16 ms·

These issues of research fraud come up often, but the root of the problem is a bit more subtle. In North America at least, biomedical research labs operate lar

These issues of research fraud come up often, but the root of the problem is a bit more subtle. In North America at least, biomedical research labs operate largely as fiefdoms of the individual principal investigators (PIs). The actual research work falls almost entirely on the backs of grad students and postdoctoral fellows. The grad students need to generate "good" data in order to graduate, the postdocs need the same in order to gain real employment (with only about 10% gaining faculty positions themselves after many years of postdoctoral training). The PIs need such "productivity" from their trainees in order to gain the funding that keeps the labs going. The PIs themselves face success rates in grant applications that are often 10% or lower and, particularly early in their careers, their job security depends almost entirely on their ability to secure grant funding. These competitive pressures create enormous incentives for otherwise conscientious people, all the way along the hierarchy described above, to fudge their research data. Research fraud is thus a direct outcome of a fundamentally-broken approach to the structure of research funding. There are exceptions to that approach, however. The not-for-profit Howard Hughes Research Institute [1], and to an extent the intramural research programs of the NIH [2], offer funding for PIs to do what they do best, without the pressure of competing for scant funds. Coincidentally, some of the best science comes out of these sites. 1: https://www.hhmi.org/scientists https://www.hhmi.org/scientists 2: https://irp.nih.gov/about-us/what-is-the-irp https://irp.nih.gov/about-us/what-is-the-irp

