Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Patent Law Blogs -> IPBiz

Patent Law

: IPBiz

Followup on Garner and scientific plagiarism; resume inflation

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

Relevant to the recent IPBiz post titled
Scientific plagiarism on work by Harold Garner on plagiarism in science articles, one IPBiz reader raised a different issue, more about Garner himself.

As background on this, recall that, although IPBiz takes a strong stance against plagiarism (repeatedly ridiculing the Harvard Business Review [HBR] text "plagiarize with pride"), IPBiz has always said that publishing false things does more damage to society than publishing true things, without giving credit to the original author. Both are bad, but circulating falsities does more damage.

For example:

Coulter plagiarism? : As a general proposition, society is harmed a lot more by the passing off of false information as true, such as happened in the matter of Hwang Woo-Suk in the embryonic stem cell area, than it is by misattribution of source (of true information). Plagiarism is not a good thing, but peddling falsities is worse.

Dr. Strangelove: still cause for worry :
Propagating bad information is worse than plagiarizing truthful information.

Adam Jaffe checking out turnitin, but will he correct Innovation and Its Discontents? : As IPBiz has pointed out many times, saying wrong things is worse than improperly taking credit for right things.

Plagiarism in the journal Proteomics : The people who "reviewed" journals don't pick up on a lot. As IPBiz has noted, publishing WRONG things is far worse for the public than not properly crediting the source of right things (tho both are bad).

With that background, note text on Harold Garner at utsouthwestern.edu:

Skip received his BS in Nuclear Engineering (minor in computer science) at the University of Missouri - Rolla in 1976. Skip received a Ph.D. in plasma/high temperature matter physics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1982. He also holds an honorary professional engineering degree. Skip worked for 12 years at General Atomics in La Jolla, California, where he conducted experimental and theoretical research for the Department of Energy at international fusion research facilities, principally in Japan (5 years) and the Soviet Union. In the last 6 years at General Atomics, he was a founding member of The Institute for Development and Application of Advanced Technologies, an internal think tank group, where he developed artificial intelligence/expert systems, new particle accelerators, high temperature superconductors, stealth technologies and biology software and instrumentation. Skip currently holds the P. O?B. Montgomery, M.D., Distinguished Chair, is a Professor of Biochemistry and Internal Medicine, is a member of the McDermott Center for Human Growth and Development (Human Genetics Center) and a founding member of the Division of Tranlational Research (DTR). Our research is in three areas: 1) applied computational biology, 2) advanced instrumentation development and 3) genetics, genomics and proteomics research that capitalizes on our software findings and instrumentation capabilities. Additional information and our on-line computational resources can be found on the www at http://innovation.swmed.edu. [bolding added]

One IPBiz reader commented on this text:

The "Institute" was the creation of Tihiro Okawa, who controlled all company internal R&D. "Founding member" is badly inflated!! Skip received some funds from it, and made a small UV-vis cuvette (his "biology instrumentation" above), so as to look at small (ul) quantities in a standard UV-vis instrument (ml quantity used). GA hoped to commercialize it, but [there is no evidence of commercializiation]. Garner also got an NSF (or NIH) grant (in collaborate with Scripps Research Institute folks), and when the Scripps people moved to UT, they brought Garner and his grant along.

There are no novel particle accelerators ever made
There are no high temperature superconductors with his name on publications
I"m not aware of any stealth technologies
I'm not aware of any biology software.

On resume fraud in the Trump empire==>

Resume of Trump's E.J. Ridings questioned

On resume fraud in academics-->

Plagiarism in academics, I'm shocked!

**Returning to the initial theme of plagiarism in scientific journals, it will not be difficult to find examples of plagiarism, most specifically of self-plagiarism (aka multiple publication), in scientific journals. This is "gambling in Casablanca."

Full post as published by IPBiz on March 09, 2009 (boomark / email).