GNR

Vijaysree Venkatraman has a nice article on Prof. G.N.Ramachandran's work at the University of Madras in the fifties and the sixties: How a Madras scientist won the global race in the ’50s to crack the structure of collagen. An excerpt:

First, he needed to find a source of collagen. The shark fin collagen from the biochemistry department on campus didn’t yield great images. Good quality pictures were essential to cracking the collagen puzzle, he knew. Leather, it occurred to GNR, was largely collagen.

Not far from the university campus was a new institute – the Central Leather Research Institute. GNR decided to pay his neighbours a visit. As he made his way there, the leather choices in GNR’s mind were Kangaroo Tail Tendon or Beef Achilles Tendon. The deputy director of CLRI turned out to be a kindred soul, happy to help a fellow scientist. The beef sample was easy to obtain locally. But if kangaroo collagen was going to yield the best diffraction images – as the scientific literature said – the deputy director promised to get GNR samples from Australia.

Thus, GNR found himself some purified marsupial collagen to work with.

The only information available on the fibrous protein collagen was this: one-third of its total amino acid content was glycine. Using this fact, looking at the pictures he had taken, GNR made an intuitive leap. [...]

If lack of reproducibility is a crisis, so is lack of producibility

The accepted practice is instead to adjust the model so that it continues to agree with the lack of empirical support.

This very Zen statement is a part of a commentary by theoretical particle physicist Sabine Hossenfelder-- in Nature, no less (so it must be fashionable, if not also true) -- who writes candidly about the crisis in her field (and its neighbours: astrophysics and cosmology): Science needs reason to be trusted [Caution: paywall]. She calls it a crisis of "overproduction" (i.e., abundance) of theories, but I like to think of it as a crisis of "producibility" of experimental data.

In recent years, trust in science has been severely challenged by the reproducibility crisis. This problem has predominantly fallen on the life sciences where, it turns out, many peer-reviewed findings can't be independently reproduced. Attempts to solve this have focused on improving the current measures for statistical reliability and their practical implementation. Changes like this were made to increase scientific objectivity or — more bluntly — to prevent scientists from lying to themselves and each other. They were made to re-establish trust.

The reproducibility crisis is a problem, but at least it's a problem that has been recognized and is being addressed. From where I sit, however, in a research area that can be roughly summarized as the foundations of physics — cosmology, physics beyond the standard model, the foundations of quantum mechanics — I have a front-row seat to a much bigger problem.

I work in theory development. Our task, loosely speaking, is to come up with new — somehow better — explanations for already existing observations, and then make predictions to test these ideas. We have no reproducibility crisis because we have no data to begin with ... [Bold emphasis added]

Here's something that will makes your jaw not just drop, but go into a tailspin:

In December 2015, the LHC collaborations CMS and ATLAS presented evidence for a deviation from standard-model physics at approximately 750 GeV resonant mass2, 3. The excess appeared in the two-photon decay channel and had a low statistical significance. It didn't look like anything anybody had ever predicted. By August 2016, new data had revealed that the excess was merely a statistical fluctuation. But before this happened, high-energy physicists produced more than 600 papers to explain the supposed signal. Many of these papers were published in the field's top journals. None of them describes reality.

A 'Special' Resonance

Resonance, the "journal of science education" published by the Indian Academy of Sciences, had something 'special' in its March issue: as Guest editors Prajval Shastri and Sudeshna Mazumdar-Leighton write in their editorial, "while this issue is no different from any other in intent, it is ‘special’ because it has an all-female authorship."

***

Hat tip to Vasudevan Mukunth's article in The Wire, which also points to special issues of Current Science and Physics News, but I am not able to locate their URL.

***

Update: The original post had a link to the special issue of Current Science; a friend alerted me that this issue has not yet been published.

Akshat Rathi on History of Indian Science

Over at Mint On Sunday, Rathi has a great article with a brilliant title -- Separating Fact from Ancient Indian Science Fiction -- exploring the question: "Why is the public’s knowledge of the history of Indian science so poor?"

The sad part is that, despite an ongoing history of science programme, which has been running for more than 50 years, very little of that has filtered in to public knowledge. I asked Subbarayappa why.

“That is a question I have often asked myself,” he said laughing. The commission nudges on with what it has been doing for the past 50 years. Regular articles appear in the Indian Journal of History of Science, but there is little conversation between the few academics working on the history of Indian science and those working on setting the science curriculum.