martincmartin 6y ago
What do you suggest as an alternative?
- cscurmudgeon 6y ago
  Research publication, funding, and jobs should not be tied to outcomes of research. They should be tied to how systematic, logical, and well-documented the research is. We need a system wide change from funding bodies, job committees to publishing criteria.
  - mlthoughts2018 6y ago
    Along the same lines, “what question to ask” or “what idea to try” should never generate credit or fame for individuals. This incentivizes Indiana Jones style research, results at all costs. As a researcher you should be desiring to get jobs or rewards based solely on the care of methodology, clarity of communication and ease of reproducibility. If you do those things well and the papers turn up negative results, that’s good archived knowledge for society. Turning up positive results should be viewed as an emergent property of a wide network of labs, agencies, universities and governments, and never a property of darling individuals.
    - dasudasu 6y ago
      It can be argued that part of being a good researcher is developing an intuition and taste for interesting and promising research questions. Of course, the counterpart to this is that you see hype and fads developing very easily. But overall it is very easy to come up with experiments that any experienced researcher would have told you beforehand had no chance of producing interesting / impactful / positive results. The system must discriminates against researchers that are able to come up with interesting (positive) results with greater probability, since it represents every time an expense of finite resources. If your only contribution as a researcher is to be able to make conscientious and well realized experiments, then sadly your place is much more as an assistant than a PI. I've never seen it argued in serious research circles that grants should be given this way, but I did find the non-research community to be overly obsessed over negative results not being published or rewarded. It is simply a consequence of the set of possible experiments being infinite, the same way you can come up with an infinite number of startup ideas, but not all of them are equally good even before implementation. Should we reward startup founders with failed startups because they tried their best and really did the best they could given the circumstances?
      - mlthoughts2018 6y ago
        The comparison with startups isn’t valid - they seek an explicit profit outcome where good or bad ideas are judged by success in markets. Research is meant to be a public good, that furthers society’s at large repository of knowledge and culture. > “ It can be argued that part of being a good researcher is developing an intuition and taste for interesting and promising research questions.” I don’t think this can be argued actually. This is mythology, usually applied to creditmongers who run labs and accumulate accolades that are actually due to a wide array of students and post-docs who are made to get reduced credit as a type of dues paying laced with rampant discrimination and sexism. I’d say mythologizing the idea of a crack sleuth who has a special knack for research intuition is extremely harmful on all fronts: depriving value to society because it’s false and depriving value to the wide network of lower level staff who are actually responsible for progress.
- gwerbret 6y ago
  1) I think the idea of funding "people, not projects" (the Howard Hughes Research Institute's byline; I'm not affiliated with them in any way) is a great one. It would probably involve changing the structure of research programs in other fundamental ways, such as by 2) Limiting the number of graduate students. The current relatively-low barrier of entry into grad school provides cheap, motivated labor for PIs who are trying to stretch their research dollars to the limit. The outcome today is far more PhD graduates than jobs, and for those who get jobs, far too many of them for the research funds that are available. The overall quality of research drops when PIs focus what is fundable, rather than what is important. 3) Shifting the burden of the bulk of research work from trainees to salaried research associates/assistants/lab techs. 4) Change the focus of research output from novelty and volume (of papers published) to quality and significance of work done. Good research is often slow and careful, and doesn't fit well with the demands of grant funding agencies. Fewer grad students means more resources available for their training, and better career prospects. Shifting the bulk of the research benchwork to salaried professionals removes the incentive to commit fraud. None of this has to come at the expense of research quality; as an example, the NIH/HHMI already have approaches to vetting research programs for quality, even if the PIs aren't competing for grant funding.
  - an_opabinia 6y ago
    > Limiting the number of graduate students. Isn't a lot of the graduate school product providing a way for people to immigrate to the United States? The economy around it is pretty complicated and definitely there's way more pressure to supply more, not fewer, spots.
    - vkou 6y ago
      No, the problem is a bit more structural then that. A single professor trains dozens of grad students over the course of their career. Even if you remove every single foreigner, and every single person who does not want to pursue a career in academia, you still end up with dozens of graduates - per professor. The number of jobs available for those graduates? One - that professor's - when he or she retires. And until then, they get to burn the midnight oil, doing grunt work on their projects, in the hopes of competing their dozen collegaues for a shot at that one spot.
- adminprof 6y ago
