Dr. Marguerite Kay's statement to the Faculty Senate, University of Arizona
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"And the significance of this great organization, gentlemen? It consists in this, that innocent persons are accused of guilt, and senseless proceedings are put in motion against them..." Franz Kafka, The Trial I asked to address you today because of the many inquiries regarding the nature of the agreement that the University administration wanted me to sign in order to avoid termination. A copy of it is available for you to reach your own conclusions. I have attached a copy of my letter, dated July 20, 1998 to the administration in which I continue to take supervisory responsibility for my laboratory personnel. However, I did not and would not knowingly publish data unless I believed it to be correct. After I learned that some data might be questionable, I submitted corrections to the journals. My counter proposal to the administration is also available to you. I'd like to first give an overview of the context and the direction of the papers that were questioned. Two of these were a composite review of an area supplemented with original data that appeared in special issues of journals, one devoted to the topic of the immunobiology of Alzheimer's disease and another to band 3 anion transport proteins in health and science. They report a perspective and a vision. One of my challenged articles ends with the statement, "Again, this falls in the twilight zone of band 3 as a regulatory protein?, co-channel?, or .... ? Frontiers yet to be explored." I'm trying to project into these articles a vision to a future. I firmly believe that a good hypothesis is one that holds together long enough for another scientist to come up with a better one. Science is a continuing, evolving field. It has to be. If you cut off vision, there will be no progress in science. I asked the best people working in the field to give me their vision. This is the context in which the authors of the articles wrote. They were asked to speculate. The structure of the various papers that were challenged is that multiple methods were used to address the same questions that formed the basis of the paper and the proposition advanced that antibodies can recognize changes in Alzheimer's disease. These methods varied from expensive direct visualization to a cheap, simple, and probably crude test that is purely a screening test to look at a lot of samples fast. It was this cheap and simple screening test on which the CAFT investigation focused. However, as we got the same result by five different methods, I have confidence in the results. In addition, the key findings on which the propositions put forth in the papers were based have been either confirmed or independently discovered by other labs in the United States, Europe, and the UK. The university's own expert described the vitamin E findings as "robust," meaning "statistically significant," even when outliers were included.
Is it better to look at thousands of samples by one technique or a small number of samples by many techniques? It depends on the question that you are trying to answer. All Throughout my career, I have strived for the betterment of the human condition. This is one of the main reasons that I was attracted to aging research and have remained there. At the time that the papers were written, I believed that the views and perspectives presented were correct, and I still believe that they are. The importance and impact of these papers on science is that they are a stimulus to push the envelope. They have and will do this by providing a glimpse, a vision of a future in science. It is these visions of a future that give us a future. To quote George Bernard Shaw, "You dream what is and ask "why?" but I dream what has never been and ask "why not?" |
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