Chapter 1 - Cell Motility and Scientific Cheating
1.1 Introduction
1.2 Scientific Responsibility
1.3 Life through the Microscope
1.4 What is Described in "A Habit of Lies"?
1.5 What does "A Habit of Lies" aim to do?
Facts are like cows, if you look them in the eye long enough they generally run away. (Dorothy Parker)
1.1 Introduction
These are the facts, as announced in 1642 by Dr. John Lightfoot, later Vice-chancellor of Cambridge University. God created the heavens and the earth on October 23rd, 4004 BC, at nine o'clock in the morning. During the next six days, the Holy Trinity created man and all creatures now inhabiting the earth, as well as the fossilised remains of many now dead species.
These are the facts, according to modern science. Life began in the primordial soup that made up the earth's oceans some four billion years ago. For three billion of those years, evolution by natural selection gradually made life more complex and diverse, while the emergent life changed even the earth itself as primitive plants consumed the carbon dioxide of the atmosphere and replaced it with oxygen. The earth became cooler with this change in its atmosphere but soon the first animals developed to complete the cycle, consuming oxygen and returning carbon dioxide to the air. Life floated, then swam, through the seas until, about 400 million years ago, a short time in comparison to what had gone before, it sprouted and crawled its way onto the land. Animals have changed little since that time - reptiles, dinosaurs, mammals and men being but variations on some fishy mudskipper.
This work will not discuss whether the biblical or scientific descriptions of our origins is the true one. It will not seek to reconcile them but neither will it select one for ridicule; it will note that these two claims have more in common than is immediately apparent, particularly in respect of their social contexts. In fact, socially, it is difficult to distinguish them, with large, powerful groups proclaiming both as essentially factual.
Today's scientists might dismiss Dr. Lightfoot's calculations as baseless and suggest that the attention given his work reflected not its merit but his own elevated social status. They may claim that their own approach is free from such distortions, but "A Habit of Lies", a work about science not religion, will challenge such claims. Because it is a work about science it will treat "facts" as those generated by science but it does not suggest that Dr. Lightfoot's conclusions were insincere. Indeed, a principal conclusion will be that all facts, including those of science, owe a large part of their "factuality" to the social power of those who advocate them, regardless of whether the power so exercised is confined within science, or manifested in wider society. This book will review one field of biology, presenting its arguments and reasoning in a social, as well as scientific, context. The resulting portrayal of science will be very different from that found in most textbooks.
All roles in life carry both rights and responsibilities. Examples of responsibilities are filling in tax returns and paying the resulting taxes, while the benefits those taxes pay for are rights. If false tax returns are submitted, correspondingly distorted tax bills result and, though it is often tempting to mislead, truth is an essential part of this duty. In science, as in tax returns, there are strong temptations to mislead but such reporting corrupts the integrity of scientific knowledge, leads readers to form distorted judgements and wastes both time and money. Accordingly, it is generally held that a scientist has an essential duty to report his work truthfully.
A widely-accepted foundation stone of scientific logic involves a process of elimination, requiring all available possibilities to be considered with incorrect ideas discarded when they fail to predict experimental results. Just as the police must consider all possible suspects during an investigation, so a scientist must, as a matter of professional responsibility and competence, consider all possible explanations when forming his conclusions. However, some scientists are able to ignore these duties, while the safeguards built into the scientific bureaucracy, supposedly to ensure quality, do not prevent such malpractice but rather enable it. It is this type of false reporting, omission of alternatives, that will be described and documented in one field.
The processes of science and the law have often been compared, and the analogy is appropriate, both professions involve investigations and concern for truth. The philosopher Stephen Toulmin (1972) made wide use of the parallel and, during the 1970s, there was even serious talk of scientific courts where controversies could be aired and debated. In fact, scientific debate could not be conducted in a courtroom environment and such courts could never work but, nonetheless scientists could learn a lot from courtrooms. Litigants before the courts, whoever they are, have the formal right to expect "due process," a phrase that summarises well what science should offer the people and ideas standing before it. Sadly, the courts often fail to deliver the due process of their ideal, with power or deception overriding truth. The resulting problems are major topics of judicial discussion. Abuse of power and deception occur in science as well as the courtroom and the problems they cause are just as real. However, in science such behaviour is much less well recognised and documented, which is why this book was written.
