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Harvard President says Hauser could lose tenure

September 22, 2010
Statue of John Harvard, founder of Harvard Uni...

John Harvard: Wikipedia

The Boston Globe reports on an interview of Harvard’s President Drew Gilpin Faust by former ABC correspondent Charlie Gibson.

The discussion, billed as a start-of-the-school year address, was held at Sanders Theatre and broadcast over the Internet. In response to Gibson’s question about why Marc Hauser remained on the faculty even after the university found him guilty of eight instances of scientific misconduct, Faust said Harvard is addressing the issue. “Integrity is absolutely fundamental in everything we do,’’ Faust said. “We have a process we have undertaken, and that process still has some part to continue because it involves federal funds.’’ Cases of scientific misconduct could result in a loss of tenure, Faust said.

Gibson said the silence from the university has been “somewhat deafening,’’ and raised the possibility that the lack of response could call into question Harvard’s research integrity and have financial implications. But Faust replied that Harvard has moved to depart somewhat from its normally confidential proceedings, in order to correct the scientific record, though it remains mindful of ongoing federal investigations. “Announcing that there were indeed findings, that was unprecedented,’’ she said.

Whether the Harvard President is actually trying to maintain and protect integrity or merely engaging in damage control is unclear. The second part of the Boston Globe article is about the honouring of Martin Peretz and how Harvard is swallowing its principles and seems to show that there is a price at which Harvard is prepared to compromise integrity.

But meanwhile the wagons continue to circle.

Bert Vaux who is a former Professor of Linguistics at Harvard University and Jeffrey Watumull who is a PhD student in Linguistics and a member of Hauser’s lab have rushed to his defence in The Harvard Crimson.

“In our experience, Marc Hauser is the consummate scientist—the most disinterested, the most rational, the most ethical. We are proud to be his colleagues. However, we are less than proud of those in the cognitive sciences reacting publicly to Hauser’s case with irresponsible impatience (disrespect for due process), unjustified slurs, and half-baked conjectures. All are interested in the truth, but as scientists we ought to consider the case reasonably and measuredly, with objectivity and fairness”.

But they forget that his nonsense started at least as long ago as 1995. One wonders whether Hauser’s defenders are part of a concerted damage control exercise. Methinks they do protest too much.

The onus of proof has shifted.

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Posted in Ethics, Science, Scientific Fraud | 1 Comment »

Habitable planet to be discovered in May 2011?

September 22, 2010

The only thing certain about forecasts is that they are more often wrong than right – and I exclude forecasts made entirely on known science or “laws” of nature where the level of uncertainty is insignificant (e.g. the sun will rise tomorrow). Nevertheless “Future History” which is a study of how forecasts evolve and how accurate they have been is a most powerful tool when making judgements about directions to follow and actions to be taken. In management “Future History” methodology is, I think, one of the most powerful tools for the development of corporate strategies and action plans.

The New Scientist reports that :

“Two researchers have used the pace of past exoplanet finds to predict that the first habitable Earth-like planet could turn up in May 2011”.

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore observed that the number of transistors that fit on a chip doubles about once every two years – a trend now known as Moore’s law. Samuel Arbesman of Harvard Medical School in Boston wants to see if scientometrics – the statistical study of science itself – can similarly be used to not only study past progress but also to make predictions.

He and Greg Laughlin of the University of California, Santa Cruz, are testing the idea with exoplanets. Over the past 15 years or so, the pace of planet discoveries has been accelerating, with some 490 planets now known. “It is actually somewhat similar to Moore’s law of exponential growth,” Arbesman says.

To predict when astronomers might find the first planet similar in size to Earth that also orbits far enough from its star to boast liquid water, the team scoured the discovery records of 370 exoplanets.

They focused on two basic properties needed for habitability: a planet’s mass and its surface temperature. They used these two factors to assign each planet a ‘habitability metric’ ranging from 0 to 1, where 0 was uninhabitable and 1 is close to Earth’s twin.

A rough estimate of each planet’s habitability was then plotted against the date of its discovery. Using different subsets of the 370 planets, the researchers made curves from the individual points and extrapolated the curves to find when a planet would be found with a habitability of 1. They then analysed the range of discovery dates to determine which would be most probable.

