by Pr Joseph Ciccolini, Aix Marseille Univ and Public Assistance Hospitals of Marseille
La retraction where the action of unpublishing a research article published in a scientific journal is the ultimate sanction that brings shame on the researcher – most often on the basis of fraud discovered by peers calling into question the relevance, and sometimes the very reality of the published data. It is difficult to find a more humiliating and discrediting sanction for a researcher, commensurate, it must be said, with the gravity of the fault: scientific probity is not negotiable (it is estimated that more than 20% of published articles would take more or less significant accommodations with reality – most of the time the offenders explain that it is the pressure of the " publish or perish " which led them to join the dark side of the Force).
For example, during the Covid health crisis, we remember the Surgisphere scandal, this North American company of nickel-footed people with whom eminent Harvard epidemiologists had gone astray, leading in 2020 to the publication in the prestigious journal The Lancet of fanciful clinical data (1). After the scandal was discovered, the article in question was subject to a retraction procedure by The Lancet – the journal is usually not considered liable for the fraudulent content published, even if it holds the copyright and charges for access, and the editorial board is never held responsible for the nonsense they have agreed to publish, even if each article is supposed to have passed under the yoke of a peer-reviewing rigorous. Most of these scandals remain unknown to the general public, even if they are not without consequences for the guilty researcher and his institution: in the USA, the discovery in 2015 of scientific fraud leading to the retraction of articles used to obtain substantial public funds led to the revocation of the financial aid allocated and the obligation for the university employing the offender to reimburse the millions of dollars already paid by the NIH. We do not joke about scientific fraud. So be it.
So when I learned by Retraction Watch, the independent body that scrutinizes cases of data falsification in the scientific community, that in June 2020 not only had a chemistry article been retracted but, a very rare decision in this type of case, that two editors had been removed from their positions on the journal's editorial board (2), and that part of the editorial board had resigned in the process, I wondered what was the nature of the abominable crime committed by this author thus ostracized from the global scientific community and impacting a scientific journal to this extent.
It was the eminent international journal Angewandte Chemie (Wiley) and the author was an equally eminent chemist, Professor Tomas Hudlicky, from Brock University (Canada), a leading figure in the field of organic synthesis (281 international articles, 13 citations, H-index 706).
Had he, like Surgisphere, fabricated data? Claimed, for example, to have synthesized some miraculous molecule? Not at all, his four-page article, " Organic Synthesis – Where Now is thirty years now. A reflection on the current state of affairs " Today collector, was not a research article, but rather a opinion paper , that is, a review of the state of the art in his discipline. Had it been noticed that he had embezzled public funds intended for research in his laboratory? Absolutely not, his chemistry department at Brock University is clearly perfectly managed. Had he been denounced as a sexual predator harassing his students? Nada! Was he synthesizing narcotics after dark, in the manner of Breaking Bad. ? Never. Did he dissolve his PhD students in acid to make them disappear after appropriating their discoveries? No way!
No, it is, alas, more serious, much more serious than all this.
Professor Tomas Hudlicky in his infamous article briefly published on June 4, 2020 (and fortunately quickly removed from the view of chaste souls – the online version was purely deleted by Wiley, the publisher of Angewandte Chemie – the Cancel culture, so often criticized by the killjoys, still has some good when it comes to making the beautiful, the good and the truth triumph), had indeed been guilty of openly racist, sexist, misogynistic, and transgender-phobic remarks. Nothing less. Six courageous chemists, defenders of the free world and members of the Editorial Committee of the journal published in Angewandte Chemie 24 hours after the withdrawal of Belzebuth's paper an article of contrition reaffirming that the values of equity, inclusion and diversity are " the central pillars of societal justice in academia (sic)" (3). On June 6, the Chinese Chemical Society published a press release stating that it did not recognize itself in the Canadian professor's remarks. In the wake (June 8), the hyena hunting in packs, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the American Chemical Society, the German Chemical Society, and the Chemical Research Society of India published a joint press release recalling that " Sexism, racism, anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination and other forms of inequity are sadly common in chemistry, both at the individual and institutional levels. » (4). Blimey! The courageous Dean of Brock University, Greg Finn, far from supporting his teacher, on the contrary sinks him by publishing on June 7 a press release that has nothing to envy the most beautiful flights of André Malraux, dissociating himself from his awful teacher and recalling that “The statements in this article do not represent the values of [his] university”(5). A few pit bulls, excited by the smell of blood, spread through editorials on the Hudlicky affair (6). On June 8, 16 members of the Editorial Committee of Angewandte Chemie jointly announced their resignation – the retraction of the infamous article was not enough for them, the head of Satanas was not enough for them: they wanted to take a strong and courageous action to show themselves as indisputable defenders of the camp of Good. We have the Jean Moulins that we can.
