New posting! This one is ostensibly about the data integrity scandal that (#Stanford president & noted #neurobiologist) Marc Tessier-Levigne has found himself in, but it's also a riff about how scientific #oversight is only possible in small groups, and how the growth in size of research groups has created a caste of scientist-administrators who should perhaps recuse themselves from the #research activities of the groups they nominally lead. What do you think?
(And a salute as always to the tireless efforts of @ElisabethBik, data sleuth extraordinaire👏 )
http://totalinternalreflectionblog.com/2022/12/18/short-sight-oversight-the-ballad-of-marc-tessier-lavigne/
@ElisabethBik @TIR_scienceblog - thanks; this was clearly written and really gets to the heart of the problem of maintaining quality in science
@TIR_scienceblog @ElisabethBik
I once worked with a true genius. He could do stuff in 30 minutes that took me a week to do. Yet he spent two months a year writing grant proposals, to hire people like me. Which doesn't make any sense. He did it because doing your own thing doesn't work --he got tired of seeing mediocre people taking advantage of the system, running very large budgets, and doing nothing else than writing grant proposals and attending conferences. And he gave in.
@TIR_scienceblog @ElisabethBik Group size is most certainly one of the key problems. You can mitigate it to an extend by having permanent senior staff that effectively run sub-groups, but that gets you only so far.