8 ms·

Biologist decided to disavow his own study

192 points by colinprince 5y ago

dang 5y ago
Related: http://ecoevoevoeco.blogspot.com/2021/05/wish-to-register-complaint.html http://ecoevoevoeco.blogspot.com/2021/05/wish-to-register-co...
pvaldes 5y ago
If is wrong disavow is one possible way, another would be to repeat the experiment and publish a correction criticizing your own article. On the other hand, if your name is on an article, you must do your homework and know if what you are signing is realistic or not.
- pfortuny 5y ago
  However, what you say in the second paragraph is exactly what the reviewers should ask the authors and question.
- anormalpapier 5y ago
  > if your name is on an article, you must do your homework and know if what you are signing is realistic or not. Definitely not the case when you're an undergraduate trying to get your foot in the door with your first paper.
  - markwkw 5y ago
    Isn’t it the case that when you’re an undergraduate you do the grunt work and collect and process all the base data, and the risk is actually on the side of the supervisor?
    - CrazyStat 5y ago
      The base data in this case was (supposedly) collected by the Canadian Centre for DNA Barcoding, rather than anyone in the lab. However that Centre denies having the samples in their database.
    - joe_the_user 5y ago
      As far as I know, writing a research paper at all as an undergraduate is unusual. In the US, afaik, the purpose of undergraduate work is to learn the material of the field. A Phd program then teaches the student how to do research in a field and the student goes on to do actual research only then. An undergraduate would do a research paper as independent study or a special department class I think. With the provision that advisor is doing a lot of hand holding. So handing fake data to someone's whose effectively a complete newby and letting them process it and publish it as their first achievement, is really despicable as the article seems to describe.
  - pvaldes 5y ago
    If an undergraduate accepts to cheat as exchange to have a career in science maybe simply shouldn't have a career in science.
- fabian2k 5y ago
  There's pretty much no way to do that in interdisciplinary publications. In those cases the main reason you have the other people on board is because you don't understand their field well enough. And there are plenty of cases where you won't notice anything is off unless you actually examine the raw data in detail, which isn't really realistic as it's an enormous amount of effort and duplicated work. There are certainly cases where co-authors should notice that something is off about the data. But there are plenty of situations where there is no reason at all to suspect a problem with the data, and where there is no way to know that someone is simply providing false data.
  - kergonath 5y ago
    > In those cases the main reason you have the other people on board is because you don't understand their field well enough. “Don’t put your name on something you don’t understand” is a good rule to live by. All the authors share responsibility. We cannot accept credit when all works well and reject blame when it does not. > But there are plenty of situations where there is no reason at all to suspect a problem with the data, and where there is no way to know that someone is simply providing false data. Publishing an article with better results is definitely the best thing to do then. Short of that, publishing a letter to the editor sharing concerns is a good way of putting your doubts on record. Just removing your name looks too much like washing your hands of the whole thing.
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  A call replicate a paper that's demonstrably fraudulent seems even more of a cover-up of the fraud as just doing nothing. The original paper was published while the first author was an undergraduate, btw, so they probably didn't have a complete grasp of the issue.
px1999 5y ago
This is a widespread problem. A close friend went through a similar experience collaborating at another supposedly reputable Canadian university. He reported the academic dishonesty (copies of figures from another paper presented as new experimental results), and the university went to great lengths to keep the whole thing quiet. 5 years later, the lead researcher who faked the results still works at the university, the paper has not been retracted, and my friend left what became a pretty hostile lab (and AFAIK is still under NDA) At that point, what is left aside from trying to publicly remove your own name from a paper you know is fraudulent?
- ren_engineer 5y ago
  modern academia has become a meta game where its more about being able to navigate the system(get grant funding, go with status quo to get tenure, collude with others for citations, etc.) rather than actually being good at the field. We spend drastically more government money on research funding than in the past yet get less in return see the Alzheimer's amyloid plaque cartel- https://www.statnews.com/2019/06/25/alzheimers-cabal-thwarted-progress-toward-cure/ https://www.statnews.com/2019/06/25/alzheimers-cabal-thwarte... https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2019/12/31/Amyloid-plaques-may-not-cause-Alzheimers-disease-study-says/1551577796692/ https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2019/12/31/Amyloid-plaques-m... “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
  - magicalist 5y ago
    > modern academia has become a meta game where its more about being able to navigate the system rather than actually being good at the field. Sounds like the entire history of academia (and most human endeavors, honestly) > We spend drastically more government money on research funding than in the past You didn't define "in the past" but pure science spending has generally declined as a percentage of GDP and has barely changed in inflation adjusted dollars in the last twenty years. > yet get less in return* As measured how?
    - ipaddr 5y ago
encryptluks2 5y ago
[flagged]
- 74B5 5y ago
  You know about the fraudsters publishing about ivermectin?