After much research, I finally found the incriminated article – four rather dry pages during which Professor Hudlicky effectively takes stock of progress in the field of synthetic chemistry (you might as well say that you have to be a chemist to find it interesting) – and his thoughts on advancing this discipline. And so it is in the middle of these thoughts that the scandalous, the infamous, the unspeakable, the unspeakable emerges. To give you an exact idea of the extent of the scandal, I have no choice but to transcribe the extract in its original version (in fact there is clearly only one short guilty paragraph in the 4 pages of the article, but let's not be mean).
« New ideologies have appeared and influenced hiring practices, promotion, funding, and recognition of certain groups. (…) Each candidate should have an equal opportunity to secure a position, regardless of personal identification/categorization”. Free translation: “New ideologies are emerging and influencing recruitment and promotion policies. (…) Every candidate should have the same opportunities to be recruited, regardless of their categorization". Amazing ! Further, Jack the Ripper persists: “These issues have influenced hiring practices to the point where the candidate's inclusion in one of the preferred social groups may override his or her qualifications.' "These issues have influenced recruitment practices to the point where belonging to a preferred group takes precedence over qualifications.". We are left speechless. As if that were not enough, Belzebuth makes his case worse by concluding: « The rise and emphasis on hiring practices that suggest or even mandate equality in terms of absolute numbers of people in specific subgroups is counter-productive if it results in discrimination against the most meritorious candidates. » Translation : " The growing trend of recruiting in terms of perfect numerical equality between categories of individuals is counterproductive if it results in discriminating against the most deserving candidates. ».
I warned you, it's eye-opening! Recruiting people on merit, ignoring their race, religion, sexual orientation? Believing that qualification and competence take precedence over belonging to one of the countless sub-subcategories and airtight boxes in which a person's identity is locked up and reduced today? Daring to write that in 2020, an inclusive era blessed among all, that future generations will undoubtedly look upon with admiration, the same admiration with which we today consider Torquemada's henchmen rooting out evil from heretics lost in the darkness of thought, in the XNUMXth centuryeme century? But it was not a simple retraction and ostracism from his community that Tomas Hudlicky deserved, it was rather the wheel, the quartering in a public place, what am I saying, the gallows of Montfaucon!
The moral of this sad fable, since there must be one, is that the hard sciences, which for a long time mocked the grotesqueries of their colleagues in the SHS, are also affected today by the Holy Inquisition of politically correct – like all totalitarianisms, this one constantly feeds on new victims, under penalty of disappearing. No one is now safe from being led to the stake for having simply defended meritocracy at the university.
References
- https://www.the-scientist.com/features/the-surgisphere-scandal-what-went-wrong–67955
- https://retractionwatch.com/2020/06/08/controversial-essay-at-german-chemistry-journal-leads-to-suspensions/
- https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/anie.202008469
- https://www.gdch.de/service-information/nachricht/article/statement-on-inclusion-and-diversity-in-the-chemical-sciences.html
- https://brocku.ca/brock-news/2020/06/an-open-letter-to-the-brock-community/
- https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/06/08/not-winning-friends-not-influencing-people