Vedic Planes

Siddhartha Deb has a great piece on Those mythological men and their sacred, supersonic flying temples in The New Republic. Subtitle: "What tales of ancient Vedic aircraft tell us about India’s place in the modern world."

Excerpts won't do any justice to the piece. So, go read the whole thing!

Links: Tim Hunt Edition

1. Maki Naro in Popular Science: The trouble with Nobel Prizes -- They're not magic medals of blamelessness.

   So don't write to me saying I don't care about science because a poor guy tarnished his own gold star by making a bad, sexist joke and got called out on it. Instead, ask yourself how much you care about science that you've allowed the past to supersede the future. Take a long look at the choices that led you to put science before people. Instead of blindly defending an old man with a medal, try to listen and reflect upon yourself and the society that led you to defend him in the first place. Then GTFO.

2. Alice Bell at Open Democracy: After Tim Hunt: Another Science is Possible. "After the widespread reaction to Tim Hunt’s comments on women in science, it’s time to unpick the various hierarchies that stifle scientific debates and practice."

3. Janet Stemwedel at the Forbes Science Blog: What if Tim Hunt had done it differently:

   So, let’s rewind the universe to a point in time before Tim Hunt’s trajectory intersected with the controversy. You might think the crucial moment at which to consider “what if” is when Hunt was asked to make some remarks to the luncheon. But let’s go back more than a year earlier, to spring of 2014, when Tim Hunt was interviewed for Lab Times. Here’s part of that published exchange:

   In your opinion, why are women still under-represented in senior positions in academia and funding bodies?

   Hunt: I’m not sure there is really a problem, actually. People just look at the statistics. I dare, myself, think there is any discrimination, either for or against men or women. I think people are really good at selecting good scientists but I must admit the inequalities in the outcomes, especially at the higher end, are quite staggering. And I have no idea what the reasons are. One should start asking why women being under-represented in senior positions is such a big problem. Is this actually a bad thing? It is not immediately obvious for me… is this bad for women? Or bad for science? Or bad for society? I don’t know, it clearly upsets people a lot.

   What if, after the interview, Tim Hunt had done some thinking about the underrepresentation of women in science, especially in senior positions? What if he had sought out some of the people clearly upset by the inequalities in outcomes and listened to them in order better to understand that upset? What if he had looked at the research on the various factors that still present barriers to entry and inclusion for women (among others) in science?

   If he had done that, then by June of 2015, asked to speak at the luncheon, he might have had a somewhat better understanding of the women scientists in his audience.

Links

1. Barbara Oakley in Nautilus: How I Rewired My Brain to Become Fluent in Math. "Sorry, education reformers, it’s still memorization and repetition we need."

2. William Kremer in BBC: The strange afterlife of Einstein's brain. A truly bizarre story.

3. Steven Shapin in WSJ: Why Scientists Shouldn’t Write History. A review of Steven Weinberg's book To Explain the World. The following excerpt gets to the main problem with an enterprise like Weinberg's:

There’s a story told about a distinguished cardiac surgeon who, about to retire, decided he’d like to take up the history of medicine. He sought out a historian friend and asked her if she had any tips for him. The historian said she’d be happy to help but first asked the surgeon a reciprocal favor: “As it happens, I’m about to retire too, and I’m thinking of taking up heart surgery. Do you have any tips for me?”

The story is probably apocryphal, but it displays a real asymmetry between two expert practices. The surgeon knows that his skills are specialized and that they’re difficult to acquire, but he doesn’t think that the historian’s skills are anything like that. He assumes that writing history is pretty straightforward and that being a 21st-century surgeon gives you a leg up in documenting and interpreting, for example, theories of fever in the 17th century. Yet not every kind of technical expertise stands in this relation with the telling of its history. Modern installation artists don’t think they can produce adequate scholarly studies of Dutch Golden Age paintings, and it’s hard to find offensive linemen parading their competence in the writing the history of rugby.

Doing Science is, in fact, "Rocket Science"

Leonard Mlodinov has an op-ed in NYTimes arguing against the myth that science is just a series of flashes of intuitive insights that just hit people by accident.

Two thousand years ago, Aristotle’s “Physics” was a wide-ranging set of theories that were easy to state and understand. But his ideas were almost completely wrong. Newton’s “Principia” ushered in the age of modern science, but remains one of the most impenetrable books ever written. There is a reason: The truths of nature are subtle, and require deep and careful thought.

Over the past few centuries we have invested that level of thought, and so while in the 19th century the Reuters news service used carrier pigeons to fly stock prices between cities, today we have the Internet.

