Rahul Siddharthan has a must-read post on the latest twist to l'affaire Kundu. As I said in my previous post, Rahul's work played a key (and to me, definitive) part in the unraveling of Kundu's version (along with that of the committee headed by Prof. G. Padmanaban) of this story, and he makes the following point about the broader lesson in the Kundu affair:
To me, this case is not really about Kundu. It is about our complete lack of appreciation of scientific ethics, and our tendency to “close ranks” when trouble arrives. To succumb to this tendency even after an international journal has conducted its own investigation and made its own decision, and to justify it with a paltry two-page report, merely makes us a laughing-stock.
Rahul is also right to urge the Indian Academy of Sciences to look into the discredited report -- "superficial, authorless, reference-free, and partially plagiarised" -- on GM crops produced recently by it along with five other science academies of this country.
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