[HN Gopher] Retraction of Roomtemperature superconductivity in a...
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Retraction of Roomtemperature superconductivity in a carbonaceous
sulfur hydride
Author : YakBizzarro
Score : 65 points
Date : 2022-09-27 10:30 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| beanjuice wrote:
| In passing, it is just a retracted paper. However, the lab
| website of the corresponding author offers a comprehensive time
| machine to the impact the announcement of this work originally
| had [1]. It seems to be that, in a collaboration between three
| graduate students, some background data which was foundational to
| the interpretation of other findings may have been fabricated. As
| a researcher, all i can think when a major retraction happens is:
| what a nightmare.
|
| Every author of a manuscript should have full faith and knowledge
| of the results and presented data, but in a massive piece of work
| such as this, how can you? Imagine for a second, one graduate
| student doesn't want to face the wrath of an Assistant Professor
| one day, on purpose or not mishandles data. A year or two later
| it turns out you have not only wasted your time, but also the
| time of 500+ citing paper authors, numerous grant proposals, etc.
| Alongside the Alzheimer's retraction this year, the thirst for
| impact factor and the problems this causes seems to be yet
| another unsolvable problem in academia.
|
| [1] https://labsites.rochester.edu/dias/
| dbingham wrote:
| Not unsolvable - just difficult. Systematic problems driven by
| social incentives are very difficult to solve. But they can be
| solved. Especially if the institutions in question get behind
| solving them.
|
| In the case of science, a lot of the bad incentives are created
| by a combination of the institutions (university
| administrations and granting agencies) and by the scientists
| themselves. It'll take both working together to change the
| incentives and solve the problems. But it can be done.
| uup wrote:
| Fabricating data is fraud. The reputation of the university
| is harmed. The public is harmed by potentially providing
| grants for follow up research. Other researchers are harmed
| by wasting their time. It seems like one potential fix would
| be to prosecute people who perpetrate such fraud.
| pca006132 wrote:
| Who should you prosecute in this case? The PI? The
| students?
| [deleted]
| mturmon wrote:
| Prosecuting the PI for fraud might be possible. I'm not
| able to google for cases where that has been done, but
| I'll bet it's occurred before. I'm doubtful that the
| student could be prosecuted.
|
| One basis for a fraud claim would be the statement that
| accompanies most grant applications, generally of the
| form, "X is the PI of the proposed work, and has the
| responsibility to ensure the quality of the investigation
| and scientific results..." -- and the PI signs their
| name, and takes the money. (And so does a university
| official.)
|
| One example: https://research.wustl.edu/about/roles-
| responsibilities/prin...
| jjk166 wrote:
| > It seems to be that, in a collaboration between three
| graduate students, some background data which was foundational
| to the interpretation of other findings may have been
| fabricated.
|
| This is a gross misinterpretation. The authors were forthcoming
| that they used a model of the background conditions instead of
| direct measurements, as is standard practice for this type of
| experiment, and they stand by their results.
| Blackthorn wrote:
| Disappointed but not surprised to see graduate students thrown
| under the bus like that. They're an easy target for blame:
| powerless and also by the time the retraction rolls around, not
| there anymore. Very easy to blame someone who can't hit back.
| evouga wrote:
| Other than more carefully noticing, "hmm this data looks like
| a polynomial curve, maybe it's fabricated?" I'm not sure what
| you propose the professor do instead.
|
| The professor is not going to duplicate all of the
| experimental measurements done by the students and it seems
| totally natural to me to trust the student is not committing
| fraud, until there is evidence otherwise.
| tsbischof wrote:
| Duplication of work prior to publication is standard in
| many experimental fields, like synthetic chemistry. In some
| cases the cost of an experiment is high enough to be a
| problem, but conductivity measurements are not really that
| exotic.
| Blackthorn wrote:
| Taking the professor at the word that it's those graduate
| students' fault (who very conveniently can't defend
| themselves and haven't been at the University since 2020)
| and not the fault of the professor is a bit strange. It
| might after all be their fault, but it could have easily
| been some manipulation done or demanded by the PI who
| wanted a publication.
|
| What I'm trying to say is, I'm not willing to take the
| professor at their word here when their word is so
| extremely convenient for them.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Duplicating everything is unnecessary. Duplicating the
| thing which is foundational to a groundbreaking discovery
| is necessary. Beyond fraud there could be just an honest
| mistake or some fluke confounding factor.
| infogulch wrote:
| Maybe there should be a "reproducability risk" metric,
| calculated with the transitive closure of all published
| results that reference a paper that has yet to be
| reproduced. This could help researchers calibrate how
| much they should trust a result and indicate when a
| foundational paper really needs to be reproduced.
| PlsDntBan wrote:
| jinto36 wrote:
| I'm not sure why then they couldn't just apply a more standard
| background subtraction method and show that the result still
| holds. Note that this approach was "room temperature" but under
| very (very) high pressure.
