"Junk Science" 2005

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Rod Van Meter <rdv () alumni caltech edu>
Date: January 3, 2006 7:16:36 PM EST
To: dave () farber net
Subject: "Junk Science" 2005
Reply-To: rdv () alumni caltech edu

Dave, for IP, if you wish.  We've discussed Milloy before, here's my own
list of "junk science" items for 2005.  Let's all hope for a better
2006!

My corresponding blog entry has a few links for these, at
http://rdvlivefromtokyo.blogspot.com/2006/01/junk-science-2005.html

                --Rod


Steve Milloy is Fox News and the Cato Institute's political pundit who
pretends to discuss science, though in reality he's an ideologue using
science to score his political points. He talks about what he calls
"junk science", by which he means science that disagrees with his
politics -- namely, any science that suggests that totally unfettered,
laissez-faire capitalism requires any sort of check or balance. Milloy's
not interested in what is important science or good science or bad
science, he's interested in pushing a particular politico-economic
agenda. To that extent, sometimes he finds good science that disagrees
with his politics and disses it. Sometimes he finds good science that
agrees with his politics and pushes that. Occasionally, he finds real
bad science and rightly castigates its authors, funders, and overseers.

Milloy has published his list of "Junk Science" for 2005. I haven't had
time to go through his list in detail and attempt to refute it point by
point, but the line, "In a bid to blame alleged global warming for
hurricanes and tsunamis...the United Nations..." alone suggests a lot.
He's either misled or deliberately distorting the landscape by
suggesting that any significant number of real scientists, government
officials or even policy advocates would blame a tsunami on global
warming.

As further evidence, I offer the list below -- the list of one working
scientist/engineer (namely, me) on what could be considered the big
stories of the year in ethics and science. The absence of the Hwang item
from Milloy's list is proof enough by itself that the issue is not the
science, it's the politics; there was no bigger story in science this
year regarding ethics. It was a blockbuster breakthrough, making
headlines around the world, offering both profound new fundamental
science and the possibility of medical treatment for many conditions. It
was also, apparently, false -- though the verdict is not final, so let's
not be marching with pitchforks and torches just yet.



      * Tops of the list has to be Hwang Woo-Suk and his stem cell
        cloning team. He claimed to have created 11 patient-specific
        stem cell lines, but that now appears to be questionable, at
        best. Likewise, Snuppy, his cloned puppy, is now being
        questioned, and his team seems to be unable to provide the
        expected evidence of their claims.
      * The New Orleans levees demonstrated that Mother Nature is  
not to
        be messed with, not for political gain, squabbling, or general
        incompetence.
      * The fuss over the discovery of the Kuiper Belt object 2003  
EL61,
        a planet-sized object orbiting far from Earth. Mike Brown's  
team
        at Caltech, which has found many important solar system objects
        in the last decade, got scooped by Santos-Sanz and Ortiz on  
this
        one. Or did they? Someone using the same computers as
        Santos-Sanz and Ortiz in Spain accessed telescope log files
        showing where Brown's team had been looking just days before
        announcing the discovery based on two-year-old data. Hmm.
      * The Bush aministration's shift of money away from fundamental
        computer science research. You could throw in a whole bunch of
        administration moves that I disagree with, including folding
        PITAC into PCAST.
      * MIT immunologist Luk Van Parijs, fired in October for
        fabricating data on short interfering RNA in mice. He was  
also a
        postdoc in David Baltimore's lab at Caltech, though I haven't
        seen any suggestion that any of his misdeeds took place during
        his sojourn in Pasadena.
      * The continued "nudge-nudge, wink-wink" of "scientific whaling".
        Note that I'm not saying it's necessarily wrong to eat whale
        meat, just that the current approach is not honest. These are
        separate questions. But what legitimate scientific purpose  
could
        be served by continuing to kill them? I'm no marine  
mammalogist,
        but I find it hard to believe that we really need to be killing
        tens or hundreds of whales a year to answer some obscure
        question.
      * Ninety Japan apartment buildings, most in and around Tokyo, for
        which seismic safety were faked. They were supposed to  
survive a
        magnitude 8 earthquake, but officials now believe a weak six
        could take them down -- and we have those every couple of  
years.
        Arguably, this is a consequence of shifting the building
        inspection responsibility from the government to the building
        contractors, who obviously have an incentive to hire the
        "friendliest" inspector they can find. Technically "junk
        engineering", not "junk science", but it's my list, and another
        example of don't try to fool Mother Nature.
      * Dover, PA and the rest of the intelligent design movement, for
        continuing to waste our time and money and water down or ruin
        science education. The "right" result was reached in both the
        court case and the election, but we shouldn't even be having
        this conversation in 2005. Science tells us what happened;
        religion tells us why. End of story.
      * As long as I'm talking about intelligent design, it makes me  
sad
        that both President Bush and Bill Frist have endorsed its
        teaching.


All that and not a single mention of global warming.
You could make an entire list out of that alone.



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