  This entire thread is really frustrating for me to read. A lot of these ideas are one-liners from people who have had very little experience with different parts of academia, except maybe being a student. Every single idea here are debated to death by academics already (not just university academics, but funding agencies, academic societies, award panels, journal editors and conference organizers), with changes happening all the time. If it was this simple that a random person here could come up with how to "solve" academia, we'd have already done it decades ago. The ideas also lack nuance and when you get into the definitions of things (for example, p-hacking), then things become a lot more grey; are you allowed to look at a dataset that you spent 2 years collecting if your first hypothesis does not pan out? The clear cut cases are obvious to everyone, it's the grey area that takes 99% of the time to figure out. Imagine reading a thread where everyone is proposing "solutions" to software development. It'd go something like "software development is a cesspool and 80% of it fails (see voting systems, MySpace, electronic health records, Theranos. Here's what software companies need to do:" [yes I'm being intentionally stupid to demonstrate how annoying this is] 1) stop releasing before the bugs are fixed. Software and games are rushed out. Companies need to take their time to fix the bugs so the users don't have to encounter them. 2) no more technical debt. Programmers are sloppy and introduce technical debt because they are not incentivized to do high quality programs. [yes, see how triggering that is] 3) cap team sizes. Everyone knows that large teams fail more spectacularly. Gmail and Napster and the original version of Google were made by a group of 4 people. Software teams need to be 4-5 people max. 4) programmers must use a transparency scorecard. Software companies like Oracle and IBM charge ridiculous amounts for their work. They hide costs and cut corners. Programmers should be transparent about the work they are doing each day, what data they access, and which functions they are writing. These changes need to happen. derp derp
  - nl 6y ago
    Not sure who downvoted this, but this is 100% on the money in my experience. People here are writing comments like that funding should be tied to "how systematic, logical, and well-documented the research is" as though these things are correlated to the existing criteria at all. Much of the criticism here is like someone who knows how to build roads criticising agile software development because it makes it look like no one knows what they are going to build in the end. It's frustrating, and wrong, but the errors are subtle and aggregative.
dasudasu 6y ago
The topic of funding is a recurrent one in these types of discussions. There are always more people wanting to do science than what is available in funding. There needs to be a process to allocate resources that takes into account competency for the job. Just granting it at random or equally is probably very very far from optimal if it means that an exceptional PI cannot even do the things to push his/her research to the next level. Research funding is a bit like a command economy in that there are no market forces that can be drawn upon to just sort it naturally, so of course it ends up being especially thorny.
- asciimov 6y ago
  > There are always more people wanting to do science than what is available in funding. So why not just fund them? Any process you could create or that currently exists just ends up being gamed by people who understand how to get funding.
  - dasudasu 6y ago
    There are no ways around that. You cannot feasibly make funding infinite nor do anything about the lack of political will for increasing research funding. Even if funding was to increase dramatically, you'd get people coming up with even more expensive research projects (new particle accelerator anyone?) and there would still be winners and losers of that funding game. There's also the fact that a PI minting dozens of PhD over their careers, especially in fields with limited industry opportunities, inherently produces a pyramidal scheme that is bound to push people away from science.
    - jgeada 6y ago
      Why not? We seem to have no problem with infinite funding for Department of Defense and to bail out banks. The amount needed for science is paltry by comparison and typically has much better long term return on investment.
      - dasudasu 6y ago
Gatsky 6y ago
I have to disagree with this 'good people gone bad' analysis. None of the research fraud I have witnessed fits this model.
- caterama 6y ago
  Could you give more details on other causes of research fraud you've seen?
  - Gatsky 6y ago
    One was a post-doctoral scientist, called X. The lab I was in was asked to take X on by the institute because they had a falling out with another lab, the details of which were not disclosed. A year later, after very poor productivity and various petty issues with other people in the lab, someone checked X's data collection where the original data was available on the instrtument, and found that it was all made up. Subsequently the previous lab investigated, and a paper X published as first author was retracted. Turns out in the previous lab there were also concerns about data fabrication and many other problematic interactions before the fraud was discovered. Also turns out X left another lab before this under similar circumstances. Another was a well established Professor 'P' with a very large number of published papers, who continued to publish multiple papers at a high rate. There had been doubts for years due to data that seemed too cute and the fact that P always took the data and made the final figures in the paper themselves. P was finally caught out when a paper included data which could not possibly have been collected, and was outright fabricated. It is worthing nothing that both P and X left the institute without disciplinary action beyond employment termination and signing an NDA. One of them is in another city, getting government grants and doing just fine. Everyone in the know doesn't trust any of their papers of course, but I guess that doesn't include whoever reviews their grants. None of these are 'good people gone bad'. They are are flawed individuals with no integrity and sociopathic personality traits, and they waste a lot of decent people's time dealing with their actions.
    - gwerbret 6y ago
      I agree completely that some people fit that bill; I'd argue however that even for them, the skewed incentives of research success certainly help support that particular approach to fraud. My premise was that most of the people committing research fraud are probably not sociopaths.
canjobear 6y ago
Another variant of the incentive problem is more insidious. Many academics are driven by ego, and specifically a desire to be influential. One way to be influential is to have great, original, and correct ideas. This can be a good incentive, but coupled with our human ability to deceive ourselves, it can become pathological. I’ve seen researchers get convinced that their ideas are so beautiful and right-feeling that they just can’t be wrong, and they will torture the data and run experiment after experiment it appears to work. Sometimes this crosses into outright fraud without the researcher even realizing it——after all, the theory is right, so if the data don’t match it they must be wrong! This problem seems much harder to fix than research funding, because the question is how to allocate prestige and influence, not just money.
- prionassembly 6y ago
  > I’ve seen researchers get convinced Where have you seen them?
  - kergonath 6y ago