Habitable planets: http://t2.gstatic.com/images

Their calculations suggest there is a 50 per cent chance that the first habitable exo-Earth will be found by May 2011, a 75 per cent chance it will be found by 2020, and a 95 per cent chance it will be found by 2264.

In fact, exoplanet researchers have made forecasts of the future informally, plotting the mass of planets against the date of discovery to see how the field is progressing. “We’ve done that for many years at conferences,” says Eric Ford of the University of Florida in Gainesville. “The new aspect of this paper is putting an uncertainty on those predictions and unfortunately the uncertainty is quite large.”

One source of uncertainty is how factors like changes in funding and the development of new techniques and technology can alter the pace of discovery. “Like the stock market, past returns are no guarantee of future performance,” Ford says.

“There are always these complex factors of how science is actually done,” Arbesman agrees. But he says the forecasting technique could still prove useful, even if these factors are not accounted for directly. In part, that is because new technologies tend to take a while to ramp up, so they may not lead to sharp jumps in the number of discoveries made.

Previously, Arbesman has quantified how the ease of discovering new mammalian species, chemical elements, and asteroids affects the rate of their discovery. New species and asteroids are more difficult to find the smaller they are, and indeed larger ones are found first. For chemical elements, the opposite is true, since the bigger they are, the rarer and more unstable they tend to be.

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After Harvard’s Hausergate, now misconduct at Mount Sinai

September 21, 2010
Mount Sinai School of Medicine logo.png

Image via Wikipedia

Earlier this week, the blog Retraction Watch called attention to four recent paper retractions by noted gene therapy researcher Savio Woo of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. Today, the school said in a statement that two of Woo’s postdoctoral fellows have been fired for research misconduct and that an internal investigation has cleared Woo of any wrongdoing.

Two of Woo’s post-doctoral fellows at Mount Sinai School of Medicine were dismissed for “research misconduct,” said Ian Michaels, a spokesman for the institution. According to Michaels:

When Dr. Savio L C Woo came to suspect that two post-doctoral fellows in his laboratory may have engaged in research misconduct he notified the Mount Sinai Research Integrity Office. Mount Sinai immediately initiated institutional reviews that resulted in both post-doctoral fellows being dismissed for research misconduct. At no time were there allegations that Dr. Woo had engaged in research misconduct. As part of its review, the investigation committee looked into this possibility and confirmed that no research misconduct could be attributed to Dr. Woo, who voluntarily retracted the papers regarding the research in question. Mount Sinai reported the results of its investigations to the appropriate government agencies and continues to cooperate with them as part of its commitment to adhere to the highest standards for research integrity.

File:HippocraticOath.jpg

Wikipedia: A twelfth-century Byzantine manuscript of the Hippocratic Oath.

According to ScienceInsider, the names of postdocs Li Chen and Zhiyu Li were recently removed from Mount Sinai’s directory. Chen and Li were listed as first authors on the retracted papers. Three  major journals — Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Human Gene Therapy, and the Journal of the National Cancer Institute — recently retracted papers authored by Woo and others.

In a retraction notice issued this month, Woo wrote that:

It was discovered that some of the micrographs in two papers we published [figure 4 in J Natl Cancer Inst 2008;100:1389-1400 (1), and figure 3 in Hum Gene Ther 2009;20:751-758 (2)] are apparently duplicated. This has been reported to the institutional research integrity committee by the authors and while the outcome of an investigation is pending, the undersigned co-authors respectfully request a retraction of both papers and sincerely apologize to our colleagues.

The four papers in question focus on two different areas of gene therapy research. One pair, published in 2008 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute and in 2009 in Human Gene Therapy, investigate genetically engineered bacteria as a weapon against cancer. The other two papers describe a method for using bacterial enzymes to introduce therapeutic genes. A 2005 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports experiments in which mice with the metabolic disorder phenylketonuria appeared to be cured using this method. As a demonstration of the promise of gene therapy, that work garnered some media coverage, includingthis article in Science. A 2008 paper in Human Gene Therapy described the use of the technique in human cells.

Source: http://blog.the-scientist.com/2010/09/20/new-in-a-nutshell/

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Posted in Behaviour, Ethics, Medicine, Science, Scientific Fraud | 2 Comments »

Japan’s mighty whale mountain – to be consumed by school children

September 20, 2010
The flukes of a sperm whale as it dives into t...