Even if we are not scientists, every day we are challenged to make judgments and decisions about technical matters like vaccinations, financial investments, diet supplements and, of course, global warming. If our discourse on such topics is to be intelligent and productive, we need to dip below the surface and grapple with the complex underlying issues. The myths can seduce one into believing there is an easier path, one that doesn’t require such hard work.

But even beyond issues of science, there is a broader lesson ... We all run into difficult problems in life, and we will be happier and more successful if we appreciate that the answers often aren’t quick, or easy.

Links

1. Susannah Locke in Vox.com: 15 ways to tell if that science news story is hogwash

   The excellent chart ... offers "A Rough Guide to Spotting Bad Science." It was put together by the blogger [Andy Brunning, a chemistry teacher in the UK] behind the chemistry site Compound Interest. It isn't meant to be an exhaustive list — and not all of these flaws are necessarily fatal.

2. A bold initiative in France: Ambition in Paris:

   The creation of the University of Paris-Saclay’s campus will cost €2 billion ($2.17 billion), and a government-funded €2.5 billion ($2.72 billion) extension of the Paris Métro will connect the high-tech hub to the center of the French capital in 35 minutes.

   However, Dominique Vernay, president of Paris-Saclay, has bigger concerns than the infrastructure challenges involved in constructing the university’s 1,300-acre campus over the next few years, namely how to get 19 fiercely independent organizations to pull together and move in the same direction. [...]

   “They were not that keen to work together in the beginning, but they have taken steps over the past seven years to come together -- the commitment was to set up a common organization.”

   To this end, nine of France’s most prestigious grandes écoles, such as the École Polytechnique and the École Normale Supérieure, will work with less selective traditional universities, business schools and national research organizations at Paris-Saclay.

   Within 10 years, 12,000 researchers and 70,000 students will be based at the Paris-Saclay campus, with the institution aiming to take its place among the world’s top 10 universities by 2025.

3. Charles Seife in Slate: Science’s Big Scandal. "Even legitimate publishers are faking peer review."

   It can be read alone, but it's even better to read it with Seife's previous article in Scientific American: For Sale: “Your Name Here” in a Prestigious Science Journal. "An investigation into some scientific papers finds worrying irregularities."

4. Barbara Fister in Inside Higher Ed: New Predatory Publishing in Old Bottles. "... What worries me far more than these fairly obvious scams are the emerging business practices being used by highly profitable publishers with long and distinguished pedigrees that are treating open access as a new revenue stream that can be both open and closed – earning money through subscriptions and author fees. [...]"

Links

1. Michael Gordin in Aeon: Absolute English. "How did science come to speak only English?"

2. Noah Berlatsky in Pacific Standard: What Is the Point of Academic Books? "Ultimately, they're meant to disseminate knowledge. But their narrow appeal makes them expensive to produce and harder to sell."

3. Gillian Tett in The Financial Times: A degree of creativity. ‘Vocational degrees provide skills that can become outdated or be replaced by robots.’

4. Attention Decay in Science, a paper by Pietro Della Briotta Parolo, Raj Kumar Pan, Rumi Ghosh, Bernardo A. Huberman, and Kimmo Kaski. Here's the abstract:

   The exponential growth in the number of scientific papers makes it increasingly difficult for researchers to keep track of all the publications relevant to their work. Consequently, the attention that can be devoted to individual papers, measured by their citation counts, is bound to decay rapidly. In this work we make a thorough study of the life-cycle of papers in different disciplines. Typically, the citation rate of a paper increases up to a few years after its publication, reaches a peak and then decreases rapidly. This decay can be described by an exponential or a power law behavior, as in ultradiffusive processes, with exponential fitting better than power law for the majority of cases. The decay is also becoming faster over the years, signaling that nowadays papers are forgotten more quickly. However, when time is counted in terms of the number of published papers, the rate of decay of citations is fairly independent of the period considered. This indicates that the attention of scholars depends on the number of published items, and not on real time.