    This confirmation bias is everywhere. As in, “this calculation looks off, we should re-run it” or “this number is wrong, let’s call it an outlier”. Sometimes there’s a good reason, sometimes it’s wishful thinking and they are hoping the next one will be more “correct”. Distinguishing the two is not always easy, either. From my experience, it is checked most of the time before it becomes fraud, though.
    - prionassembly 6y ago
      Yes, but where is your experience? Academia, industry, STEM, biosciences, the pub?
      - kergonath 6y ago
        All of them except biosciences :) Condensed matter physics in a well-known university. But it does involve working with engineers and quite a lot of pub-going.
raister 6y ago
> with only about 10% gaining faculty positions themselves after many years of postdoctoral training There are no (steady) places for everyone, sadly. That's the way things are, where they demand postdocs to be extra productive, promising a permanent position somewhere (or a letter of recommendation, whatever). Currently, the postdoc 'experience' has multiple names: research associate, research fellow, research engineer like it is a 'career' to pursue, with minimal benefits, salary attached to research projects (so it could stop at the end), etc.
moralestapia 6y ago
>labs operate largely as fiefdoms of the individual principal investigators To add to the injury, you wouldn't believe the extent of the actions to which some PIs become engaged in order to attain/preserve their 'power'. Illegal, unethical and pathetic. The core problem is that PIs are human, and humans are flawed. The solution (if there is one) should take this into account, and somehow try to reduce it systematically, at an institutional level. The problem is that the ones that make the rules are not going to fight against themselves ... I wish I had something more to add, but that's it, that's the state of the field.
- rscho 6y ago
  > The core problem is that PIs are human Actually, the problematic behaviours you describe are encouraged at the institutional level, because institutions also get more funding if they output more/better research. The fact that postdocs don't want to commit scientific suicide for the sake of morals in that context should surprise no one. The ground truth is that scientific research has been turned into a poorly regulated industry, and we are all poorer for it. There's a very simple solution to alleviate this pain: be much more selective starting at the undergrad level. But that generates less money, so baaaaad...
  - moralestapia 6y ago
    >[...] the problematic behaviours you describe are encouraged at the institutional level Yes, which is why I wrote, >[...] and somehow try to reduce it systematically, at an institutional level.
- rapjr9 6y ago
  This is also why you see announcements of new "breakthroughs" and then nothing further ever happens. The experience is so unpleasant for many people (often compared to slavery) that they leave when they get their degree and never work on that project again. The PI's also get bored and want to do something new to keep building their reputation (so onward to the next grad student or post doc). Patents are sometimes generated, but new ideas are very difficult to take to market successfully so those that can afford to buy or license them do so very carefully (unless they want the patent to attack some competitors product.) In general there is rarely any follow through on new ideas, unless you work on projects with DARPA funding where they insist on "technology transfer", and even then many ideas turn out to be unworkable because they require additional extensive engineering for the practical aspects.
etrautmann 6y ago
HHMI does fund some of the most enormously successful work in biomedical science, but they start with the very best of the best. It's not clear how much of these labs success is the result of the precise funding structure, although it's obviously helpful to spend less time writing grants (or just have additional resources). These labs are up for renewal from HHMI every 5 years, and as such, do face the same pressure to continue publishing high-impact work.
- obmelvin 6y ago
  HHMI is crazy, it has definitely had a positive impact on my girlfriends PhD experience and allowed her to take on a 'post doc killer' project. It's taken her almost 3 years, but she's gotten great quality data, and just got a great review back from Nature Chem with proposed experiments as expected. Also, the period can increase as time goes on. Her lab doesn't have to renew for 9 years I think (they renewed last summer), if not 7. Just my 2c, it seems to me like these funding structures do have a positive impact on the research environment. That said, it's obviously a model that really requires them to select the best of the best labs as you mention, because one org (or even the gov) quite simply can't give blank checks to every lab.
  - jrochkind1 6y ago
    > That said, it's obviously a model that really requires them to select the best of the best labs as you mention... It seems like it's also a model that makes labs better. What labs will be the "best of the best labs" is not independent from the way their funding sources provide pressure/rewards/punishments to do work in certain ways or do certain kinds of work.
    - obmelvin 6y ago
      Yes, you are very much correct. Unfortunately, if HHMI and the like are unwilling* to do these sorts of funding experiments, I'm not really sure who will. * I can't claim to be up-to-date on the distribution of labs funded so for all I know someone is already doing this.
henriquemaia 6y ago
I agree with the subtle point behind the fraud crisis: misaligned incentives. However, that doesn't excuse the individuals doing it. "Because jobs" is a terrible ethical excuse. Nevertheless, you have an interesting point there.
hhas01 6y ago
Rest assured it’s not just North America. https://forbetterscience.com/2020/03/26/chloroquine-genius-didier-raoult-to-save-the-world-from-covid-19/ https://forbetterscience.com/2020/03/26/chloroquine-genius-d...
Balgair 6y ago
Aside: To give readers an idea of the financial pressures I have an example. One of my former professors told me that the lab spaces costs ~$45/sqft/mo from the university, 300sqft minimum. That's ~$160k/year just for the floor space in just the lab, not the office space either. Now, electrical, heat, vivarium, elevators, janitors, security, etc. are all rolled up into that. Bit that's not specific equipment costs, reagents, grad students, and the profssor's own salary. Granted, every university is different (just look at patent ownership clauses). It's not cheap and you must win grants just to pay rent for your own apartment. Especially early on in your career, it's a real struggle.

