Case study 1: William Summerlin
In 1974, William Summerlin was conducting research in transplantation immunology in the laboratory of Robert Good at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. The research dermatologist had reported successfully transplanting skin between genetically unrelated animals by culturing the skin in a special laboratory medium. The research had major implications for the field of tissue transplantation, but neither he nor other scientists had been able to reproduce his original results.
When Summerlin used a black pen to alter a patch of black mouse skin transplanted onto a white mouse, animal care technicians quickly discovered the fraud. Subsequent investigation by Memorial Sloan-Kettering revealed poorly conducted experiments and misleading statements about research results made by Summerlin in reports and to colleagues. All of his work was discredited, but the 1973 article in Transplantation Proceedings was never retracted.
Oh, if only such research fraud was so easily uncovered. The book I took this from, Unreliable, by Csaba Szabo, noted that “the most lasting contribution of Summerlin’s career seems to be that the term “painting mice” is still used to describe fraud and deception in research. As the footnote to this paragraph says, however, “Most scientists who use this term don’t even know where it comes from.”
I took an instant liking to the term. Later in the book, the author goes on to describe the work of Stanford professor John Ioannidis, who along with Joshua Nicholson wrote an article entitled “Conform and Be Funded”, published in Nature, and severely paywalled, that is, a copy will cost you a $200 annual subscription. Basically the article says that the more highly funded a research project, the less likely it is to be useful.
“The greater the financial and other interests and prejudices in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true. … the hotter the scientific field (with more scientific teams involved), the less likely the research findings are to be true.”
President Eisenhower in his farewell address famously warned us about the “military industrial complex”, perhaps a fait accompli even then. Lesser known in the same speech is this warning:
There is an “… equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite”
Today most scientific fields depend on government grants, and the competition to get them is intense. Careers are made and destroyed by the ability of researchers to attain financing for some vitally important study, as they all are. It gets even more intense than just wanting the money for labs and assistants (and in virology, bovine serum and antibiotics), but also for the institutions involved. 50% of the grant goes to them to cover overhead. Publish or perish literally means put out some research, get a grant, or get lost.
Trump in his current term of office, did, to his credit, attempt to pare back the institutional bonus from 50% to 10%, but the proposal died on the vine.
I mentioned Michael Mann in my title to this piece … his hockey stick comes to mind as a piece of research funded in the normal manner, but also in the Ioannidis framework. Mann wanted to create proxies using tree rings showing that Earth’s temperatures had increased in the last 1,000 years, but as can be detected with just a little intelligence, scientists and others behind him were looking for something very big and dramatic. Mann gave them what they wanted … a graph that eliminated the Medieval Warm period, but also showed a marked spike in temperatures in our current time – see the red at the right hand side?
Mann was warned that tree rings were not reliable, and indeed, when he got to 1960 or so they began to show a cooling trend, a decline. “Hide the decline” and “Mike’s nature trick” entered the vocabulary. Mann then switched to mechanical temperature records to complete the project, and the decline disappeared, and the spike came to be.
Others have redone Mann’s work and found it wanting, especially in his choice of trees to use … too much information for this purpose, but the point is that certain sets of tree rings were found to be wanting, and should not have been used. Other scientists came along to “replicate” Mann’s results, using the same discredited rings! It’s a closed circle … I am dropping the last “j” word there.
And the point here is easy to absorb … there can be a search for truth, and a truth can be a desired result. In climate science, much government money is at stake. As Ioannidis mentioned, quoted above, “… the hotter the scientific field (with more scientific teams involved), the less likely the research findings are to be true.”
I sit back now as I look at the hockey stick as a part of our history, and see how it was, I suspect, demanded of Mann, and produced to great fanfare using some really well-crafted propaganda techniques, including inclusion in the movie featuring Al Gore’s as spokesman, An Inconvenient Truth, but also in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports. It’s not that the graph contains anything that is necessarily true, but rather that it was presented in such a shocking manner than it gained undue attention, and became a iconic masthead for the Climate Change movement, then called Global Warming.
The aspect of the whole show that has me in awe is this: The graph was nothing, a piece of work easily torn to shreds by other scientists in the field, but it served its purpose, created a huge sideshow, and cemented the iconic image of global warming in the public mind. It was extremely well-crafted public relations. I put it right up there with the following ad:
Advertising does not get any better than this, or that stick.