Sperm whale flukes

It has become an annual ritual between Sea Shepherd and Japanese whalers, a ritual that only gets stronger, louder, and more dangerous over the years.  The Japanese claim that their whaling program is for research purposes.  However, whale meat ends up on the shelves of almost every counter in Japan, leading many activist groups to believe that it is a cover-up.

It is a series of cat and mouse games between the two sides, more often than not resulting in violence and even injuries.  Earlier that day before the collision occurred, Sea Shepherd activists threw stink bombs at the ships and dropped ropes in an effort to snarl their propellers. In the past, they have lobbed missiles including paint and rancid butter. The Japanese whalers have responded with water cannon, flash grenades (usually used for crowd control), and military-grade acoustic weaponry.

But how effective are Sea Shepherd’s tactics?  It is a question that has no answer.  Many media sources criticize Sea Shepherd for their violent demeanor.  Perhaps one of the most well known activist groups, Greenpeace, has openly pointed out that Sea Shepherd’s tactics are “morally wrong” and counter-productive as violent means only harden the Japanese public opinion and ensures whaling continues.

The Japan Times reports:

Stocks of frozen whale meat in Japan have reached 4,000 tons. That means there are about 40 million portions of whale meat being expensively stored under refrigeration ready for eating. But not enough people eat kujira (whale), and far from dwindling, Japan’s whale mountain is growing. It’s just not popular enough as a food. The Institute of Cetacean Research (ICR) — a branch of the government’s Fisheries Agency that outsources and oversees Japan’s whaling operations — urgently needs to reduce the size of the mountain. It wants Japan to eat more whale, and it has targeted school children as important consumers.

Whale meat for schools

Whale meat has been eaten for centuries in Japan, even millennia, but it was not consumed on a large scale until after World War II. Post 1945, as the country was being rebuilt, whale meat became an important source of protein. The children who ate it in their school lunches back then are now the venerable policymakers in the ICR and in government. The first potential problem with whale meat concerns its possible contamination with mercury.

A study conducted by Tetsuya Endo at the Health Sciences University of Hokkaido, and Koichi Haraguchi at the Daiichi College of Pharmaceutical Sciences in Fukuoka, investigated methyl mercury levels in whale meat on sale in Taiji, and in hair samples taken from 50 residents of the town. They found methyl mercury levels of 5.9 micrograms per gram in the red meat. For comparison, the United States Food and Drug Administration sets an “action level” of 1 microgram. In the U.S., any food with more than 1 microgram of methyl mercury is not allowed to be sold or consumed.

In residents who often ate whale meat, on average their hair contained 24.6 micrograms of mercury per gram. The figure from residents who do not consume whale meat was 4.3 micrograms, and in the Japanese population as a whole the figure is about 2 micrograms. The study was published earlier this year in Marine Pollution Bulletin.

n the September 2010 issue of the journal Current Problems in Pediatric and Adolescent Health Care, a group of public health researchers made an extensive review of the evidence for the effect of mercury exposure on children’s health. “Mercury,” the team write, “is a highly toxic element; there is no known safe level of exposure. Ideally, neither children nor adults should have any mercury in their bodies because it provides no physiological benefit.” ( DOI reference  is: 10.1016/j.cppeds.2010.07.002.).

In a paper to come in October 2010’s issue of Environmental Research (DOI: 10.1016/jenvres.2010.07.001) researchers based at Tohoku University conducted a “birth cohort” study on almost 500 mothers-to-be, and the children they gave birth to. They looked at the amount of seafood consumed by the women, the amount of mercury in the women’s hair, and then they measured the child’s behavior at age 3 days using the standard Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale.

They found that the greater the amount of mercury in the mother’s hair, the worse the child performed on the behavioral test. “In conclusion,” the team write, “our data suggest that prenatal exposure to methyl mercury adversely affects neonatal neurobehavioral function.”

This seems to be a not insignificant risk to subject school children to.

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“You left spacedock without a tractor beam?”: Mysterious force holds back NASA probes

September 19, 2010

Star Trek Generations

Star Trek Generations:

Kirk: You left spacedock without a tractor beam?
Harriman: It doesn’t arrive until Tuesday.

