by Peter Nollert
May 11, 2010 17:30
When I visited protein crystallization laboratories in China 4 years ago I was very impressed with the fast pace of activities directed towards building new science infrastructure and the mere manpower that was poured into the field of protein crystallography. I had never seen so many young protein structure students in one place. That bodes well for accelerated scientific progress in structural biology within our generation.
While I'm not familiar with the funding situation and working conditions, I have the impression that there may be a lot of pressure in some crystallography labs in China to publish papers. How else can you explain the recent retraction of 70 papers from ActaCryst? (check here and here). The ActaCryst editors provide a background story with some of the details.
This series of falsifications seems to be limited to small molecule crystallography and, of course, such incidents of scientific fraud are not limited to China - see the recent case uncovered at the University of Alabama in the US.
In this context though I was reminded of a piece that the Associated Press recently ran on scientific misconduct in China that I find highly disturbing: in this article Rao Yi, dean of the life sciences school at Peking University is quoted as saying 'Academic fraud, misconduct and ethical violations are very common in China,' and 'It is a big problem.' Link
W H A T ? ? ?
"What?" - as in: what is done to get rid of the problem?
The good news is that as scientists we're trained to be professional skeptics and fake structures can and will get discovered (especially if the structure factors are provided).
Trust is good, control better*,
Peter
*Everybody knows where I plagiarized this from, right?
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