Links

1. Must-read essay of the week: Stephen Marche in The Guardian: Centireading force: why reading a book 100 times is a great idea. Brought back wonderful memories of reading Tamil writer Sujatha's novels so many, so many times that Marche's description of this experience totally resonated with me: "familiarity with the text verges on memorisation – the sensation of the words passing over the eyes like cud through the fourth stomach of a cow." He actually has more about this experience:

   By the time you read something more than a hundred times, you’ve passed well beyond “knowing how it turns out”. The next sentence is known before the sentence you’re reading is finished. As I reread Hamlet now, I know as Gertrude says, “Why seems it so with thee?” that Hamlet will say “Seems, Madam? Nay it is. I know not seems.” I know as Bertie asks “What are the chances of a cobra biting Harold, Jeeves?” that Jeeves will answer: “Slight, I should imagine, sir. And in such an event, knowing the boy as intimately as I do, my anxiety would be entirely for the snake.” Centireading reveals a pleasure peculiar to text lurking underneath story and language and even understanding.

2. Austin Frakt and Aaron E. Carroll in NYTimes: Can This Treatment Help Me? There’s a Statistic for That. And that statistic is called NNT -- number needed to treat:

   Developed in the 1980s, the N.N.T. tells us how many people must be treated for one person to derive benefit. An N.N.T. of one would mean every person treated improves and every person not treated fails to, which is how we tend to think most therapies work.

   What may surprise you is that N.N.T.s are often much higher than one. Double- and even triple-digit N.N.T.s are common.

   [Take the case of aspirin, for example.] According to clinical trials, if about 2,000 people follow these guidelines over a two-year period, one additional first heart attack will be prevented.

   That doesn’t mean the 1,999 other people have heart attacks. The fact is, on average about 3.6 of them would have a first heart attack regardless of whether they took the aspirin. Even more important, 1,995.4 people would never have a heart attack whether or not they took aspirin. Only one person is actually affected by aspirin. If he takes it, the number of people who remain heart attack-free rises to 1996.4. If he doesn’t, the number remains 1995.4. But for 1,999 of the 2,000 people, aspirin doesn’t make any difference at all.

3. Evelyn Lamb in SciAm Blogs: Gauss and Germain on Pleasure and Passion. Excerpts from a wonderful letter from Carl Friedrich Gauss to Sophie Germain after he learnt that Germain, who was writing to him earlier under the name of one Monsieur LeBlanc, was actually a woman.

What Indian Mathematicians Knew in Calculus

Biman Nath, a professor of astrophysics at Raman Research Institute, Bengaluru, has a great article in Frontline about the development of proto-calculus ideas by ancient Indian mathematicians -- specifically, Aryabhatta, Brahmagupta, Bhaskara II (all in Sanskrit over 1000 years ago), and Madhava (in Malaalam, some 600 years ago).

Along the way, he makes a good point about the state of the 'debate' in the public sphere on history of Indian scientific ideas:

... [M]ost of us are not historians, and such discussions become pointless after a while. One has come across the names Aryabhata or Varahamihira in school textbooks, but one would be hard pressed to name any specific achievement of these ancient Indian scientists. School students are taught about the discovery of the zero but they never learn what it means to have “discovered” it.

How does one suddenly invoke a number and bring it down to the realm of reality? We teach our children that our ancestors must have had a remarkable knowledge of metallurgy and give the example of the iron pillar in Delhi, but we never spell out what exactly they knew.

This superficiality in our collective knowledge often leads to meaningless, rhetorical debates on the achievements of ancient Indian scientists. [...]

Nath peppers his article with snippets that give us a richer picture of how these mathematicians presented their results. For example, here's Aryabhatta:

... Aryabhata’s sine table was considered the most accurate ... He had tabulated the sines of 24 angles, equally spaced between zero and 90 degrees (with a difference of 3.75° between them). The table was in the form of a verse, and he had come up with an ingenious way of coding the table in the words of the poem. The introduction to his book Aryabhatia explained the code. [...]

And, Brahmagupta and Madhava:

It is not clear how Brahmagupta derived the formula—he never explained it anywhere—but historians think he used geometry.

[...]

Like his predecessor Brahmagupta, Madhava never explained how he came up with the formula. Historians of mathematics again suspect that he obtained it through geometrical methods.

Finally, all this leads to question of what happened after Madhava's work, and why it did not blossom into calculus as we know it today? I look forward to a follow-up article by Nath.

Links: Vedic Aviation Edition

Sidebar

See also:

Jayant Narlikar: Going Back in Time -- Science and Technology in Epics (The Times of India 1995).

Mayank Vahia (TIFR) in DNA: Cry my beloved science, cry my beloved country.

* * *

1. Hartosh Singh Bal in The Caravan: Why the Indian Scientific Community is to Blame for the Lack of Science at the 102nd Indian Science Congress.