martincmartin 6y ago

What do you suggest as an alternative?

cscurmudgeon 6y ago
Research publication, funding, and jobs should not be tied to outcomes of research. They should be tied to how systematic, logical, and well-documented the research is. We need a system wide change from funding bodies, job committees to publishing criteria.
- mlthoughts2018 6y ago
  Along the same lines, “what question to ask” or “what idea to try” should never generate credit or fame for individuals. This incentivizes Indiana Jones style research, results at all costs. As a researcher you should be desiring to get jobs or rewards based solely on the care of methodology, clarity of communication and ease of reproducibility. If you do those things well and the papers turn up negative results, that’s good archived knowledge for society. Turning up positive results should be viewed as an emergent property of a wide network of labs, agencies, universities and governments, and never a property of darling individuals.
  - dasudasu 6y ago
    It can be argued that part of being a good researcher is developing an intuition and taste for interesting and promising research questions. Of course, the counterpart to this is that you see hype and fads developing very easily. But overall it is very easy to come up with experiments that any experienced researcher would have told you beforehand had no chance of producing interesting / impactful / positive results. The system must discriminates against researchers that are able to come up with interesting (positive) results with greater probability, since it represents every time an expense of finite resources. If your only contribution as a researcher is to be able to make conscientious and well realized experiments, then sadly your place is much more as an assistant than a PI. I've never seen it argued in serious research circles that grants should be given this way, but I did find the non-research community to be overly obsessed over negative results not being published or rewarded. It is simply a consequence of the set of possible experiments being infinite, the same way you can come up with an infinite number of startup ideas, but not all of them are equally good even before implementation. Should we reward startup founders with failed startups because they tried their best and really did the best they could given the circumstances?
    - mlthoughts2018 6y ago
      The comparison with startups isn’t valid - they seek an explicit profit outcome where good or bad ideas are judged by success in markets. Research is meant to be a public good, that furthers society’s at large repository of knowledge and culture. > “ It can be argued that part of being a good researcher is developing an intuition and taste for interesting and promising research questions.” I don’t think this can be argued actually. This is mythology, usually applied to creditmongers who run labs and accumulate accolades that are actually due to a wide array of students and post-docs who are made to get reduced credit as a type of dues paying laced with rampant discrimination and sexism. I’d say mythologizing the idea of a crack sleuth who has a special knack for research intuition is extremely harmful on all fronts: depriving value to society because it’s false and depriving value to the wide network of lower level staff who are actually responsible for progress.
gwerbret 6y ago
1) I think the idea of funding "people, not projects" (the Howard Hughes Research Institute's byline; I'm not affiliated with them in any way) is a great one. It would probably involve changing the structure of research programs in other fundamental ways, such as by 2) Limiting the number of graduate students. The current relatively-low barrier of entry into grad school provides cheap, motivated labor for PIs who are trying to stretch their research dollars to the limit. The outcome today is far more PhD graduates than jobs, and for those who get jobs, far too many of them for the research funds that are available. The overall quality of research drops when PIs focus what is fundable, rather than what is important. 3) Shifting the burden of the bulk of research work from trainees to salaried research associates/assistants/lab techs. 4) Change the focus of research output from novelty and volume (of papers published) to quality and significance of work done. Good research is often slow and careful, and doesn't fit well with the demands of grant funding agencies. Fewer grad students means more resources available for their training, and better career prospects. Shifting the bulk of the research benchwork to salaried professionals removes the incentive to commit fraud. None of this has to come at the expense of research quality; as an example, the NIH/HHMI already have approaches to vetting research programs for quality, even if the PIs aren't competing for grant funding.
- an_opabinia 6y ago
  > Limiting the number of graduate students. Isn't a lot of the graduate school product providing a way for people to immigrate to the United States? The economy around it is pretty complicated and definitely there's way more pressure to supply more, not fewer, spots.
  - vkou 6y ago
    No, the problem is a bit more structural then that. A single professor trains dozens of grad students over the course of their career. Even if you remove every single foreigner, and every single person who does not want to pursue a career in academia, you still end up with dozens of graduates - per professor. The number of jobs available for those graduates? One - that professor's - when he or she retires. And until then, they get to burn the midnight oil, doing grunt work on their projects, in the hopes of competing their dozen collegaues for a shot at that one spot.
adminprof 6y ago
This entire thread is really frustrating for me to read. A lot of these ideas are one-liners from people who have had very little experience with different parts of academia, except maybe being a student. Every single idea here are debated to death by academics already (not just university academics, but funding agencies, academic societies, award panels, journal editors and conference organizers), with changes happening all the time. If it was this simple that a random person here could come up with how to "solve" academia, we'd have already done it decades ago. The ideas also lack nuance and when you get into the definitions of things (for example, p-hacking), then things become a lot more grey; are you allowed to look at a dataset that you spent 2 years collecting if your first hypothesis does not pan out? The clear cut cases are obvious to everyone, it's the grey area that takes 99% of the time to figure out. Imagine reading a thread where everyone is proposing "solutions" to software development. It'd go something like "software development is a cesspool and 80% of it fails (see voting systems, MySpace, electronic health records, Theranos. Here's what software companies need to do:" [yes I'm being intentionally stupid to demonstrate how annoying this is] 1) stop releasing before the bugs are fixed. Software and games are rushed out. Companies need to take their time to fix the bugs so the users don't have to encounter them. 2) no more technical debt. Programmers are sloppy and introduce technical debt because they are not incentivized to do high quality programs. [yes, see how triggering that is] 3) cap team sizes. Everyone knows that large teams fail more spectacularly. Gmail and Napster and the original version of Google were made by a group of 4 people. Software teams need to be 4-5 people max. 4) programmers must use a transparency scorecard. Software companies like Oracle and IBM charge ridiculous amounts for their work. They hide costs and cut corners. Programmers should be transparent about the work they are doing each day, what data they access, and which functions they are writing. These changes need to happen. derp derp
- nl 6y ago
  Not sure who downvoted this, but this is 100% on the money in my experience. People here are writing comments like that funding should be tied to "how systematic, logical, and well-documented the research is" as though these things are correlated to the existing criteria at all. Much of the criticism here is like someone who knows how to build roads criticising agile software development because it makes it look like no one knows what they are going to build in the end. It's frustrating, and wrong, but the errors are subtle and aggregative.