The Telegraph:

A space probe launched 30 years ago has come under the influence of a mysterious force that has baffled scientists and could rewrite the laws of physics. Researchers say Pioneer 10, which took the first close-up pictures of Jupiter before leaving our solar system in 1983, is being pulled back to the sun by an unknown force. The effect shows no sign of getting weaker as the spacecraft travels deeper into space, and scientists are considering the possibility that the probe has revealed a new force of nature.

Tractorbeam arriving on Tuesday

“If the effect is real, it will have a big impact on cosmology and spacecraft navigation,” said Dr Laing, of the Aerospace Corporation of California. Pioneer 10 was launched by Nasa on March 2 1972, and with Pioneer 11, its twin, revolutionised astronomy with detailed images of Jupiter and Saturn. In June 1983, Pioneer 10 passed Pluto, the most distant planet in our solar system.

pt:Trajectória da sonda Pioneer 10 em Jupiter

Pioneer 10 trajectory

Research to be published shortly in The Physical Review, a leading physics journal, will show that the speed of the two probes is being changed by about 6 mph per century – a barely-perceptible effect about 10 billion times weaker than gravity.

Assertions by some scientists that the force is due to a quirk in the Pioneer probes have also been discounted by the discovery that the effect seems to be affecting Galileo and Ulysses, two other space probes still in the solar system. Data from these two probes suggests the force is of the same strength as that found for the Pioneers.

Dr Duncan Steel, a space scientist at Salford University, says even such a weak force could have huge effects on a cosmic scale. “It might alter the number of comets that come towards us over millions of years, which would have consequences for life on Earth. It also raises the question of whether we know enough about the law of gravity.”

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Confirmed: Crops respond positively to increased carbon dioxide

September 19, 2010

Crops responded positively to future levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), but soil tillage practices had little effect on this response, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) study.

http://www.physorg.com/news203852397.html

Higher carbon dioxide levels used on crops, examined

Raised carbon dioxide improves crop yields

The first long-term study comparing tillage practices under high CO2 levels showed that elevated CO2 caused soybean and sorghum plants to increase photosynthesis while reducing transpiration-the amount of water the plants release. This resulted in increased water use efficiency, whether the  were grown with no-till or conventional tillage, according to researchers with USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS).

Plant physiologist Steve Prior, plant pathologist Brett Runion, and their colleagues at the ARS National Soil Dynamics Laboratory in Auburn, Ala., found that water use efficiency response to high CO2 was much greater for soybeans than for sorghum over the 6-year study. The scientists also compared current ambient CO2 levels—about 370 parts per million (ppm)—with levels of 720 ppm. With the higher level of CO2, regardless of tillage method, soybean photosynthesis increased by about 50 percent, while sorghum photosynthesis rose by only 15 percent. This was expected because crops like soybean, which have a C3 photosynthetic pathway, are known to respond better to high CO2 levels than crops like sorghum and corn that have a C4 photosynthetic pathway. Most plants worldwide are C3 plants.

Photosynthesis - CO2 concentration graph

Carbon dioxide concentration and Photosynthesis

Although no-till didn’t make a difference as far as crops responding to high CO2, it can greatly reduce soil erosion, conserve  , and increase carbon storage, among its many benefits.

The results of this research were published earlier this year in the Journal of Environmental Quality.

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Researchers show that peer review is easily corrupted

September 18, 2010
PhysicsWorld reports on a new paper:
Peer-review in a world with rational scientists: Toward selection of the average
by Stefan Thurner and Rudolf Hanel
1Section of Science of Complex Systems, Medical University of Vienna, Spitalgasse 23, A-1090, Austria
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1008/1008.4324v1.pdf

Just a small number of bad referees can significantly undermine the ability of the peer-review system to select the best scientific papers… Scholarly peer review is the commonly accepted procedure for assessing the quality of research before it is published in academic journals. It relies on a community of experts within a narrow field of expertise to have both the knowledge and the time to provide comprehensive reviews of academic manuscripts.Stefan Thurner and Rudolf Hanel at the Medical University of Vienna created a model of a generic specialist field where referees, selected at random, can fall into one of five categories. There are the “correct” who accept the good papers and reject the bad. There are the “altruists” and the “misanthropists”, who accept or reject all papers respectively. Then there are the “rational”, who reject papers that might draw attention away from their own work. And finally, there are the “random” who are not qualified to judge the quality of a paper because of incompetence or lack of time.Within this model community, the quality of scientists is assumed to follow a Gaussian distribution where each scientist produces one new paper every two time-units, the quality reflecting an author’s ability. At every step in the model, each new paper is passed to two referees chosen at random from the community, with self-review excluded, with a reviewer being allowed to either accept or reject the paper. The paper is published if both reviewers approve the paper, and rejected if they both do not like it. If the reviewers are divided, the paper gets accepted with a probability of 0.5.

