Scientific Mistakes

 
During a recent discussion with undergraduates, they mentioned that it would be a good idea to discuss the more recent scientific papers in class. They seemed to be very impressed with a course that presented papers published within the past few months.

I pointed out that there's a problem with that kind of course. If the goal of a course is to teach fundamental principles and concepts then it's very unlikely that recent papers are going to advance that goal. Why is that? Because much of the scientific literature is either trivial or incorrect. You don't know that it's trivial or incorrect until some time has passed and other scientists react.¹

If the goal of a course is to teach how science is done on a day-to-day basis, then a key part of that course should be to drive home the concept of skepticism. Don't believe everything you read in the latest journals. An important part of that teaching goal is to pick examples of important mistakes in older literature.

John Dennehy has helped us out this week by posting a "citation classic" that turned out to be wrong [This Week's Citation Classic: Being Wrong]. In my opinion, it's far more important to look at examples like this than to expose undergraduates to several dozen hot new papers that are supposedly at the cutting edge.

The paper that John choose is by Paul Boyer who subsequently won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry [Nobel Laureates: Paul Boyer and John Walker] for his work on the mechanism of ATP synthase [How Cells Make ATP: ATP Synthase].

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1. Sometimes it takes a long time for scientists to react to mistakes in the literature. Wrong ideas can be perpetuated for decades after they've been refuted, especially if the original papers were widely referenced. I was reminded of this the other day when listening to a graduate student seminar—coincidently, on the structure of ATP synthase. The student posted an old-fashioned, out-of-date view of the citric acid cycle as an introduction to the function of ATP synthase. I have challenged my undergraduate biochemistry class to find a single example of a web site that gets the entire citric acid cycle correct. There's a prize. They can't use the IUBMB site, they can't use my sites, and they can't make one of their own. So far nobody has collected the prize.