All life is based on cells. Everywhere we look, the microscope reveals a world of tiny single-celled animals and plants, quite invisible without its aid. These creatures are guided through their miniature world by sense organs; they move, this way or that, according to information they glean from their surroundings. Large animals, such as human beings, are colonies of cells working together as a single organism. These cells also move and sense the world around them but they do even more, they communicate and cooperate, working together towards common goals. The sight of tiny cells moving under their own power, with apparent purpose, is both a source of great wonder and the origin of many questions concerning how they achieve such feats.
The questions that arose from wonder are now pursued for entirely practical reasons, with research funded by medical research agencies, charities and drug companies in all developed countries. Scientists have answered some of the questions and, as is always the case, raised others. How cells move, sense their surroundings and communicate is intimately concerned with the properties of their outer surface.
The subject matter of this book probes the surface of living cells with a phenomenon closely related to movement. The field came about because of a series of observations that can be summarised as, "capping and particle movement on the surface of motile eukaryotic cells." That sounds complicated but the observations to be explained are straightforward enough and will be described in chapter 3. All those questions about how cells move, communicate and respond to their surroundings would be answered more clearly if we understood how and why they cap and move particles. This topic has been the subject of many years of investigation, research and debate. The debate has been very influential and its ideas have strongly influenced the wider field of motility, how cells move, which represents perhaps 5-10% of all research in cell biology and a considerable investment in research funds.
Broadly, three proposals (models or hypotheses) have been advanced to explain the experimental observations. Although three ideas have been put forward, debate, investigation and reporting have portrayed the field as if only two of those models are possibilities, with virtually no explanation of how the third hypothesis was eliminated. This fact alone signals a poor investigation but it will be argued here that the proposals receiving the attention are plainly incorrect. The substantive evidence indicates that the neglected idea is actually the best.
"A Habit of Lies" is hardly the title of a biological review, not even one that challenges received orthodoxy and, if this work ever occupies a library shelf, it is unlikely to sit alongside treatises on cell biology. Other, darker themes run through these pages - themes older, but less celebrated, than the microscope, the cell or science itself; themes of power, deception and the generation of myths, here expressed in a scientific context. This book chronicles how the investigation of cell surface movement has developed and how inadequate the debate has been. With falsehood by omission being routine, it is hard to see how readers of the scientific literature could be other than misled about the status of the evidence. It is these debating practices that will be described, then considered in the light of social studies of science.
Chapter 1, the present chapter, introduces the topics to be discussed. With more than thirty pages, chapter 2 is quite long and reviews the logical and philosophical principles underlying science. In fact this is short for such a review and some readers might have preferred still more detail. Even so, others will find it tedious and it is to help them that much of chapter 2 is contained in its own appendix that can be omitted with little loss of continuity. Chapter 3 reports the experimental facts needing to be explained, the subjects of capping and particle movement themselves. Chapters 4 to 7, explain the theories that have been proposed. This whole book stands or falls according to the rationality of chapter 7, as it was written to correct neglect of the wave model described there. Chapter 7 is therefore the core of the book and is addressed to you, the disinterested reader, to persuade you that the wave model is certainly feasible and almost certainly correct.
Many of the field's most prominent workers have been contacted and asked to explain their rejection of the wave model and their omission of it from debate. The matter has also been drawn to the attention of scientific authorities. Chapters 8 to 10 the summarises, quotes from and commented upon the replies received
Chapter 11 considers the consequences of ignoring the wave model, touching on some research avenues that might have been pursued and considering the cost of its omission. Excluding opportunity costs, the rigid support of wrong ideas is estimated to have cost roughly £1 billion, mostly in taxpayers' money. Chapters 12 to 15 are the social chapters and not directly concerned with capping and particle movement as such. They review this kind of behaviour from ethical, psychological, historical and sociological perspectives, arguing that denial of evidence and neglect of alternatives are recurrent social themes in science. The social origins of such things are discussed and presented as one among several prevalent forms of scientific cheating, all analogous to similar acts occurring in the wider community. Chapter 16 is a concluding summary, while a glossary, bibliography and list of addresses complete the work. The internet site will archive relevant data, such as the full text of the letters discussed. Chapters, 11 to 15, are not present in the internet version, which site contains only their table of contents.
"A Habit of Lies" aims to
- Strengthen the understanding of the role played by social factors in science.
- Contribute to, and call for, a codification of professional responsibility.
- Document debate in the field and point out its inadequacy.
- Record the responses of relevant figures in the scientific community.
- Make the arguments more widely known, thus cautioning workers in other fields against uncritical acceptance of published conclusions from the capping studies.
- Show the reader that the wave model is viable and probably correct.
© Copyright John A Hewitt.
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Last Modified 21 October 2005