dasudasu 6y ago

The topic of funding is a recurrent one in these types of discussions. There are always more people wanting to do science than what is available in funding. There needs to be a process to allocate resources that takes into account competency for the job. Just granting it at random or equally is probably very very far from optimal if it means that an exceptional PI cannot even do the things to push his/her research to the next level. Research funding is a bit like a command economy in that there are no market forces that can be drawn upon to just sort it naturally, so of course it ends up being especially thorny.

asciimov 6y ago
> There are always more people wanting to do science than what is available in funding. So why not just fund them? Any process you could create or that currently exists just ends up being gamed by people who understand how to get funding.
- dasudasu 6y ago
  There are no ways around that. You cannot feasibly make funding infinite nor do anything about the lack of political will for increasing research funding. Even if funding was to increase dramatically, you'd get people coming up with even more expensive research projects (new particle accelerator anyone?) and there would still be winners and losers of that funding game. There's also the fact that a PI minting dozens of PhD over their careers, especially in fields with limited industry opportunities, inherently produces a pyramidal scheme that is bound to push people away from science.
  - jgeada 6y ago
    Why not? We seem to have no problem with infinite funding for Department of Defense and to bail out banks. The amount needed for science is paltry by comparison and typically has much better long term return on investment.
    - dasudasu 6y ago

