People Who Make the Science Community Look Bad

[Greenday]

I never really thought about this kind of stuff into I got into college and now it starts to affect me. There are a lot of bogus scientific articles being posted and when it finally comes out that the person was full of crap, the entire science community as a whole looks bad.

Not too long ago, a friend of mine, who is also a chem major, found an article on how some guy was able to find a way to use microwaves to split hydrogen particles. Without being trained in the sciences, especially chem, most people look at the article and say, "Hydrogen fuel!" No, absolutely not. Nothing to do with hydrogen fuel. And that's not the only thing that bugs me about this. Not only is it very misleading, why, if he came out with some huge new discovery, does he immediately tell the press? To me, that completely discredits him. I know people who do research. One of my friends recently managed to create something that no one has ever been able to create before. And the first thing you do is get it patented.

So yea, stuff like this, along with many, many other things, makes real scientists look bad, and really discredits real research that is going on.

[Boozy]

Not only is it very misleading, why, if he came out with some huge new discovery, does he immediately tell the press? To me, that completely discredits him. I know people who do research. One of my friends recently managed to create something that no one has ever been able to create before. And the first thing you do is get it patented.

Actually, the first thing most scientists do is publish their results in an academic journal so they can be subjected to peer review. Then other scientists will be able to (ideally) reproduce these findings in independent studies. Until that happens, the discovery will not be accepted by the scientific community.

I suppose you could get a patent for some things, although not many scientific discoveries meet patent requirements. But if I were a scientist, I'd be more interested in seeing advancements in my field than hoarding an idea to make money.

Science reporters for various magazines and newpapers scan scientific journals for the latest breakthroughs. Then they write an article for their papers for popular consumption, blowing the research findings out of proportion if that's what their editor demands.

Without knowing what study you are referring to, I have to give this chemist the benefit of the doubt and assume its not his fault if popular media published his findings or skewed the meaning of them.

[Greenday]

Well, my friend and the teacher she was doing the research with filled out the patent info and sent it out. It's not the money part of it that's important, though it is nice. It's having your name on something so credit goes where credit is due. You don't want your work to be called someone else's. And next weekend she is going to a big scientific convention out in Spain to present her findings on it.

As for the story I had referred to, going to the press with his findings was the first thing he did. He didn't publish anything at all. There's been no information of him talking about what he found with anyone of the science community. These are the types of stories my Analytical Chem teacher would have us read during class and then would discuss with us what is wrong with the articles and what was discovered. The chem department REALLY stresses not fudging data. Two kids in an Organic Chem lab were caught fudging data. I'm pretty sure the teacher who caught them petitioned that they be kicked out of the Chem program.

[Seshat]

I suspect that if you publish in a scientific journal, you can challenge any matching patent whose submission date is later than the datestamp on your submission to the journal. You have evidence of prior art, you see.

However, challenging and/or defending a patent is a pain the butt. So I can see a case for simultaneous patent submission and journal submission, or a case for doing them in either order. Not being a research scientist, I'll defer to experienced research scientists for which case is strongest.

Some of the problem is science journalists misinterpreting or overhyping scientific discoveries. But some of the problem is independent researchers who don't understand the peer review process or don't have the credentials to get published in the peer review journals.