Peer review gauntlet

Thurner and Hanel find that even a small presence of rational or random referees can significantly reduce the quality of published papers. Daniel Kennefick, a cosmologist at the University of Arkansas with a special interest in sociology, believes that the study exposes the vulnerability of peer review when referees are not accountable for their decisions.

Kennefick feels that the current system also encourages scientists to publish findings that may not offer much of an advance. “Many authors are nowadays determined to achieve publication for publication’s sake, in an effort to secure an academic position and are not particularly swayed by the argument that it is in their own interests not to publish an incorrect article.”

(This could have been written about Marc Hauser — https://ktwop.wordpress.com/2010/09/17/harvard-reviews-hausers-work-but-is-the-purpose-investigation-or-vindication/)

But Tim Smith, senior publisher for New Journal of Physics feels that the study overlooks the role of journal editors. “Peer-review is certainly not flawless and alternatives to the current process will continue to be proposed. In relation to this study however, one shouldn’t ignore the role played by journal editors and Boards in accounting for potential conflicts of interest, and preserving the integrity of the referee selection and decision-making processes,” he says.

In fact Journal Editors have much to answer for in the perversion of the peer review process which was revealed by Climategate. (The Hockey Stick Illusion by Andrew Montford— reviewed here)

Thurner argues that science would benefit from the creation of a “market for scientific work”. He envisages a situation where journal editors and their “scouts” search preprint servers for the most innovative papers before approaching authors with an offer of publication. The best papers, he believes, would naturally be picked up by a number of editors leaving it up to authors to choose their journal. “Papers that no-one wants to publish remain on the server and are open to everyone – but without the ‘prestigious’ quality stamp of a journal,” Thurner explains.

When reviewers show bias (in acceptance or in rejection) or misuse and hide behind the cloak of anonymity and are not required to be accountable then Hausergate and Climategate become inevitable.

Oliver Manuel comments: The most basic problem with ANONYMOUS peer-review is this: “That methodology is flawed and those flaws have been gradually undermining, corrupting, and trivializing American science for decades.” Anonymous peer review of papers and proposals has been steadily “undermining, corrupting, and trivializing American science” since I started my research career in 1960.

The evolution of peer review with the use of open servers in now overdue but is beginning.

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Son of Hubble — getting expensive

September 18, 2010

Successor to Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope is now slated for launch in 2014. The $5 billion mission is once again plagued by cost overruns.

Science News reports:

How can astronomers advise NASA on how to trim the costs of developing missions if no one will tell them how much the costliest mission of all, the James Webb Space Telescope, is running over budget?

That’s what Alan Boss, chair of the independent NASA Astrophysics Subcommittee, would like to know. When the subcommittee met in Washington, D.C., on September 16 and 17, Boss and his colleagues already knew that the $5 billion infrared space observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope’s successor now set for launch in 2014, was once again in need of a monetary transfusion.

What Boss wanted to know was how much. But no one in room 3H46 at NASA headquarters was willing to talk dollars and sense — when Boss, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., asked if anyone in the room could cite a dollar figure, his question was met with a silence as deep as any in the vast empty reaches of intergalactic space.

Fear of making a huge and embarrassing error like the one that produced Hubble Space Telescope’s infamously misshapen primary mirror may be causing JWST scientists and engineers to go overboard and do too much testing, Weiler said. The comprehensive report on JWST due next month, led by John Casani of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., will cite instances where engineers on the mission may be overzealous in testing equipment.

JWST gobbles up about 40 percent of NASA’s astrophysics science budget.

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Oh my ! Canada Goose will need a visa for Europe

September 17, 2010
Canada Goose (Branta canadensis)

Canada Goose (Branta canadensis)

Biodiversity be hanged ! Alien wildlife must be banned from Europe.

Urgent call on EU to stop billion-euro ‘alien invasion’

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11286432

The Canada Goose (Branta canadensis) was the worst culprit, having the biggest impact on both the environment and economy.

