years for this to be cleared up and resolved during which time a significant number of children didn’t get the MMR vaccine and didn’t complete the course of individual injections which could leave them exposed to the measles, mumps or rubella viruses.

      I would, if I could go back and not let Andrew Wakefields work be published so the whole media hype could never happen.

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