For my first post of the New Year

[johnny9fingers]

I’d like to pass on this lovely article:

www.theguardian.com/science/2020/jan/06/nobel-prize-winner-demonstrates-best-way-apologize-chemist-frances-arnold

When a paper you have put your name to has to be retracted, this is how you do it. It is easy to admire Nobel Prize winners. Even when they lose the plot like Watson. But when they have the moral integrity of Frances Arnold well... words don’t suffice, so chaps like me tell our kids of her greatness instead.

Comments

[tcpip]

I mean, this should be the norm.

1) I have a proposition.
2) The evidence does not support it.
3) Therefore my proposition was wrong.

How hard is it?

[johnny9fingers]

Yeah, but then money and other stuff seem to get in the way for many folk, or if they need to retract a paper they do it quietly.

How hard should it be? As hard as human ego and greed will make it, at a guess.

[tcpip]

And, in an act of grim dialectical beauty, the ego is due to a lack of inner strength, and the greed most prevalent when their needs are not under threat.