Leading experts on invasive species are demanding Europe-wide legislation be put in place by next year to tackle the threat to native wildlife. The researchers want urgent action from the EU to protect Europe’s indigenous species from these “alien invaders”. The scientists are meeting at the Neobiota conference in Copenhagen. They are demanding Europe-wide legislation to be in place by next year to ensure the threat doesn’t worsen. Invasive species are defined as those that are introduced accidentally or deliberately into a place where they are not normally found.

Piero Genovesi is chair of the Invasive Species Specialist Group (ISSG), a global network of experts on invasive species. He told BBC News that the figure of 12 billion Euros represents a significant underestimate of the impact of alien species. “We’re asking the EU to rapidly develop and approve a policy on invasive species, fulfilling the formal commitment agreed by the council of European ministers in June 2009,” Mr Genovesi told BBC News. “This is urgent, we would like this to be in place by next year.”

A Ruddy Duck drake

The Ruddy Duck is just one of more than 1,300 alien species living in Europe which threaten biodiversity.

Scientists gathered at the conference are calling for urgent action by the European Union to implement laws similar to those that already exist in countries like New Zealand and Australia.

Wolfgang Nentwig, from the Institute of Ecology and Evolution in Switzerland has just published one of the first detailed studies of the impact of alien birds in Europe. The Canada Goose (Branta canadensis) was the worst culprit, having the biggest impact on both the environment and economy.

There is something somewhat paradoxical in banning the adventurous and entrepreneurial wild life to protect the diversity of those that are failing !

Update!!

Dr Guy Consolmango, curator of the Pope's meteorite collection

Dr Guy Consolmango

The Catholic church is more open minded than EU scientists. Pope Benedict XVI’s astronomer has said that the Catholic Church welcomes aliens. Highly evolved extra terrestrial lifeforms may be living in space and would be welcomed into the church – “no matter how many tentacles”, the Pope’s astronomer has said.

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Harvard reviews Hauser’s work – but is the purpose investigation or vindication?

September 17, 2010
Harvard is reviewing all “relevant” work by Marc Hauser . But there is a large element of “damage control” and “vindication” of Hauser’s co-workers which is mixed in with the investigation. It is to be hoped that they will be able to resist the temptation to stand on the position that if further misconduct by others cannot be rigorously proven then these others can be acquitted. Now that Hauser’s misconduct has been established the onus of proof shifts – and must do so. The default position must be that all his work is now tainted unless shown beyond reasonable doubt to be otherwise.

The focus must be on investigation and not on a pre-planned vindication or on “rescuing” the money spent if the work is suspect.

http://www.thecrimson.com/

With a federal investigation now underway, much of Hauser’s research has been called into question—and with it, the annals of literature that have grown out of it. In response, the Psychology Department at Harvard has set in motion a project to review Hauser’s work and to determine the areas of his groundbreaking research that can be salvaged.

Cotton-top tamarind

In the last 10 years alone, Hauser has published 143 articles and four books, work that has helped form the foundation for an entirely new field of science. “It creates a lot of uncertainty for people in those fields,” said a Harvard psychology professor who asked to remain anonymous, stating that the situation is still evolving. “They may begin to worry about whether they can trust other findings from that lab.”

The department established a committee to begin a process that could include combing through decades of research. “We are starting a process in collaboration with the animal cognition community about how to deal with this,” Carey said. “Clearing the record is the way you deal with the integrity of the science.” Carey said that the department has also assumed the responsibility of vindicating any department members—students and colleagues alike—who may have worked with Hauser in the past.

According to his curriculum vitae, Hauser has advised 24 Ph.D. students and overseen 15 post doctoral students. The CV lists 221 published papers authored or co-authored by him. And in an academic web of peer research, hundreds of published articles cite and work off of Hauser’s research. And in an academic web of peer research, hundreds of published articles cite and work off of Hauser’s research.

Hauser has made a name for himself by executing novel research techniques in the field of animal cognition. His work with primates and cotton-top tamarinds—the subject of Hauser’s only article to have been retracted—has involved a unique set of research skills and costly access to the animals.

“You don’t want to throw out about two decades of groundbreaking work, but you also don’t want to build a science on shaky ground,” said the psychology professor. “How do we rescue millions of dollars of research?” the individual added.

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