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The Public Impact of Science
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ou have to be asleep or avoid all news media not to see the impact that scientific reports have on the news reported to the public. Many times, we read stories in newspapers, in the U.S. and abroad, that could convince a layperson that he or she is being poisoned by something in the locality. The journalist’s assertions are too often taken uncritically from a scientific article. The public’s trust in the benefits of scientific research is a cornerstone of its willingness to support research with public resources. Therefore, damage to that public trust harms both the public and science. As reported elsewhere in this issue (pp 5240–5242), Analytical Chemistry may have contributed to this general problem by recently publishing an article on platinum in silicone breast implants (2006, 78, 2925–2933). We firmly believe that journal Editors act in the proper interests of science when they allow the publication of work that may prove to be controversial, provided that the science behind the results appears to be solid. In this case, at least some of the science may not meet that mark, despite the rigors of peer review. Let us—in retrospect—create a new hypothetical reviewer who asks hard questions about the adequacy of the chromatographic experiments that led to the speciation results reported in the above paper. Speciation of the oxidation state of an element, in this case platinum, is far more difficult than elemental analysis. Chromatographic retention depends on many things, and for a metal complex, the ligands are at least as important as, or perhaps more important than, the metal oxidation state. Furthermore, sample preparation has to avoid conditions that oxidatively or reductively change the metal-ion oxidation states of the initial sample. The care with which column vendors describe the details of speciation applications in
© 2006 AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY
their literature, with respect to specific metals, attests to these points. This reviewer would have challenged the authors to do a much better job of proving a capacity for platinum speciation than they did. Analytical Chemistry tries to approve publication only of analytically sound results. Any journal Editor can occasionally look back at a given article published in his or her journal and see a flaw. Sometimes, a private memo to the author results. We hope that in the normal course of science, apparent flaws either are clarified as nonflaws or are corrected by further work done by the same or other researchers. Such is the nature of the scientific process. In the case of the platinum speciation paper, however, an element of public trust in scientific information is involved, because this topic is of substantial public interest. Perhaps the speciation results of this paper are correct—even though the data are startling. We must say, however, that in retrospect, the evidence that platinum speciation is possible with the experimental conditions described in that paper falls short of this journal’s standards. Thus, we Editors urge that our readers use caution in evaluating the conclusions drawn in the paper.
Royce W. Murray
Catherine Fenselau
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