Yesterday we reported on the retraction for data misuse and plagiarism of a 21-year-old paper on sex and female cancer patients. Turns out we missed a couple of rather interesting details about the authors of the pulled article.
One tidbit, for example, is that one of them, Willibrord Weijmar Schultz, is science royalty, having been a member of a team that won the 2000 Ig Nobel prize in medicine. Their heralded study, “Magnetic resonance imaging of male and female genitals during coitus and female sexual arousal,” published in 1999 in the BMJ: An inside-the-MRI look at the human body having sex.
The authors even produced videos of their subjects in action, which you can watch on YouTube (we’re not sure why this doesn’t count as porn, but maybe it’s the indeterminate nature of pretty much — although not quite EVERYTHING — that sanitizes the clip).
Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research, which awards the Ig Nobels (and who brought the authors’ award to our attention), says the prizes aren’t judgments on good or bad science:
The Ig winners are a (as folks say) diverse lot. Good and bad are irrelevant — the criterion being simply and solely “they’ve done something that makes people LAUGH then THINK.
What IS bad science, however, is this: Schultz and his co-author Mels F. Van Driel (along with a third author not on the first paper), were forced to retract a 2009 article in BJU International for plagiarism, as Talli Yehuda Rosenbaum (see her name in the notice below) told us this morning:
The following article from BJUI entitled “Physical therapy for premature ejaculation, erectile dysfunction and chronic pelvic pain syndrome” by Helena M. Nugteren, Willibrord C.M. Weijmar Schultz and Mels F. Van Driel, published online on Dec 7 2009 (DOI: 10.1111/j.1464-410X.2009.09094.x) in Wiley Online Library (www.onlinelibrary.wiley.com), has been retracted by agreement between the Journal’s Editor-in-Chief, the authors, and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. The retraction has been agreed due to substantial overlap between this paper and an earlier published paper by Talli Yehuda Rosenbaum, “Pelvic floor involvement in male and female sexual dysfunction and the role of pelvic floor rehabilitation in treatment: a literature review”, which appeared in the Journal of Sexual Medicine (4), pp. 4–13.
Reblogged this on Active Science and commented:
Toen de MRI scan van het wippende koppeltje in 1999 wereldnieuws werd, vroeg ik me al af: “En wat is de vraag precies?” Nu, 14 jaar later, is me dat nog steeds een raadsel.
If you take the trouble to follow the link and read the article, you will find out. There was a serious question here — what is the actual physical configuration during coitus? I suppose this can be of value to gynecologists, urologists etc. who are trying to treat reports of problems in coitus. In any case, the science was sound: something not known, with prior speculation (by Leonardo no less) but no hard (sorry!) facts.
Ook, in Nederland wij moeten er trots zijn, want Groningen is hier de trekker (sorry again).
The science was sound, the stealing of it was pathetic. Sadly, this kind of conduct–taking credit for stuff one did not do and not giving credit to those who did do it–detracts from the seriousness that people then give the findings and harms the scientists who actually did the research even more: not only are they not credited as they should, but the information then may seem suspect as well, because it is seen as associated with a retracted publication.
Regarding the importance of the MRI study–as odd as it is for me to consider the ‘research methodology’ of this, I can appreciate the importance of learning more about what actually goes on–with the caveat of probably individual differences in internal angle and structure and so on–to hopefully help some people who may have difficulty with sexual acts.
Dear Dr. Rossiter,
Thanks for your reaction!
In fact, I was aware that the research aimed at unravelling actual configuration. But indeed I did not link that to any possible medical applications. Frankly, I think that IG Nobel agrees with me, but nevertheless I stand corrected!
Cheers,
Marco
To all: A reference to a medical journal in which the insights of this work have been applied in a therapy would be highly appreciated.
This reminds me of a quote I read recently along the lines that one cannot imagine what this type of reasoning would have meant if applied to e.g. Faraday almost two centuries ago. Suppose he would have asked for funding to fly a kite in a storm, and his mecenas did not link that to any possible applications? Whether the experiment was actually performed or not, we owe our progress to unforeseen chance findings. In my opinion, one of the major problems in academia, if we can still call it that, is that it is being “managed” to be “accountable”, and such. It leads to “dotting the i’s” research, but little breakthroughs.
Stealing other people’s work is laziness and cowardice. It shows disrespect not only to the scientists and academician from which they stole the work, but also to the peer review journals they submit to, to the publishing houses of whatever articles they purport to write, and to the readers, who are made a fool of by thinking that they are reading the work of one person when in fact it is stolen work. Like being invited to someone’s gala and getting all excited only to learn that one leg was pulled and the whole exhibition was stolen good.
It is the LOWEST form of information.
Laziness and cowardice.
Their work is being retracted. Any prizes they received should be retracted, as well. And a note made on every citation–that this is STOLEN work, originally presented under false pretense. To do any less would show indifference to the veracity and honor of academic and scientific work.
It’s not like the Ig Nobel prize is something to be proud of, really…
Why not?
Sure, some are for just silly stuff (the 2011 IgNobel prize in mathematics, for example), but others do make one think and are not nearly as silly as they may look at a first glance
I’m not proud of mine.
So, you did some silly stuff, then? 😉
Oh, come one, you can tell us, we’re all adults here!
As far as I can tell the work for which they received the Ig Nobel is not one of the works that are being retracted, so (as yet) there is no reason to retract the prize or modify the citation. Not to mention that only one of the people that received that Ig Nobel is involved in these retractions.
It doesn’t matter if that was the article they received the prize for or not. If someone is guilty of stealing someone else’s work, academically they get ALL their work unqualified and their scientific opinion is considered nullified. As for the other authors on that article, they can keep their honor, but the reality is that sometimes there is collateral damage from doing work with con artists and crooks. Not that it is their fault directly but it has happened in other settings as well (e.g. the person who lied about the research about the link between autism and vaccinations; the person who lied about his results in stem-cell research). Their colleagues had some distancing to do…and some of them who were co-authors had to deal with the retraction of the articles they were co-authors on, because of the con-work on one of them. It is part of the awful selfishness that stealing academic work or lying about it exacts–not only from the people who may read it and be misled, but from the people who collaborated innocently enough but are then victimized by the acts of the bogus scientist.
It is the reality of lies such as this one that they hurt a lot of people. It part of their ugliness.