[Dinner following a Board Meeting of the Howard Florey Institute of Experimental Physiology and Medicine in 1971. From left to right: Sir Ernest Coates, Sir John Phillips, Prof R Douglas (Pansy) Wright, Sir Ian Potter, Mr S Baillieu Myer, Mr Ray F. Marginson, Dr H.C. Coombs, Prof Leslie J. Ray, (seated) Dr Derek Denton, Dame Hilda Stevenson, Mr Kenneth Myer, Absent of Mr Evelyn de Rothschild]
I read this morning in an email from Medscape about goings on in the world of sports science. To judge from Bing, there has been quite a lot of coverage in the media, in for example, the Guardian, but perhaps it was relegated to the sports pages which I very rarely look at.
It seems that one Paul McCrory is being convicted of the heinous crime of plagiarism and worse. A crime which I remain a bit ambivalent about. Science is all about building on what has gone before, adding a little bit of knowledge to the accumulated store - and who is to say where exactly my little bit of knowledge has come from. A tip from a colleague during a jog around the park? An idea triggered by something I read, not obviously anything to do with the subject in question? An idea I had come across months ago in some obscure bit of coverage in print or on screen, having forgotten exactly where in the meantime? So mostly all a bit woolly, although I grant that one can simply lift chunks of work done by someone else without proper acknowledgement. Which is not woolly at all.
And I can see that if you are a career research worker you are going to care about who gets the gongs, the grants and the other rewards that come with adding lots of value of your own.
But from the outside, what I care about more is getting the right answer. However, reading reference 1, I learn that these crimes might bear on that too. By giving the impression that more work has gone into some claim or other than is in fact the case. By giving the impression that some claim or other has more support from colleagues than there is, perhaps by putting words into their mouths. By simply puffing some claim or other, rather than doing real work to produce more real evidence for it.
The scientist in question, Paul McCrory is an Australian, seemingly attached to the Florey Institute in Melbourne, and is an expert on concussion. A matter of some importance in contact sports like the Australian or US versions of football. How much damage does a footballer have to take before he is taken out of the line? A question which has, I dare say, large dollar signs attached to it.
I then read that really careful people check with the retraction watch database (references 5 and 6) before putting too much weight on something they have read. Maybe it has been retracted?
Nothing, it seems, is ever simple these days. Even for people holed up in ivory towers.
References
Reference 1: Concussion researcher Paul McCrory earns nine more retractions, nearly 40 expressions of concern - Ellie Kincaid, Medscape - 2022.
Reference 2: https://florey.edu.au/science-research/scientist-directory/associate-professor-paul-mccrory.
Reference 3: https://florey.edu.au/. Where I find that starting modestly with the role of salt and water balance in health and disease in 1960, forty years later they had spread out, amalgamating with the Mental Health Research Institute, the National Stroke Research Institute and the Brain Research Institute, building a powerhouse of discovery and funding. Today, teams work on a range of serious diseases including stroke, epilepsy, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, Huntington’s disease, motor neurone disease, traumatic brain and spinal cord injury, depression, schizophrenia, mental illness and addiction. World leaders in imaging technology, stroke rehabilitation and epidemiological studies.
Reference 4: https://florey.edu.au/about/publications/brain-matters. Accessible guides to and updates on the work at Florey.
Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retraction_Watch.
Reference 6: http://retractiondatabase.org/RetractionSearch.aspx?.
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