   A copy of the proceedings that would include Bodas’ draft will only serve to confirm what the Islamic scholar Abu'l Raihan al-Biruni, writing almost a thousand years ago, had said about the state of Indian scientific knowledge: “I can only compare their mathematical and astronomical literature, as far as I know it, to a mixture of pearl shells and sour dates, or of pearls and dung, or of costly crystals and common pebbles. Both kinds of things are equal in their eyes, since they cannot raise themselves to the methods of a strictly scientific deduction.”

   But even these harsh words would constitute a charitable view. The reason the proceedings may still end up carrying Yonath and Ashtekar’s pearls along with Hindutva’s dung is not because our scientists cannot distinguish between them, but because they choose to look away in the face of a new political dispensation.

2. At one point, Bal refers to the Indian Science Congress as "India's premier scientific gathering." It looks like he hasn't got the memo that the ISC turned into some kind of a sad joke quite a while ago -- most Indian scientists avoid going to it if they can. In case they do go there, it's more likely because of an invitation from some hapless friend who got saddled with the responsibility of organizing a session on something or the other.

3. In any event, we now have some info on how the session on "Ancient Science through Sanskrit" got into the program, and how the organizers vetted the "contributions":

   Organisers defend session Organisers said the idea to conduct a session on ancient sciences emerged following a meeting of various university vice-chancellors with the Governor of Maharashtra. It was the vice-chancellor of Kavikulaguru Kalidas Sanskrit University in Nagpur, Uma Vaidya, who proposed the idea for such a session, said S B Nimse, chairman of the 102nd Indian Science Congress. Nimse said the sessions had been decided by a committee he headed and which had seven members, including TIFR Director Mustansir Barma, IIT Bombay Director Devang Khakhar, scientist Anil Kakodkar, Professor Kothari and two local secretaries. He too agreed that the controversy had “impacted other sessions”.

   Associate prof and head of Sanskrit department at Mumbai University, Gauri Mahulikar, who gave an overview on ancient Indian sciences through Sanskrit at the Science Congress, said that between August to December this year, there were several meetings between Vaidya and Sanskrit department of Mumbai University. “In one of the meetings, which included Vaidya, myself and teachers from Mumbai University’s Sanskrit department, it was decided to have such a topic at the Indian Science Congress. Thereafter, we called for papers and received five abstracts or presentations, which were jointly reviewed by Vaidya, myself and our teachers,” said Mahulikar.

4. It also turns out that neither the author of the Vedic aeronautics paper nor the organizer of that session is keen to part with the paper:

   When asked the reasons for not sharing a public presentation, Gauri Mahulikar, co-host of the event, associate professor and Head of Sanskrit Department, Mumbai University, said, "There are copyright issues. We fear that others who have nothing to do with this research, will claim it as their finding," she said. She said that a few students of Sanskrit had already taken some papers from them, and claimed to be their own works.

Links

1. Relevant to the goings on at Science Congress: H.S. Mukunda et al (1974): A critical study of the work “Vymanika Shastra”. [Hat tip to V. Vinay on Twitter]

   A study of the work “Vymanika Shastra” is presented. First, the historical aspects and authenticity of the work are discussed. Subsequently, the work is critically reviewed in respect of its technical content. It appears that his work cannot be dated earlier than 1904 and contains details which, on the basis of our present knowledge, force us to conclude the non feasibility of heavier‐than craft of earlier times. Some peripheral questions concerning dimensions have also been touched upon. [Bold emphasis added]

2. Also relevant: an engaging BBC Radio 4 podcast on Indian mathematics (45 minutes, mp3, via Sidin Vadukut). See also this review of Mathermatics in India and Square Roots in the Sulbasutra by Cornell mathematician David Henderson. [Hat tip to Siddharth Varadarajan]

3. Dalmeet Singh Chawla in Science Insider: India’s major science funders join open-access push

4. My colleage Prof. E. Arunan has started blogging. Here are the first three posts:

   • Indian Science: Catch up with India, then worry about China.

   • The more zeroes you have to your name, the better scientist you are!

   • Is there a leadership crisis in Indian science?

Links

Following the #shirtstorm (and the apology), there has been an outpouring of articles and blog posts on the women-unfriendly culture in academic science in particular, and academia and science in general. Here are a few links:

1. Janet Stemwedel at Doing Good Science: The Rosetta mission #shirtstorm was never just about that shirt and A guide for science guys trying to understand the fuss about that shirt.

