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Fraud in the research on "DNA damage from cell phones"?

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

The August 29 issue of the journal Science has an article on page 1144 titled: Fraud Charges Cast Doubt on Claims of DNA Damage from Cell Phone Fields. There seems to be some uncertainty about what's going on. The senior author (Hugo Rudiger) of the two papers now has agreed to retract only one paper, but another author (Franz Adlkofer) has not agreed to the retraction.

Some interesting text from the Science article:

Rudiger says he initially agreed to withdraw both papers based on the ethics committee's findings. But several days later, he discovered that the chair of the ethics committee was a lawyer who had worked for a telecom company.

This situation is not resolved.

***Also on page 1144

Federal support for academic research, in real terms, has dropped for 2 years running, according the US National Science Foundation (NSF). 321 Science 1144.

***On page 1160

An article "On the back of an envelope" by Stephan Mertens discusses so-called "Fermi problems", such as "how many piano tuners are there in the city of Chicago." The article is a review of the book Guesstimation by Weinstein and Adam, Princeton University Press, 2008.

Full post as published by IPBiz on September 09, 2008 (boomark / email).