I’m calling it right now: 2009 sucked major ass. It was an okay year for me, at least: another year down of killin’ bitches and throwin’ em in ditches. [1] But for society as a whole, there’s little to look back on with fondness, especially in science.

Remember how we bitched about the Nobel in Chemistry going to the discovery of the structure of the ribosome? That was silly of us. The science they won it for was, at least, based on facts. Consider the biggest science news stories of the year:

At the top of the shit heap was Climategate, that overly-publicized clusterfuck of epic proportions that forced us to have a dialogue about the nature of science and how it affects policy-making.

And then we find out that 12 highly-cited structures in the PDB were faked. And then this business in Peter Schultz’s lab with two high-profile articles in Science and JACS getting retracted, of which the chemistry blagosphere was privy to quite a while back, leading (perhaps indirectly) to the researcher in question not getting tenure at UT Austin.

And then, just this week, we find out that nearly 50 papers, if not more, in Acta Crystallographica C and E were retracted after it was found that two authors were taking structures and replacing atoms and fudging unit cells![2] I cannot, for the life of me, understand why anyone would want to do this, in Acta Cryst. no less, which is little more than a slightly peer-reviewed repository nowadays. Disgusting.

And with all of this tremendous bullshit, therein lies a insidious trend: as the world becomes more dependent on technology, we need its constituents to become greater champions for science. And in America, the opposite trend is happening. The scientific process allows people to be wrong; the process of gaining knowledge rationally is meant to be self-correcting. Being wrong is one thing. But fraudulent reports such as these not only take longer to correct, it undermines everything science stands for. Science is not about landing yourself a great job, it’s not about showing off your intellect, nor fame, nor glory, nor a means to your personal end. But the scientific establishment nowadays relies on its successes for the sake of its own power structure. And in 2009, that hubris was exposed in no small way.

So, goodbye, 2009. Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.

ETA: But hey, there were some high points to the year. For example, a majority of you reading this have survived the year, indicating that celebrities do not, in fact, read our blog. We also found out that you can oxidize alcohols with sodium hydride, not to mention the irony of iron cross-couplings. And that you can continue to publish the synthesis of molecules that kinda look like other things if you’re famous(ly crazy) enough. Hell, if you’re *really* famous, they don’t even have to look like anything. I’d also call 2009 the year of “what the christ is this shit?” but that’s pretty much every year, isn’t it?

[1] Er, by “killin’ bitches” I mean doing a lot of chemistry, and “throwin’ em in ditches” I mean publishing some of it.
[2] List of Acta. Cryst. retracted papers here and here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009 at 4:01 pm and is filed under epic rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.