In science, anyone who discovers an error and remains silent is an accomplice. The duty not to look the other way

For this writer, it is painful to have to report, at times at length, problems gradually uncovered in scientific publications – that is, in those documents on which, in theory, the consolidation of new knowledge and the advancement of science are based – especially if such problems do not fall into the category of errors from which one can learn something – and thus make progress – but, on the contrary, are the result of the distortion of the bibliometric evaluation system that now prevails within the scientific community.

Despite this – that is to say, despite the temptation to gloss over matters, to avoid facing up to them and to refrain from publicly exposing what occasionally comes to light, particularly when it concerns systemic failings which are therefore more damaging and harder to rectify – I believe that the ethics of knowledge outlined with crystal-clear clarity by the Nobel laureate Jacques Monod – that ‘duty to truth’ which entails a responsibility for every researcher, every scientist and, I would say, every intellectual in general to candidly expose their own errors and those of others, whoever may have discovered them.

Please note: ‘self-correction’ – that term invoked to demonstrate the superiority of the scientific method (or methods) over others – does not merely imply the correction of one’s own errors, but must be understood as a form of action undertaken by the entire scientific community: it is the entire scientific community – or rather, the majority within it – whose opinion must shift in the face of an error; self-correction is therefore a collective endeavour, in which everyone – through the famous ‘peer review’ process – has a duty to correct any errors that come to their attention, whether by chance or through research.

Not only that: this process, within the limits of what is feasible, must be transparent to the public, because only in this way can trust in science – and the justification for the superiority of its method – be upheld; highlighting errors, and showing how and when – that is, under what circumstances – they are corrected, is the best way to illustrate how and why progress is made in humanity’s understanding of the natural world.

That is why I was once again (as has happened many times in the past) unpleasantly surprised by certain comments prompted by my latest article on a serious issue of falsified data uncovered by Sholto David in the scientific literature.

“It’s nothing new”, “why are we surprised?”, “it’s been like this for at least 20 years” – this is the gist of such comments. When confronted with the obvious rejoinder that such comments are generic—and consequently with the request to explain what they are based on—it transpires that certain colleagues have not only been grappling for decades with the difficulties of replicating the data published by the basic research necessary, for example, to identify new targets for innovative therapies, but that there are even those who have devoted considerable effort to attempting laboratory replicas, identifying the problems, in short, in demonstrating that what has been published does not hold up. But then, one wonders, with those data in hand, and with that awareness of so many problems in the scientific literature, why did you not follow the example of David – to stick with the most recent case – or that of myself, who for some fifteen years has been correcting instances of errors, inaccuracies, fraud and whatever else I happen to encounter, in every forum and by every means at my disposal?

It is true: we are not. But we are all – in industry and the general public, researchers and scientists alike – bound by that ethics and that responsibility I referred to, which Monod so aptly articulated, and these do not allow us to shirk an indispensable part of the scientist’s work: the duty to scrutinise, to critique, to uncover and to report potential errors, so that the entire community can examine a result that has flaws – or is presumed to have them – and determine how sound the published work is.

It cannot be the case that, simply because we work in industrial development, we are not interested in the state of scientific knowledge; nor can we afford to look the other way – a habit all too often adopted for the sake of convenience, to avoid causing a disturbance, to spare ourselves the effort, and to avoid debate – as if scientific literature or the publications of others were of no concern to us, except when they provide valid support for what we are doing.

Turning a blind eye, ‘because we aren’t paid for this’, is the scientific manifestation of that lack of civic spirit which is leading, more generally, to the dissolution of our societies; and precisely for this reason, I shall conclude by making my own a phrase by Gramsci from "La città futura", which, strangely enough, also applies within the academic and scientific community: I hate the indifferent. In the hope that the benevolent reader will excuse this impassioned plea of mine – perhaps a little too impassioned – I would remind everyone that in science, recognising an error – and perhaps even demonstrating it in the laboratory – without communicating it to others is no less culpable than producing a forgery and failing to remove it from the path of knowledge.