Obviously it will take some time for the dust to settle from the stem cell fraud case. It’s certainly disheartening to see that such an apparently promising result was faked, and no doubt this plays into the hands of those who find the entire endeavor disreputable. But the work will go on, and I completely agree with the bloggers at the American Journal of Bioethics (who have been all over this story) that the question of whether the US federal government will fund this work becomes less and less relevant. The states are the big players, and the Hwang fiasco may actually jumpstart some new work now that the key task of generating individualized embryonic stem cell lines has been put back on the table.

That said, I don’t have anything else to add to the avalanche of commentary that is already out there. I would like to say something about peer review, however, which takes a beating whenever a bad apple turns up in the published literature. Everyone likes Winston Churchill’s line about democracy: it’s the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. The same goes for peer review, they say (see here). This is appealingly modest, and properly recognizes that all human institutions will be imperfect because all human beings are imperfect.

But this strikes me as damning something with faint praise. So let me go out on a limb and say something heretical: peer review really works quite well.

Really.

Phil Campbell, editor of Nature, makes a strong case, but here are some additional thoughts.

From the questions I sometimes get, one might think that the peer review system is riddled by unacknowledged conflicts of interest, and inadequate or incompetent reviewing. Add in a general tendency to give sexy results a free pass or, depending on whom you’re talking to, to disregard truly important findings out of a lack of imagination, and it’s not a pretty picture. Do such things ever happen? Sure (see above re: human imperfection). But I’ve been an editor at Nature Genetics for more than five years now, and if I had to offer one overriding impression of peer review it would be the conscientiousness of the vast majority of reviewers and editors that I’ve worked with (this may seem self-serving, but there you go). Our reviewers are among the busiest people you’ll ever meet, and yet they labor over the details of manuscripts, considering them in the context of the prior literature, and offer thorough advice on how to improve them, even if they don’t think a particular paper is a good fit for the journal to which it’s been submitted. On occasion, they suggest that a result is flat-out incorrect. Their advice is often lengthy and remarkably thoughtful. As a result, the scientific literature as a whole is significantly better than it might otherwise be: important controls are added, stories are made more complete, new and interesting experiments are carried out, discussions are made clearer, methods are fleshed out. I know that at least one of these things is true of most papers that go through the process.

Perhaps you have to wade through hundreds or thousands of reviews to get a sense of this. Planes that take off and land safely don’t make the headlines.

I’m sure there are a lot of opinions about this. The floor is yours.