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March 15, 2010, 02:00 PM ET

But What Are These Things Called 'Scientists'?

Thomson Reuters' Science Watch has named Rudolf Jaenisch, a stem-cell scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as the world's "hottest" researcher, based on the number of citations to his work.

Congratulations, Professor Jaenisch. Congratulations, too, to the Reuters news agency, for so vividly describing the scientific publishing process in its article about the honor: 

"Scientists share their discoveries by writing studies called papers, which are published by journals. Other researchers read them, poke holes in them, try to replicate them and use them as the basis for their own studies.
Each time they do, they credit the original paper by citing it."

Are we clear? —Don Troop

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1. princeton67 - March 15, 2010 at 05:41 pm

"...poke holes in them....": here we have the difference between real science and pseudo- or voodoo-science. Always looking for new expanations, scientists challenge; always accepting old explanations, pseudo-scientists cover up. Examples of the latter: "The Council for Tobacco Research" (dedicated to the notion that tobacco is harmless); "The Institute for Creation Research" (dedicated to a Christian Intelligent Designer [aka: God] behind everything); "The Flat Earth Society" (self-explanatory).

2. ole_perfesser - March 15, 2010 at 06:26 pm

Princeton67,

You left out the pseudo-science of "human-caused Global Warming." When so-called scientists, even some who have a Ph.D. (usually in fields other climatology) say it is necessary to lie or exaggerate to scare the public into political action and then also give away their fraud in emails, the truth becomes incredibly clear. Their aim is to support "cap and trade" taxes that support certain "green" industries making money off the fraud. Hopefully the real truth will ultimately surface.

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