This reminds me, I am reading a detective novel by Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) called The Long Goodbye. Chandler more or less invented the hardboiled detective, giving us Philip Marlowe, a genre that is wildly imitated to this day. All that aside, I offer his words in closing here, page 186 of the book, and you’ll see why it caught my eye, even written as it was in 1953 – nothing has changed:
“She hung up and I set out the chess board. I filled a pipe, paraded the chessmen and inspected them for French shaves and loose buttons, and played a championship tournament game between Gortchakoff and Meninkin, seventy-two moves to a draw, a prize specimen of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, a battle without armor, a war without blood, and as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency.”
Piece of Mindful 
I’m trying to make heads and tails of that plot you have of years vs deviation from the temperature at year 1950 or so. The gray is the error bars, correct? GTFO (get the fuck outta here) on that for their error model which they claim to be +/1 0.5 degrees Celsius going back to the year 1000? That tree ring shit is garbage science, tree growth is likely most correlated with precipitation and local growth conditions, like insect infestations, etc. No way you can differentiate between a few degrees annual temperature change with that method. Moreover I don’t know the exact date for invention of thermometers, especially for measuring the “climate”, as in a weather station, but it can’t be more than 200 years.
On facebook an old friend from college, who is super woke, posted that because it was snowing in November in South Carolina that was proof of climate change. This particular guy collects old sports cars from the 1970s and 1980s,. and I really wanted to reply that if that’s the case then he should send all his old gas guzzling cars to the crusher to save the earth. Anytime there’s a cold spell, or hot spell, or heavy rain, it has to be climate change.
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I missed something with my first comment, that they included data from thermometers in the red data points. So how can “historical records” give temperature data? I’m completely serious – some guy wrote down it was cold in London on November 23, 1025, so that gets recorded as a temperature? And the error bars are +/- 0.2 C on that plot? Holy cow what they get people to believe. Like the astrophysics who claim to know the temperature of the universe 15 picoseconds after the big bang.
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Thermometers only go back to the 1800s, so the use proxies. As proxies go, there are better ones than tree rings. But in the right hands, statisticians and the like, and careful selection of samples, they can work with tree rings.
But I like ice cores better.
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Mark have you looked into the science of ice cores? I think a deep dive into this method is appropriate. When i have time I can do this, but I am highly suspicious on the claims it is an accurate proxy to “infer” the temperature. Based on all the steps required to produce a “result”, the idea that there are these neat little layers for each year, which they know exactly, and can extract a sample that can tell them exactly what the global temperature was? There are so many assumptions and places where error can become introduced, including the use of mass spectrometers for quantification. The lay public is probably not aware of this but mass spec is best for qualitative analysis, such as matching the identity of a substance you are looking for, but not for absolute quantitation, which is not possible, but +/-20% error in measurements is achievable with careful spiking of internal standards.
All in all I see ice cores as busy work for mediocre scientists who have insufficient talent for real work, and they can spend years chopping up ice blocks to produce straight lines with random trending and massive error bars. And they can sell a lot of scientific instruments for useless research which makes many happy and employed.
Also if your comment is deleted with backspace hit “control + Z” and it will undo the deletion.
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Ray, I have looked into the science of ice cores, and I do want to discuss the subject with you, perhaps later this week when not so busy.
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Ice cores are simply proxies. When you don’t have contemporary evidence, you look for other ways to ascertain temperature. By ice they have captured oxygen molecules, and in releasing them can determine their isotope, 12 or 14, more likely to find one or the other in colder or warmer temperatures. No one is calling it a weather forecast, no one is claiming precise accuracy, just a general picture. When that general picture coincides with what we have other evidence for, like Minoan, Roman, Medieval warm periods and the Little Ice Age, then we know the cores are telling a story. They also release other gases, CO2 one of them, and because they’ve been at it so long, they’ve determined that that CO2 follows warm, does not precede it, turning climate change science on its ass.
Tree rings are a different story, and two guys, a mining engineer (Steve McIntyre) and statistician (Ross McKitrick) have torn Mann’s hockey stick to shreds, but it does not matter, as the hockey stick was fraud meant for PR and advertising to do major psyop to promote the warming scam, and because these people know how to sell, it worked. And yes, it has occurred to me that McIntyre and McKitrick, MM, are part of it, revelation of the method. But tree rings are not in and of themselves fraud. Careful selection and statistical methodology can clean it up. In Mann’s hands it was a toy. He was assigned a mission, to sell global warming, and by hook and crook, the motherfucker achieved his end. If he was really interested in science, he would have looked to ice cores, easily available.
