they did not. in the case of tessier-levigne, who was responsible for getting him out of there? not the NIH. it was a fucking Stanford undergrad journalism student.
let that sink in. a heroically persistent undergrad had to do the job that the NIH was morally and legally obligated to do.
this "science is self correcting" trope needs to stop being propagated right now. and you can claim eventual self consistency if it resolves a hundred years from now, which would obviously be too little too late. how many people were hurt, how much research dollars were wasted in the meantime. "well, Eventually" is not good enough, and the self correcting slogan is just running cover for entreched interests in the face of their misdeeds.
Yeah, but that's actually not really true, the undergrad just reported in the campus newspaper what other scientists had found and reported in pubpeer:
https://pubpeer.com/search?q=Tessier-Lavigne
Kudos to the kid for breaking the story before other media sources, but the actual scientific investigative work here was done by people with scientific training
I'll add that all systems are self-correcting given sufficiently long timescale. (Or they die out and we're none the wiser due to survival bias)
Science isn't any special in this regard. Even the Catholic Church was self correcting (it doesn't do Inquisitions or sell indulgences any more, does it?). As was Nazi Germany (WWII fixed that, hurray for... whatever that was).
To be honest the real "self-correcting" mechanism is some kind of Darwinian survival system where you have to ensure the wrong things don't perpetuate. Government funding really doesn't help with that unless the mechanism deciding which projects/people to fund have a really good model of the real world (i.e. "truth").
they did not. in the case of tessier-levigne, who was responsible for getting him out of there? not the NIH. it was a fucking Stanford undergrad journalism student.
let that sink in. a heroically persistent undergrad had to do the job that the NIH was morally and legally obligated to do.
this "science is self correcting" trope needs to stop being propagated right now. and you can claim eventual self consistency if it resolves a hundred years from now, which would obviously be too little too late. how many people were hurt, how much research dollars were wasted in the meantime. "well, Eventually" is not good enough, and the self correcting slogan is just running cover for entreched interests in the face of their misdeeds.