Gatsky 6y ago

I have to disagree with this 'good people gone bad' analysis. None of the research fraud I have witnessed fits this model.

caterama 6y ago
Could you give more details on other causes of research fraud you've seen?
- Gatsky 6y ago
  One was a post-doctoral scientist, called X. The lab I was in was asked to take X on by the institute because they had a falling out with another lab, the details of which were not disclosed. A year later, after very poor productivity and various petty issues with other people in the lab, someone checked X's data collection where the original data was available on the instrtument, and found that it was all made up. Subsequently the previous lab investigated, and a paper X published as first author was retracted. Turns out in the previous lab there were also concerns about data fabrication and many other problematic interactions before the fraud was discovered. Also turns out X left another lab before this under similar circumstances. Another was a well established Professor 'P' with a very large number of published papers, who continued to publish multiple papers at a high rate. There had been doubts for years due to data that seemed too cute and the fact that P always took the data and made the final figures in the paper themselves. P was finally caught out when a paper included data which could not possibly have been collected, and was outright fabricated. It is worthing nothing that both P and X left the institute without disciplinary action beyond employment termination and signing an NDA. One of them is in another city, getting government grants and doing just fine. Everyone in the know doesn't trust any of their papers of course, but I guess that doesn't include whoever reviews their grants. None of these are 'good people gone bad'. They are are flawed individuals with no integrity and sociopathic personality traits, and they waste a lot of decent people's time dealing with their actions.
  - gwerbret 6y ago
    I agree completely that some people fit that bill; I'd argue however that even for them, the skewed incentives of research success certainly help support that particular approach to fraud. My premise was that most of the people committing research fraud are probably not sociopaths.

canjobear 6y ago

Another variant of the incentive problem is more insidious. Many academics are driven by ego, and specifically a desire to be influential. One way to be influential is to have great, original, and correct ideas. This can be a good incentive, but coupled with our human ability to deceive ourselves, it can become pathological. I’ve seen researchers get convinced that their ideas are so beautiful and right-feeling that they just can’t be wrong, and they will torture the data and run experiment after experiment it appears to work. Sometimes this crosses into outright fraud without the researcher even realizing it——after all, the theory is right, so if the data don’t match it they must be wrong! This problem seems much harder to fix than research funding, because the question is how to allocate prestige and influence, not just money.

prionassembly 6y ago
> I’ve seen researchers get convinced Where have you seen them?
- kergonath 6y ago
  This confirmation bias is everywhere. As in, “this calculation looks off, we should re-run it” or “this number is wrong, let’s call it an outlier”. Sometimes there’s a good reason, sometimes it’s wishful thinking and they are hoping the next one will be more “correct”. Distinguishing the two is not always easy, either. From my experience, it is checked most of the time before it becomes fraud, though.
  - prionassembly 6y ago
    Yes, but where is your experience? Academia, industry, STEM, biosciences, the pub?
    - kergonath 6y ago
      All of them except biosciences :) Condensed matter physics in a well-known university. But it does involve working with engineers and quite a lot of pub-going.

raister 6y ago

> with only about 10% gaining faculty positions themselves after many years of postdoctoral training There are no (steady) places for everyone, sadly. That's the way things are, where they demand postdocs to be extra productive, promising a permanent position somewhere (or a letter of recommendation, whatever). Currently, the postdoc 'experience' has multiple names: research associate, research fellow, research engineer like it is a 'career' to pursue, with minimal benefits, salary attached to research projects (so it could stop at the end), etc.

moralestapia 6y ago

>labs operate largely as fiefdoms of the individual principal investigators To add to the injury, you wouldn't believe the extent of the actions to which some PIs become engaged in order to attain/preserve their 'power'. Illegal, unethical and pathetic. The core problem is that PIs are human, and humans are flawed. The solution (if there is one) should take this into account, and somehow try to reduce it systematically, at an institutional level. The problem is that the ones that make the rules are not going to fight against themselves ... I wish I had something more to add, but that's it, that's the state of the field.

