Should Scientists Be Held Legally Responsible for Their Results?

Should politicians be held responsible for theirs? Clergymen? Bankers?

This should only apply when a scientist made willful errors, or had some agenda.

Absolutely YES...

Indeed. There are too many situations where the Science is not precise enough to hold a threat of Legal action against Scientists.

Such a law would be a hell of incentive for bright young minds to take up a career in sciences.

Indeed. Also would cause many false alarms to be raised that would disrupt lives and ironically would probably end up causing more Laws to punish Scientists. Our Scientific knowledge is certainly impressive and vast, but it is still far from complete.

Yes........and they should be kicked in the nuts. How many times have I heard that coffee is bad for me only to be changed back to good for me. The kick in the nuts would come in the morning........since that's when I drink my coffee.

I dunno if it's scientists saying that or so-called nutritionists. Unless things have changed recently, there's no such thing as an accredited nutritionist.

But the same thing has been said of eggs. They were good for us cuz they had protein and vitamin B. Then they were bad for us because they were relatively high in cholesterol. Then they were good for us because the primary form of cholesterol in eggs is the good kind and yadda yadda yadda.

But I certainly think if a scientist willingly falsifies information for personal gain, they should be held legally or at least civilly responsible. Just like any politician or banker should.

So many similar Foods(especially) have gone back and forth from being Harmful/Helpful. I think that mostly just shows that everything has its' Pro/Cons. Often it also is due to a lack of understanding about particular things. I remember when Cholesterol was Bad, then later that was separated into Low and High Cholesterol, one being Bad the other Good. This is a problem with just drawing definitive conclusions from a single Study, at best you can get an idea of what to Study next, but just moving on will likely miss out on much Knowledge and a more precise understanding of what caused the results of that Study.

Another problem is Media reporting. For the sake of Ratings/Sales, Studies get overly sensationalized.

Just don't expect much of anything and you won't be disappointed when they are wrong. Whatever some scientist says isn't going to change how I live my life anyways.

That and articles written by people who seem to have no common intelligence or knowledge of the subject. It often looks like someone decides to run an article on a topic and then picks whoever happens to be around to write it. Follow ups are usually non-existent.

The classic ho-hum article starts off "A recent study that there may be a connection between X and Y. Not very definite or useful.

OR...

A very large earthquake will hit Western North America... could be tomorrow, or in 50 years, or in 300 years, but it will.

A super volcano will blow up, eventually... could be tomorrow, or in 1000 years, or in 50,000 years, but it will.

The sun will go red giant, eventually... probably in about 5 billion years or so, but it will.

In the news article above a panel of scientists and civil servants who said the an area of of Italy was safe from tremours.... The panel concluded citizens should not worry, and even that people should relax with a glass of wine.

The people heeded the advice. Six days later over 300 people were killed in an earthquake...

There are allegations that the study by Dr. Andrew Wakefield on there is a vaccine-autism link based was falsified data...

His research peer reviewed....

http://shine.yahoo.com/parenting/wakefi ... 37353.html