Marc Hauser, Head of Harvard's Canine Cognition Lab, Accused of Scientific Misconduct

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    Marc Hauser, Head of Harvard's Canine Cognition Lab, Accused of Scientific Misconduct

    Marc Hauser, who up until a few days ago was heading the Canine Cognition Lab at Harvard, has been accused of misrepresenting his results in at least one key paper on animal cognition, which reported an ability in tamarin monkeys to generalize patterns the way human infants do when learning language.

    "Harvard University psychologist Marc Hauser, a well-known scientist and author of the book Moral Minds, is taking a year-long leave after a  lengthy internal investigation found evidence of scientific misconduct in his laboratory.  ... An internal examination at Harvard University . . . found that the data do not support the reported findings. We therefore are retracting  this article." - Boston Globe

    I hope they continue to operate the lab in his absence. If so, this might also give them an extra incentive to be as meticulous as possible in how they set up their experiments, as well as in how they read their data.

    LCK

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    One question I have about this, is what effect will pulling that one paper have on other papers, written by other scientists who based their theories or hypotheses on Hauser's work?

    LCK

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    My guess is that's Hauser's academic career over and anyone who has ever collaborated with him is going to have an uphill battle to prove themselves trustworthy. This happened to an academic I know when I was at uni. Someone he had collaborated with a few times was found to have fabricated data. A number of academics that had collaborated with him quickly got together and wrote an open letter to the scientific community saying they had no idea and had nothing to do with it. It was very scary for the person I knew, because science is largely based on trust. How well you do gaining grants as a scientist depends largely on your standing within the scientific community, which depends on the quality of your work. Fabricating or fudging data is about the worst thing you can do as a scientist, so if you are suspect of it then how can anyone trust your work? You're work is worthless. 

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    corvus
    My guess is that's Hauser's academic career over

     

    I hope that's not the case. I'm keeping a wait-and-see attitude, hoping it's more a matter of sloppy record-keeping than deliberately fudging data.

    LCK