Comments on: Mexican Chemistry Scandal! http://ivan.tubert.org/blog/archives/2006/02/13/mexican-chemistry-scandal The life of a Mexican yalie computational chemistry perl hacker en Mon, 06 Oct 2008 14:37:19 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=1.2.1 by: Anonymous http://ivan.tubert.org/blog/archives/2006/02/13/mexican-chemistry-scandal#comments Fri, 10 Mar 2006 20:53:03 -0600 336:102@http://ivan.tubert.org/blog blog.tenderbutton.com www.paulbracher.com/blog Check out the Sames scandel on these two blogs. JACS beats out JOC and Tetrahedron. blog.tenderbutton.com
www.paulbracher.com/blog

Check out the Sames scandel on these two blogs. JACS beats out JOC and Tetrahedron.

]]> by: Sergio Granados http://ivan.tubert.org/blog/archives/2006/02/13/mexican-chemistry-scandal#comments Tue, 21 Mar 2006 13:38:05 -0600 342:102@http://ivan.tubert.org/blog It is interesting how “La Jornada” actually portraits the facts implying that the publication of these papers was done knowing that the results were false. I think they are overreacting, everybody, including the scientists, is prone to making a mistake, if anything, they were simply a little sloppy. I have encountered similar situations in my research, were the NMR looks as if I got the compound that I was expecting and other analysis techniques give you ambiguous results. Fortunately in all these cases I have caught the mistakes because my compounds did not react as I was expecting them to or the NMR started to look “funny” after an extra round of purification. My point is that this looks like an honest mistake although we would have to read his thesis to find out if he simply misinterpreted his data or if he intentionally concealed the results indicating that the synthesis was not yielding the expecting products. If the whole thesis was based on the system which does not work, then his degree should be reevaluated (because this would mean he was “sloppy” during several years). However, if this merely constituted a chapter or a section of the dissertation then it was an honest mistake which could happen to anyone who is too eager to publish. It is interesting how “La Jornada” actually portraits the facts implying that the publication of these papers was done knowing that the results were false. I think they are overreacting, everybody, including the scientists, is prone to making a mistake, if anything, they were simply a little sloppy. I have encountered similar situations in my research, were the NMR looks as if I got the compound that I was expecting and other analysis techniques give you ambiguous results. Fortunately in all these cases I have caught the mistakes because my compounds did not react as I was expecting them to or the NMR started to look “funny” after an extra round of purification. My point is that this looks like an honest mistake although we would have to read his thesis to find out if he simply misinterpreted his data or if he intentionally concealed the results indicating that the synthesis was not yielding the expecting products. If the whole thesis was based on the system which does not work, then his degree should be reevaluated (because this would mean he was “sloppy” during several years). However, if this merely constituted a chapter or a section of the dissertation then it was an honest mistake which could happen to anyone who is too eager to publish.

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