{"id":1902,"date":"2011-01-06T05:11:06","date_gmt":"2011-01-06T05:11:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=1902"},"modified":"2011-01-06T05:11:06","modified_gmt":"2011-01-06T05:11:06","slug":"scientific-ethics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=1902","title":{"rendered":"Scientific ethics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I am reading <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bmj.com\/content\/342\/bmj.c5347.full\">the articles<\/a> from the British Medical Journal about the Andrew Wakefield case. Wakefield was the British physician who published a fraudulent study in 1998 linking vaccines to autism, causing a worldwide scare which may have resulted in the deaths of many unvaccinated children over the years.<\/p>\n<p>What I didn&#8217;t know was that Wakefield wasn&#8217;t merely incompetent: he was a fraudster. According to the BMJ, he deliberately and fraudulently falsified data while being paid by a legal firm that was planning to sue the vaccine manufacturer.<\/p>\n<p>I also do scientific research. My research (thankfully) has nothing to do with people, vaccines, or diseases; it&#8217;s about things like historical spacecraft or obscure aspects of gravity theory. Even so, I find the idea of altering or &#8220;massaging&#8221; my data, be it for fame or for profit, totally unthinkable and abhorrent. To do so when people&#8217;s lives are at stake&#8230; The likes of Wakefield not only undermine the credibility of the entire scientific community, they also put people&#8217;s lives at risk for monetary gain.<\/p>\n<p>I wonder if Wakefield will ever face criminal charges. Perhaps he should.<\/p>\n<fb:like href='https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=1902' send='true' layout='standard' show_faces='true' width='450' height='65' action='like' colorscheme='light' font='lucida grande'><\/fb:like>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I am reading the articles from the British Medical Journal about the Andrew Wakefield case. Wakefield was the British physician who published a fraudulent study in 1998 linking vaccines to autism, causing a worldwide scare which may have resulted in the deaths of many unvaccinated children over the years. What I didn&#8217;t know was that <a href='https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=1902' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health","category-science","category-29-id","category-48-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1902"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1902\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1903,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1902\/revisions\/1903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}