The Broken Pipeline 2: The Funding is Not the Entire Issue

I previously noted a new website (brokenpipeline.org) and glossy report on the career “pipeline” problem currently experienced by biomedical research science in the US. This report catalyzed more discussion in the blogosphere on the issue (SciGuy, Jonathan Gitlin, Greg Laden, Dr. Free-Ride; Update 3/13/08: Orac, Harvard Science on a related Congressional hearing, The Neurocritic, Chris Seper). My readers from the past year will recall that I’ve discussed these issues at some length.
My readers will also recall that I have some pointed views on what I see as cultural biases against young investigators at the stage of grant review that have little (specifically) to do with the amount of money available. That is today’s topic for discussion.

How Not To Read A Retraction: Blogging, Biomedical Research, and Publication Ethics

As we discussed contemporaneously here at DrugMonkey, Nature published a retraction last week of a paper from the laboratory of Nobel Prize winner Linda Buck. At his eponymous blog, fellow ScienceBlogger Greg Laden also posted a piece on the retraction. Unfortunately, Laden’s piece egregiously misrepresented both the impetus for the retraction and the relationship of the retracted work to Buck’s Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (there is absolutely none). PhysioProf, ScienceBlogger and enthusiastically engaged member of the biomedical research community, clearly pointed out Laden’s errors in the comments to that piece.
In a further unfortunate development, Laden refused to acknowledge his multiple mistakes, dug in his heels, and stood by his mischaracterization of the significance of the retraction. Only after extensive back and forth between PhysioProf and Laden, and after numerous other commenters rightly took Laden to task for his blunders, Laden belatedly edited his post to try to correct his errors, to explain why he made those errors, and to editorialize quite broadly on the nature of blogging (and blog commenting), the social organization of the biomedical research enterprise, and publication ethics.
Continuing the unfortunate nature of this entire series of events, Laden’s broad editorializing–which also occurred in part via his own comments to both his piece on the retraction, as well as another meta-piece and comments thereto discussing, inter alia, the disagreement over Laden’s analysis of the retraction–contained a number of additional gross misconceptions about how modern biomedical research occurs, the ethics of authorship in biomedical research, blogging ethics, the nature of so-called “trolling”, and how the Nobel Prize is awarded. PhysioProf is fascinated by each of those topics, and Laden’s series of blunders provides us an excellent context in which to explore them, which we do in detail below the fold.