Blogobowitz #4 - 

"Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!" 

- Sir Walter Scott, 1808

There are four readings for this assignment, and it's all about getting things wrong, from different levels, and with different - widely different - intentions. Although not each and every form and shade of deceit is listed in the four readings for this assignment, their echo teaches us that one may never rest on one's laurels, so to speak. In the general changes of society, even what may have been established and settled law - not unlike human rights - may still need to be radically reviewed and updated. Walter Scott. Dred Scott. Great Scott. The very tenets upon which our society is built, moored in seemingly primordial mud, may yet become untethered. Science, we are taught, should be irrefutable. Yet, we're all in danger - yikes! - maybe what we've believed isn't true at all. It's important to be on the RIGHT ship, after all.

The first of the readings - Laurie Sampsel, regarding plagiarism - is straightforward enough. Don't cheat, you might get caught, the punishment might be much worse than you've bargained for. Strangely enough, there is no carrot to complement her shtick. Nor is mentioned anything about either an incomplete citation, nor too much about citations that are simply wrong. One might assume it's even more advantageous to get a citation (quote) screamingly wrong than to leave it out altogether. For me, the most important takeaway was that paraphrasing (call it P'ism lite) is also tabu. I might have thought that could have been acceptable, as long as no five words were repeated in an academic work verbatim. Getting out our thesaurus, yes, that might turn the tide - but frankly it never really occurred to me NOT to do original work. If you have to earn the doctorate, it's the process that one has to master, and after that - necessarily - the material. If you've shortcutted the process, well, you don't deserve the rewards - and the feelings of guilt and remorse, one would think, would be more than enough to regret the actions for a lifetime. Case in point - a previous Minister of Defense in Germany, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg - from a fine family and extraordinary education - had been caught cribbing material for his thesis. The roar that followed in all of Germany (2011) meant that not only would his Doctor title be revoked (which in Germany is a form of punishment uniquely in itself) - the public pressure forced his resignation from his ministry, pulling out of politics (he was rumored to be material of which future Chancellors are made), he was eventually forced to leave Germany. He's been in hiding in the USA for these past 10 years, and people haven't forgotten or forgiven. In his case, it wasn't a slap on the wrist - him being caught plagiarizing on his thesis absolutely destroyed his family name, his career - and altered German upper-level politics. And since the search for similar shenanigans was continued, thanks to faster computers and theses being available online - other German politicians were forced to resign, as their Ph.D.s were shot down one by one. Extraordinary!

The next reading - Roni Caryn Rabin, for the NYT - talked about medical plagiarism, and the concept of falsified statistics. An Indian doctor who probably thought up the figures for 700 hospitals covering many thousands of patient studies who were "cased" for reactions to the Coronavirus. Charlatan? Salesman? Crazy? It's hard to say why someone might take advantage of a breach in human research to try to pull a fast-track article that could in fact have toxic results - literally - for millions of patients, who might have been treated by physicians who actually believed what they were reading in the New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet. 

The Hippocratic Oath was perhaps never in this world so hypocritically betrayed as badly as in the machinations here.

The other two readings focused on two sides of the same coin - a retraction blog - based on retractions, not on the subject of the retraction - and the rationale for having such a blog in the first place. Important to note is that the time necessary for retractions is still way too long - and that misogynous articles can still require decades to be weeded out - but the pace is accelerating. 😊 

Clearly, in a world of "alternative facts" much, much more is at stake regarding the truth than cutting corners. Each of us needs to stand firm - with integrity - in our lives, and in our studies, in our politics and in our science. Truth matters.

~ Alex Jacobowitz ~