House Republicans Are Targeting Scientists For Harassment and Intimidation

[DetlefK]

1. Oh shit. They also want the raw data that was produced over 7 years of research... Very bad call.

They are in for a bad surprise: Some kinds of experiments can generate Gigabytes of raw data, out of which only a few Mega- or even Kilobytes are interesting.



Indeed, they are in for a very bad surprise: Science has progressed to a state where scientists have to be extremely specialized in order to work in state-of-the-art research.
A colleague from the same field can duplicate your work right-away.
A colleague from a nearby field can understand your work and duplicate it with a few weeks and months of preparation.
A colleague from a distant field can understand what you are doing experimentally.
A colleague from a non-related field can take an educated guess on what you are doing.
A non-scientist won't understand shit. Well, he can read it, but he won't be able to tell whether it makes sense or not.


For example: The paper how Wickramasinghe found alien bacteria inside a meteorite. It seems to make sense, but it's actually chock-full of red flags in the experimental and technical details.
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1303/1303.2398.pdf