rscho 6y ago
> The core problem is that PIs are human Actually, the problematic behaviours you describe are encouraged at the institutional level, because institutions also get more funding if they output more/better research. The fact that postdocs don't want to commit scientific suicide for the sake of morals in that context should surprise no one. The ground truth is that scientific research has been turned into a poorly regulated industry, and we are all poorer for it. There's a very simple solution to alleviate this pain: be much more selective starting at the undergrad level. But that generates less money, so baaaaad...
- moralestapia 6y ago
  >[...] the problematic behaviours you describe are encouraged at the institutional level Yes, which is why I wrote, >[...] and somehow try to reduce it systematically, at an institutional level.
rapjr9 6y ago
This is also why you see announcements of new "breakthroughs" and then nothing further ever happens. The experience is so unpleasant for many people (often compared to slavery) that they leave when they get their degree and never work on that project again. The PI's also get bored and want to do something new to keep building their reputation (so onward to the next grad student or post doc). Patents are sometimes generated, but new ideas are very difficult to take to market successfully so those that can afford to buy or license them do so very carefully (unless they want the patent to attack some competitors product.) In general there is rarely any follow through on new ideas, unless you work on projects with DARPA funding where they insist on "technology transfer", and even then many ideas turn out to be unworkable because they require additional extensive engineering for the practical aspects.

etrautmann 6y ago

HHMI does fund some of the most enormously successful work in biomedical science, but they start with the very best of the best. It's not clear how much of these labs success is the result of the precise funding structure, although it's obviously helpful to spend less time writing grants (or just have additional resources). These labs are up for renewal from HHMI every 5 years, and as such, do face the same pressure to continue publishing high-impact work.

obmelvin 6y ago
HHMI is crazy, it has definitely had a positive impact on my girlfriends PhD experience and allowed her to take on a 'post doc killer' project. It's taken her almost 3 years, but she's gotten great quality data, and just got a great review back from Nature Chem with proposed experiments as expected. Also, the period can increase as time goes on. Her lab doesn't have to renew for 9 years I think (they renewed last summer), if not 7. Just my 2c, it seems to me like these funding structures do have a positive impact on the research environment. That said, it's obviously a model that really requires them to select the best of the best labs as you mention, because one org (or even the gov) quite simply can't give blank checks to every lab.
- jrochkind1 6y ago
  > That said, it's obviously a model that really requires them to select the best of the best labs as you mention... It seems like it's also a model that makes labs better. What labs will be the "best of the best labs" is not independent from the way their funding sources provide pressure/rewards/punishments to do work in certain ways or do certain kinds of work.
  - obmelvin 6y ago
    Yes, you are very much correct. Unfortunately, if HHMI and the like are unwilling* to do these sorts of funding experiments, I'm not really sure who will. * I can't claim to be up-to-date on the distribution of labs funded so for all I know someone is already doing this.

henriquemaia 6y ago

I agree with the subtle point behind the fraud crisis: misaligned incentives. However, that doesn't excuse the individuals doing it. "Because jobs" is a terrible ethical excuse. Nevertheless, you have an interesting point there.

hhas01 6y ago

Rest assured it’s not just North America. https://forbetterscience.com/2020/03/26/chloroquine-genius-didier-raoult-to-save-the-world-from-covid-19/ https://forbetterscience.com/2020/03/26/chloroquine-genius-d...

Balgair 6y ago

Aside: To give readers an idea of the financial pressures I have an example. One of my former professors told me that the lab spaces costs ~$45/sqft/mo from the university, 300sqft minimum. That's ~$160k/year just for the floor space in just the lab, not the office space either. Now, electrical, heat, vivarium, elevators, janitors, security, etc. are all rolled up into that. Bit that's not specific equipment costs, reagents, grad students, and the profssor's own salary. Granted, every university is different (just look at patent ownership clauses). It's not cheap and you must win grants just to pay rent for your own apartment. Especially early on in your career, it's a real struggle.