2. Kelly Baker in Vitae: Science Isn’t the Problem; Scientists Are.

3. Noah Smith in BloombergView: Economics Is a Dismal Science for Women. Money quote: "Why is it that the sciences look like a feminist nirvana compared with the economics profession, which seems to have a built-in bias that prevents women from advancing?"

Marguerite Del Giudice: Why It's Crucial to Get More Women Into Science

National Geographic:

So what difference does it make when there is a lack of women in science? For one, it means women might not get the quality of health care that men receive.

It's now widely acknowledged that countless women with heart disease have been misdiagnosed in emergency rooms and sent home, possibly to die from heart attacks, because for decades what we know now wasn't known: that they can exhibit different symptoms from men for cardiovascular disease. Women also have suffered disproportionately more side effects from various medications, from statins to sleep aids, because the recommended doses were based on clinical trials that focused largely on average-size men.

Such miscalculated dosages often have not been discovered until the drugs were on the market. Just last year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration advised women to cut their doses of the sleeping pill Ambien in half, after learning that the active ingredient in the drug remained in women's bodies longer than it did in men's.

Was the oversight in medical research deliberate? No, many scientists say. There was simply a routine procedural bias not to include sex as a variable in scientific research.

"Beautiful Chemistry"

Wonderful stuff [Hat tip: Cocktail Party Physics]. Here's the website with lots of interactive graphics.

Links

1. Samanth Subramanian in The New Yorker: India's Frugal Mission to Mars (November 2013) and Why India Went to Mars (25 September 2014).

2. Eldho Mathews in Inside Higher Ed: Internationalization: Where Is India Headed?

3. UGC tags 8 deemed universities 'unworthy', Basant Kumar Mohanty reports in The Telegraph.

4. India's Town of Toppers, Rakesh Kumar reports in Gulf News - Weekend Review.

Links: The Women-in-Science Edition

1. Patricia Fara in Nature (and non-paywalled!): Women in Science: A Temporary Liberation. "The First World War ushered women into laboratories and factories. In Britain, it may have won them the vote, argues Patricia Fara, but not the battle for equality."

2. Zuleyka Zevallos, Buddhini Samarasinghe and Rajini Rao in nature.com's SoapboxScience blog: Nature vs Nurture: Girls and STEM. In a section devoted to institutional interventions, they say:

   Active intervention at the institutional level also leads to positive change. Already, some colleges are reporting huge improvements: at Carnegie Mellon University, 40% of undergraduate incoming class in computer science are women, a welcome contrast to the dismal 18% of graduates in the U.S., and at Harvey Mudd College, more than half of the freshman engineering class this year were women. Their strategies ranged from featuring women on their brochures and as tour guides, to training teachers and hosting camps for high school students.

3. Mark Guzdial in Computing Education Blog: The most gender-balanced computing program in the USA: Computational Media at Georgia Tech. Making sense of two trends in one institution: growth of women's share from 25% to 45% in ten years (while that in the CS program grew from 9% to 19%), accompanied by a shrinking enrollment in the CM program.

4. Ruthe Farmer in Shriver Report: 10 Reasons Why America Needs 10,000 More Girls in Computer Science.

Some Bad Habits are Learned at School

A letter from S. Ramasesha in Current Science:

... While wilful plagiarism should be punished exemplarily, it may also, in some cases, be due to a lack of understanding on the part of the offender as to what constitutes plagiarism. In the Indian context, often the young researchers, mainly students, commit plagiarism ‘unknowingly’ because it is not clear to them as to what constitutes plagiarism and what does not. This is especially true for students in India, since in their formative years in school, often teachers give full credit only for answers which are reproduced verbatim from their textbooks or class notes. Students who write answers in their own words are often penalized. [...]

And also, this article by Tim Birkhead and Bob Montgomerie in Times Higher Education:

Further discussion with our own undergraduate research students uncovered what they considered to be the main cause of such misconduct: the way science is taught at school. The obsession with box-ticking is a major culprit, where assessment rewards only the right answer rather than the process of research and the integrity of reporting. Students told us of teachers who encouraged them to make up results (the right ones, of course) when a particular experiment had not “worked”. The problem is obvious: teachers have not been given sufficient time by governments and curriculum developers to properly teach the scientific process and to do experiments carefully. If an experiment or demonstration fails, pupils need to understand why. It is ludicrous that pupils should ever be encouraged to fake results when their experiments do not turn out as expected, or be punished with lower marks when they do not get the “right” answer. We expect that for some ambitious young scientists, the mis-training they received at school sets the agenda for the rest of their career.