image manipulation outside the humanities

Since our visit to the Neuroimaging lab, I have spent quite some time thinking about the importance of images outside of the humanities (which is admittedly my comfort zone!).  As we discussed briefly in class, I found it fascinating that aesthetics do eventually play an essential role in the work of Dan Stettler and his colleagues, as that which is published must necessarily be in some way visually appealing in order to capture the attention of journal-readers and conference attendees.  I had never considered that “beauty” – as subjective an idea as that may be – could find its way into what I had imagined to be the much more objective arena of neuroscience.  

After reading Christine Rosen’s article “The Image Culture,” which I presented in class, I began to wonder if digital manipulation is ever a problem in science-based imaging, which can, as Dan indicated, be so important to the advancement of one’s career.  Rosen discusses how manipulation has been used for decades to “visually settle scores,” often in the arena of politics, and how the advent of Photoshop in 1990 has had significant implications for our ability to trust what we see.

In researching cases of image manipulation in the sciences, I came across an article entitled "The Ethics of Digital Manipulation" which crystallized many of the issues we discussed in class.  The author is a practitioner of digital astrophotography, a field in which photographers have a vested interest in developing photographs of faraway galaxies which are visually appealing for publication, and the site demonstrates the difference between an unedited image of the night sky (red) and one which has been digitally enhanced (blue).

I also came across an article in the scientific journal Nature News entitled "Science Journals Crack Down on Image Manipulation," indicating that occurrences of such manipulation have increased in the past few years.  The United States Department of Health and Human Services' Office for Research Integrity (ORI), the agency tasked with reviewing submissions for publication in scholarly journals, noted that image manipulation "has escalated over the past two years" and that it is a "growing problem that needs to be dealt with."  The executive editor of Nature notes that "people don't  understand the difference between the beautification of an image and fraud."  The following graph accompanied the article was quite illustrative of the increase in such cases over the years, raising some interesting questions for me:

As digital manipulation technology becomes more sophisticated, does our tendency to use it for insidious purposes increase?  How do ethics play into this issue? Because everyone theoretically has access to these technologies, does the use of them constitute "fair game?"