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Ann Gauger sets record straight on Wistar II

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In “What Really Happened at Wistar II”( Biologic Institute, July 26, 2012), Ann Gauger recounts

In June 2007, I attended a private conference in Boston, commemorating the famous Wistar Symposium of 1966. All participants were asked to keep the proceedings confidential – and all did. One participant, Daniel Brooks of the University of Toronto, later violated that agreement, however, and published his version of events on-line. That account can be found here.

Several times now, that erroneous account has been quoted against me in different venues. In the interests of truth, I am therefore setting the record straight. This exercise may shed some light on the way science is done.

[ … ]

In his leaked report, Dan Brooks claimed that I had found a mutant with beneficial new information. This is stretching things quite a bit. What I probably found was a mutant with an extra copy of the genes required to transport biotin from the medium, or with a higher affinity for biotin. That kind of mutation would help glean every available biotin molecule from the environment, but it would not help make biotin in the first place. There was no new genetic function generated, with sufficient information to make biotin. In the end, this adaptation would be a dead end for these cells once exogenous biotin was exhausted.

In charity, I would offer that perhaps Brooks didn’t follow the details of the experiments I discussed because he is not a geneticist or a molecular biologist. The alternative explanation, that he deliberately misrepresented things to put me in a bad light and to score a talking point, would be unfortunate. More.

Gauger, in today’s corrupt environment, Brooks can get way more credibility misrepresenting what you did or said than you could by doing good science. Or he could have either.

Defending intellectually bankrupt Darwinism is one industry that is still hiring, on the taxpayer’s dime. A guy who breaks an agreement is well suited to it.

That’s the lesson of the 500 tenured, degreed, or deeply in debt non-entities at Emory University who published a petition against neurosurgeon Ben Carson, their commencement speaker, due to his doubts about Darwin. And the university president promised to see to it that those non-entities will never be offended again.

Now there is one bale of hay blowin’ past. It’ll get worse as Darwinism becomes more irrelevant. You must just go ahead and do good science anyway.

Comments
'That’s the lesson of the 500 tenured, degreed, or deeply in debt non-entities at Emory University who published a petition against neurosurgeon Ben Carson, their commencement speaker, due to his doubts about Darwin. And the university president promised to see to it that those non-entities will never be offended again.' ... and I'd always thought of logic as epistemically binding. Yet today's corporate-imposed scientism culture never ceases to find new ways, in which to mock the notion of scientists being the paragons and custodians of reason and logic. I wonder what Lewis Carroll would have made of it all? He was a mathematician, wasn't he, as well as being a writer of surreal children's fantasies?Axel
August 19, 2012
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