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Mark, that sounds like ice cores have the potential for being proxies; however I need to question that also. First, is there any proof there has been planet-wide climate change ever? Just because and ice core in Greenland changed, does not mean a warming period in the Northern Hemisphere (caused by a shifting ocean currents) was not balanced out by a cooling period somewhere else on the globe. In fact, thermal equilibrium is the most logical conclusion (based on the conservation of energy) for the temperature of the earth, if you exclude the effect of the sun, which we do not have sufficient evidence now to determine whether its radiation output significantly varies over time.
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Milankovich cycles have withstood the test of time, been verified independently. As to climate change world wide, hard to say when the tropics are largely unaffected. It is the temperate zones and poles that are most affected, and if the overall temperature of the planet remains relatively stable due to steady insolation then it’s a question of where it goes. If the NH is cooling, is the SH warming? Most likely, but the SH is harder to figure, as most of it is ocean.
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Mark, another landmark on the journey to making climate change a “science” is the point at which they got their own departments, isolated from their traditional Chemistry research colleagues, who needed to be excluded from all the shit science seminars that have been going on for decades on climate change research. Now going back to the 1990s, when there was a seminar by an outside speaker, or graduate student, in a Chemistry department (or at least the two I went to for grad school) it was a hostile event. Professors would scrutinize others work like you would not believe, sometimes just because they could and enjoyed being bullies because of their ego and position as full professors. Anyhow the point is I don’t believe climate “science” would have survived in traditional chemistry departments due to excess scrutiny.
And there has been a trend over the years from then until now – when it is now considered rude to seriously question someone’s work during the Q&A session at the end of every seminar. Science has become extremely soft in general, to the point at my last job I was admonished by my managers for asking too many questions and making my fellow colleagues “feel bad”.
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This is maybe a little OCD of a question, but how does a black pen help you disguise black skin stuck on a white mouse? Paint the rest of it black?? And how is any color paint on a mouse going to fool anyone anyway. Sounds like some kind of joke – maybe there’s some real fraud, but they made up a story to use as their “bad example”/ warning that you’ll be caught?
I think when in the mid 20th C when US industry was booming and needed real science/ research to advance technology, government funded science supporting industry was real and well managed – Vannevar Bush is lionized for this as an organizational genius, and it seems likely true enough. But the long term plan seems to be about shifting operations elsewhere, and just letting finance vultures pick the bones of the carcasse from whatever’s left of these formerly grand institutions, as they wither on the vine (pick your metaphor..)
Nice Chandler quote, never read him myself.
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Reading the description of the fraud again, it sounds like it should read, although I am making an assumption, is that he drew the black spots on the white mouse with a black sharpie and claimed they were xenografts.
I think you’re on the right track about shifting operations, they don’t like any country to get too high on their horse before they get knocked back down. Look at the science (chemistry) done by the Germans late 19th century into the early 20th century, and they were absolutely dominant. Of course we know how that ended up. Now it appears R&D is being shifted to China for many industries, where they can be paid cheaply and tightly controlled. And they have them in a box – they have made everyone in the world dislike (many do) and fear (most do) the Chinese, when they are just another conglomerate of Asian peoples, who are have been blackwashed heavily for over 200 years by the West. Indeed they are written out of the history of slavery, and from my brief research into the field of slavery in Boston, for example, is the slaves they were bringing in to work the warehouses and factories to handle all the China/India trade of the 17th-19th centuries – being mainly Chinese. Which no one seems to be aware of – along with their extensive use in the buildup of California and the railroads, which is more well known.
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Ah, I bet you are right, that’s probably what the story was.. Sounds pretty cute/ jokey, but if it’s real I can see why it would be laughed about among scientists and lend its name as the archetypal case of fraud.
And yes, absolutely, empire and cultural/ intellectual capitals have always shifted constantly over decades and centuries. I didn’t read very much of the famous Tragedy & Hope giant tome (want to get back to it eventually), but in the opening chapters he recaps the migration of empire (and changing types of empire) over the past few millennia, and already (in the 60s) is projecting out where and when it might go post-US hegemony.
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thanks for the suggestion! I just ordered tragedy and hope and will read it over Christmas vacation. I honestly havent read a book in about a year, i needed a rest since so many books are a waste of time or wrong, especially history books.
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Quigley is quite a character, and that book has quite a strange back story as part of the “conspiracy” movement.. probably much more talked about than ever read by most. Will be interested to hear what you make of it.
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The premise has never worked for me, that he was granted access to a collection of private archives, and then went off on a tangent publishing things never authorized in the first place.
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This deserves an answer, or a brain dropping as you say. But we are travelling. I will get back to it as with Ray above. As I told my wife who wants me to turn out the light, “But someone posted something on the Internet that has to be answered!”
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Mark i have also heard the expression “someone on the internet is wrong so i must reply”.
