Dear Charlie, Do you mean that small doses of fraud should be accepted as a form of natural evolution? Or perhaps you were suggesting that genuine errors/mistakes are acceptable in 1/10000 due to the high costs of spotting them?
D From: CCP4 bulletin board [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Carter, Charlie Sent: 19 October 2012 13:09 To: ccp4bb Subject: [ccp4bb] Fwd: [ccp4bb] PNAS on fraud Begin forwarded message: Date: October 19, 2012 4:40:35 AM EDT To: Randy Read <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Subject: Re: [ccp4bb] PNAS on fraud This thread has been quite interesting to me. I've had a long interest in scientific fraud, which I've generally held to be victimless. While that view is unsupportable in a fundamental sense, I feel strongly that we should understand that error correction costs exponentially more, the smaller the tolerance for errors. In protein synthesis, evolution has settled on error rates of ~1 in 4000-10000. Ensuring those rates is already costly in terms of NTPs hydrolyzed. NASA peer review provided me another shock: budgets for microgravity experiments were an order of magnitude higher than those for ground-based experiments, and most of the increase came via NASA's insistence on higher quality control. Informally, I've concluded that the rate of scientific fraud in all journals is probably less than the 1 in 10,000 that (mother) nature settled on. I concur with Randy. Charlie On Oct 18, 2012, at 2:43 PM, Randy Read wrote: In support of Bayesian reasoning, it's good to see that the data could over-rule our prior belief that Nature/Science/Cell structures would be worse! -- This e-mail and any attachments may contain confidential, copyright and or privileged material, and are for the use of the intended addressee only. If you are not the intended addressee or an authorised recipient of the addressee please notify us of receipt by returning the e-mail and do not use, copy, retain, distribute or disclose the information in or attached to the e-mail. Any opinions expressed within this e-mail are those of the individual and not necessarily of Diamond Light Source Ltd. Diamond Light Source Ltd. cannot guarantee that this e-mail or any attachments are free from viruses and we cannot accept liability for any damage which you may sustain as a result of software viruses which may be transmitted in or with the message. Diamond Light Source Limited (company no. 4375679). Registered in England and Wales with its registered office at Diamond House, Harwell Science and Innovation Campus, Didcot, Oxfordshire, OX11 0DE, United Kingdom
