Support Pullquote, upgrade to Pro!
(Or just tweet your Pullquote for free!)
With Pullquote Pro, you'll get to:
- share on Facebook
- schedule tweets
- tweet from multiple accounts
- edit quotes
- customize colors
- change fonts
- save and index quotes
- private quotes
Choose a plan: $5/month $50/year (includes free access to any new features)
Recent quotes:
The Horrors of Hepatitis Research | Carl Elliott | The New York Review of Books
The names of physicians once celebrated for ethically questionable research are finally being removed from medical school buildings, awards, and lectureships. In 2008 the University of Pittsburgh discontinued a lecture series named for John Cutler, one of the principal researchers in the Tuskegee syphilis study from 1932 to 1972 and the Guatemala syphilis study of the mid-1940s. Ten years later it removed the name of Thomas Parran, another Tuskegee researcher, from a building in its School of Public Health. In 2021 the University of Pennsylvania took similar measures with Albert Kligman, the dermatologist responsible for decades of barbarous experiments at Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia, renaming the Kligman Professorship and phasing out a lectureship named after him. A movement is now underway at the University of Cincinnati to honor those who died in the Pentagon-funded radiation experiments conducted there in the 1960s and early 1970s by Eugene Saenger, a radiologist honored by the university with the Daniel Drake Medal, the College of Medicine’s highest honor.
Of all the infamous research scandals that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, however, none is more contested than the one over the Willowbrook hepatitis study. Between 1956 and 1972 a team of researchers from New York University led (beginning in 1958) by Saul Krugman deliberately infected institutionalized, mentally disabled children at the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island with the hepatitis virus. Along with the Tuskegee syphilis study and the 1963 cancer study at the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in Brooklyn, Willowbrook is part of what the historian Susan Reverby calls the bioethics “holy trinity” of research horror stories. Yet Krugman was widely celebrated among his peers. The year the study ended, he was elected president of the American Pediatric Society. Later he was honored with some of medicine’s most prestigious prizes, including the Robert Koch Gold Medal (1978), the John Howland Award (1981), and the Mary Woodard Lasker Public Service Award (1983). Even today Krugman has defenders. The Oxford Textbook of Clinical Research Ethics argues that misguided criticism of the Willowbrook study has “cast a restrictive ethical pall” over pediatric research.
Jonathan Haidt's Take on Social Media and Teen Mental Health Is Statistically Flawed
What Haidt has done is analogous to what the financial industry did in the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis, which was to take a bunch of mortgage assets of such bad quality that they were unrateable and package them up into something that Standard & Poor's and Moody's Investors Service were willing to give AAA ratings but that was actually capable of blowing up Wall Street. A bad study is like a bad mortgage loan. Packaging them up on the assumption that somehow their defects will cancel each other out is based on flawed logic, and it's a recipe for drawing fantastically wrong conclusions.
Jonathan Haidt's Take on Social Media and Teen Mental Health Is Statistically Flawed
Academics face strong career pressures to publish flawed research. And publishing on topics in the news, such as social media and teen mental health, can generate jobs for researchers and their students, like designing depression-avoidance policies for social media companies, testifying in lawsuits, and selling social media therapy services. This causes worthless areas of research to grow with self-reinforcing peer reviews and meta-analyses, suck up grant funds, create jobs, help careers, and make profits for journals.
Eva Amsen, also an ex-scientist, current epic science communicator and Outreach Manager for F1000Research.
Next up, Eva gave an account of how F1000 is pushing the boundaries of the current publishing models by allowing fast publication combined with post-publication peer review. She gave a nice historical overview of publishing, pointing out that since the first publication in 1665, and the first instance of peer review as we currently know it in the mid-20th Century, nothing much has changed about how we publish until recently. Journals used to act as the gatekeepers for science, when research was published in paper issues, and this is what made it restrictive – page limits. Now though, we don’t have those limits thanks to the online world, but still these limits are often still imposed.
Scholarly publishing is broken. Here’s how to fix it | Aeon Ideas
Researchers are still forced to write ‘papers’ for these journals, a communication format designed in the 17th century. Now, in a world where the power of web-based social networks is revolutionising almost every other industry, researchers need to take back control.
Is the 'blockchain revolution' coming for science? GT&V
Blockchain-based services, and those based on similar technology, are what we call ‘decentralised’. This means that services and power/control are taken from a single point and distributed across numerous local points instead. This means that there is no single point of failure, and that services/control become owned by community-based structures instead.
Can you imagine legacy publishers like Wiley, Elsevier, and SpringerNature being too happy with that? I can’t. Elsevier, and others like Digital Science, are trying to pull researchers into a system where they control the entire research workflow, from data collection all the way through to evaluation (more on this here). Great for business, bad for science, and especially scientific freedom – a basic co-opting of ‘open science’. Decentralised services, therefore, provide an alternative to this, and a highly disruptive potential.
Many published psychology experiments lack evidence of validity, study finds -- ScienceDaily
Chester and Lasko investigated 348 psychological manipulations included in peer-reviewed studies. They found that roughly 42% of the experiments were paired with no validity evidence, and that the remaining psychological manipulations were validated in ways that were extremely limited.
"These findings call into question the accuracy of one of psychology's most common practices and suggest that the field needs to strongly improve its practices in this methodological domain," said Chester, an assistant professor in theDepartment of Psychologyin theCollege of Humanities and Sciences.
Psychiatrist Engaged in Research Misconduct, Says Gov't Watchdog
"I acknowledge there were regulatory issues raised, which I don't deny, but they were all unintentional," he told Medscape Medical News. "I regret the decisions that were noted, but, again, I acted with my best intentions, meaning I wanted to advance science, and therefore it's particularly sad and devastating for me personally, because I never intended to do anything wrong or act against any regulations or anything."