No rush on ice cores, as I mentioned its one of those sciences where it doesn’t matter if you are wrong. You could make a career out of it and the results are inconsequential except as a political weapon. Like you said before its a job where the results dont matter unlike a carpenter or plumber
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Regarding the painted mouse, they were working on skin implantation and to show the splotches made it seem more authentic. That’s the story. Was it done to expose it in order to make the rest of science look more genuine? Could be, but 1973 sounds early in the game to me. These days it is more likely, as we know most of science is corrupted by money.
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Or other reasons.. maybe they had seen some minor fraud from young scientists on the make, and wanted to make an example of someone to discourage it, to suggest you’d be caught and held up to ridicule.
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I finally watched Spinal Tap II The End Continues. Thumbs down and a waste of time. I was expecting a lot more from a Rob Reiner film. It’s like they farted it out just to finally have a sequel, like it was a tv show and not a movie.
However there is a scene where Paul McCartney shows up in the studio and says “Hey I’m Paul”, and a band member says “The Paul?”, then McCartney says “One of them”. Why would he say that, it had to be a clue and it validates Mark’s research, because he’s a twin!
Worth watching that scene, for those that follow this blog, and should be at your local library to check out.
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But don’t you know, Sage of Quay says the McCartney twins thing has been “debunked”? And don’t you know too that the book promoted by Mike Williams, the Sage himself, the Billy Shears nonsense, written by unseen hands, says use of the word “debunked” is a psyop ploy, a way to discredit honest research? And doesn’t this give evidence to Williams being a hired gun, limited hangout?
I do not like thee, Sage of Quay, the reason why I cannot say, but this I know and know full well, I do not like thee Sage of Quay.
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That sounds from your description like they are just poking fun at the conspiracy theorists.. but playing both sides too, since it only adds fuel to the fire of course.
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Yes indeed could be conspiracy theory candy. What struck me was they inserted McCartney into a movie about a scripted rock band – in a way suggesting the Beatles were also a scripted rock band. Of all the Beatles McCartney seems perfectly OK with whatever role he needs to perform with the public, and is fine with the PID and other manufactured Beatles miscellanea, because he knows the truth that they are a scripted rock band. But he appears very proud, and comfortable with his place in history, as he is a decent singer, and steady performer over many years, so he likely thinks people who believe in the Beatles myth to be foolish, and is fine with that.
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I noted in a comment at Quora that McC may be the biggest phony who ever lived, even as Elon Musk might object to my saying that.
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Interesting writer I came across.. similar to Gabler in his mainstream acceptance (at least somewhat) but giving more alternative takes and some good media analysis. He does a podcast with Matt Taibbi who was “mainstream” and then drifted into “fringe,” disputing some big media narratives.
Anyway I really liked this short blog post about the effects of news storytelling on the audience.. Kirns’s concept of “seizers” seems similar to Gabler’s “lifeys” or life movies. But updated a bit for the current media environment –
https://walterkirn.substack.com/p/the-seizer
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Speaking of mainstream:This is quite interesting – one of my best friends from high school will be on Jeopardy Dec 9. It will be Steve with the bow tie. Super smart guy unfortunately i will be flying when its broadcast.
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Did he tell you anything about the experience? I assume it was taped and he’s done with it. I guess they get contestants a hotel room for the duration of their participation, and hopefully buy them plane rides back home if they keep winning. At least he didn’t admit to having an inner ear moniter with the answers being fed to him.
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No he posted about it on Facebook. I don’t believe they are able to say much before the viewing. It does make me think much of Jeopardy could be on the level. Anyhow Ill be rooting for him, great guy also.
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To follow that up I will say I believe these trivia shows and contests serve to reinforce the canned official version of history. I used to be very good at trivia until I woke up and realized it was packed with things I suspect like Space Travel and nuclear weapons for example.
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Bingo. ________________________________
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Does anyone have predictions for where this AI over investment bubble (according to the bears) is headed? Will the tech titans come out ahead in the end, or will it all come crashing down?
I can see a case either way.. or maybe a big crash in the short term, followed by a turnaround. I read a persuasive case that they might actually be able to monetize it, by turning AI into an “agentic shopper” that would eventually bypass a lot of big industries that currently help to connect buyers with sellers. Where AI would have partnerships with many companies and get a direct (large) cut of sales they funnel to lots of big purchase value professional services, for example.
Or, the whole house of cards is just a pyramid scheme, and insiders will cash out leaving millions of mopes holding the bag as usual. And only select business uses for AI will have real utility and staying power, maybe.
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