| beanjuice wrote:
| In retracting the work, the editors at Nature were in some way
| certain "why" they couldn't apply a more standard method.
| jjk166 wrote:
| It's not that they did the background subtraction in a non-
| standard way, it's that they didn't have a measurement of the
| background to subtract (it being too hard to measure directly),
| so they instead estimated what the background would look like
| and subtracted that. Some of their peers are claiming their
| estimate is bad, but the researchers are sticking by it.
| [deleted]
| routeroff wrote:
| That was a bit expected, and the reason given by Nature are not
| the whole story. Some of the same authors also claimed to have
| found metallic hydrogen [0], which is also highly controversial
| since the proof hold mainly on pictures taken using a Iphone
| camera.
|
| [0] https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.aal1579
| routeroff wrote:
| This short article in Science [1] give more information and
| summarize the whole story.
|
| [1] https://www.science.org/content/article/something-
| seriously-...
| tom-thistime wrote:
| If you haven't worked in science, please keep in mind that the
| literature has never been seen as holy writ. Wrong stuff gets
| published all the time. You have to read critically.
|
| Not excusing sloppy work or whatever it was. Just pointing out to
| any laypeople out there that science has never had (and never
| required) a perfect professional literature. Far from it.
| dbingham wrote:
| Not just that, but it would be impossible to achieve. One study
| should never be taken as truth - but rather a single data point
| among many. It's only when we have many data points that give
| us a trend line that we can begin to say we know something.
| TillE wrote:
| Right, any casual reader who wants good information should
| look for meta analyses. You should almost never draw
| conclusions from a single study.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| Pulcinella wrote:
| My copy of the _CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics_
| (basically an encyclopedia of scientific facts. Things like
| melting points, conductivity, etc.) has an opening from the
| current editor explaining that when he took over as editor he
| tried to track down the sources of a lot of the data.
| Unfortunately a lot of the sources for the data wasn't listed,
| missing, didn't seem to exist, or existed but was incorrect. So
| he undertook a program of re-doing a lot of the studies and
| finding new, accurate sources. Definitely gave me sort of
| cyberpunk vibes of "this data just showed up one day and nobody
| knows where it came from."
|
| Edit: I've also run across cases where data is just incorrect
| and you don't know how. E.g. a chemical ordered form a supplier
| is listed as having a solubility of X you the most you can ever
| get to dissolve is Y and X is something like 13.7 times higher
| than Y so it's not like a simple misplaced decimal.
| zalo wrote:
| That's a shame; I hope they're allowed to come back in a revised
| article.
|
| ...or perhaps Nature felt it was too early for a discovery of
| this magnitude to be published ;-)
| Jolter wrote:
| I'm sure the experiment could be repeated with correct data
| processing. The authors probably won't do it, unless they think
| it will provide a positive result.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| That sort of thinking is surely a great loss to scientific
| progress? You need a few goes by different labs to show
| failure, so you know that if you were going to try that
| technique you need to think again, surely?
|
| Sometimes one should probably even do experiments that seem
| self-evidently futile.
| shishy wrote:
| Retractions are a healthy part of the process -- they shouldn't
| be frowned upon to the extent that they are. Me and my team just
| submitted a paper outlining a system we're using at scite to
| detect retractions more quickly from the titles themselves
| (instead of manual curation, or relying on publisher updates,
| which can be spotty / inconsistent). Happy to share details if
| anyone is interested, since that data will be open for free.
|
| email: ashish AT scite.ai
| chrisbrandow wrote:
| Due to the typically discrete nature of the phenomnenon in
| question, chemistry and molecular-scale physics seems to the
| worst aspects of the reproducibility crisis in science more
| broadly. It's just harder to hide either mistakes or deceptions.
| The experiments can typically be setup by another single lab
| hoping to build on the work, rather than requiring the
| collaboration of countless others.
|
| It's not a terrible outcome that a paper was published then
| retracted merely 2 years later as opposed to 1-2 decades later.
| nyokodo wrote:
| This is why it's best to adopt a skeptical attitude about
| published science at least until after a reasonable time period
| has passed for general scrutiny and retraction but maybe always.
| This is especially important if the subject is exciting,
| surprising, relates to some political controversy, or anything
| else that tends to provoke motivated reasoning.
| dbingham wrote:
| Honestly, we too often forget that science works in the
| aggregate. There are far, far too many things that can go wrong
| in any individual study - from biases, to mistakes, to outright
| fraud, to just bad luck and weird statistical flukes. It's only
| after we've had several replications that we can really say we
| think something might be true, and only after _many_
| replications that we can say we "know" something.
|
| This aspect of science seems to have been lost both in the
| public's imagination and - all too often - in the institutions
| own understanding and approach.
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