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    I know you're just trying to make a point here, but not all of the Ivermectin research was fraudulent. There was some (seemingly) legit work from India/Bangladesh where Ivermectin did significantly increase the chance of survival among COVID patients. (To be fair, these same regions where the legit studies are from also have a high prevalence of parasitic worm infections, but it's still a poignant reminder that removing complicating factors can help heal the primary disease.)
    - mst 5y ago
      Thank you for bringing this up because so much of the Ivermectin discourse forgets about it and I continue to be very glad that doctors in those areas have an extra tool for saving lives. The anglosphere yelling at itself in counterproductive ways would, I presume, have happened anyway albeit over a different treatment, so this seems to me like it was at least close to a pure win and "fewer dead people" is a pretty solid win, all things considered.
  - loudtieblahblah 5y ago
    Tell me who you voted for without telling me who you voted for.
    - encryptluks2 5y ago
      Voted for Biden
surlyadopter 5y ago
Here is a much longer writeup of the situation. https://www.science.org/content/article/this-scientist-accused-supplement-industry-of-fraud-now-his-own-work-is-under-fire https://www.science.org/content/article/this-scientist-accus...
wnevets 5y ago
It's been said before but once it was decided having papers published became a target everything started to go to shit.
- vkou 5y ago
  Sure. Which alternative metric would you prefer we use for allocating jobs and funding, and why do you expect that a generation from now, it won't be gamed into absurdity?
- jltsiren 5y ago
  The root issue is that many people want to become scientists but other people are only willing to fund far fewer scientists. When the supply of scientists far exceeds the demand, there must be a way to decide who gets jobs and funding. Some people favor objective measurements, because they are less prone to corruption and nepotism than subjective ones. But when you have objective measurements, people will try to game them, and some will use dishonest means.
  - oconnor663 5y ago
    I think tech company hiring is in a loosely similar situation. No one thinks whiteboard coding is an awesome way to test candidates. Everyone agrees that it doesn't reflect what programmers do day-to-day, and everyone knows there are lots of strong programmers out there who don't do well in whiteboard settings. But I'm not aware of any viable alternatives. The good old fashioned approach of "judge people based on what school they went to, what companies they worked for, and who they know" is probably worse for everyone. The ideal approach might be "hire anyone who asks and then fire them after a year if they're not doing well", but that's very expensive for everyone involved.
    - jimmaswell 5y ago
      There are tons of alternatives, anywhere from take home tests to just gauging their general experience and answers to some technical questions.
CoastalCoder 5y ago
I understand that Melinda Gates is looking for different charities to invest in. I wonder if she'd fund researchers to attempt to replicate crucial publications / studies. I expect that she has enough money to put a serious dent in this problem, at least if she focused on some specific area.
- HarryHirsch 5y ago
  It doesn't work like that. When you do actual science at the bench you find out fairly quickly whose work is solid and whose is like weak reeds. The trouble is the misaligned incentives, everyone has good reason to keep silent for fear of attracting the attention of the funding agency. If something is afoot (the rumours are usually true), soon you are looking at 7-figure damages.
  - CoastalCoder 5y ago
    I don't understand why that invalidates my idea though. In this case, Gates would be the funding agency. And its published findings would hopefully steer much academic teaching and research away from bad assumptions.
    - HarryHirsch 5y ago
      The problem isn't discovering who is a shady type, everyone knows who they are already. But they just won't get outed or dealt with. The Hellinga scandal at Duke is very typical. This is what is looks like from outside: https://www.buffalo.edu/content/dam/www/news/imported/pdf/May08/NatureChemistryPaperWithdrawn.pdf https://www.buffalo.edu/content/dam/www/news/imported/pdf/Ma... And this is an inside account: https://caffeinatedchemist.medium.com/hellinga-66449cf4699e https://caffeinatedchemist.medium.com/hellinga-66449cf4699e It's exclusively an accountability issue.
    - joe_the_user 5y ago
      Just to elaborate on the "it doesn't work that way" part. Science is hard. Replicating an experiment is costly in time and money. The papers in scientific field are organized like a tree. A good paper by a good and credible researcher will be a base node that other papers branch off of. A poor or not credible paper will be leaf that won't be cited by others. Testing all the poor papers would be tremendous waste of time. And it wouldn't catch fraudsters as such because not being replicable isn't proof of fraud.
CPLX 5y ago
At this point we are all just living in The Wire all the time. So many of our institutions have been corrupted from the inside by the more ruthless nature of careerism that’s taken over the modern world. Bond rating agencies endorse junk debt, doctors say opiates aren’t addictive any more, epidemiologists say the politics of your protest determine if it’s safe during a pandemic, elite educational institutions tell you going into crippling debt will be good for you. Literally every institution, including ones supposed to serve the public, is rotting from the inside out from people bullshitting to keep their job or get promoted. https://youtu.be/_ogxZxu6cjM https://youtu.be/_ogxZxu6cjM
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 5y ago
  Without necessarily endorsing the premise of the comment, I wonder what can be done to prevent this. Has humanity ever been successful at preventing institutions from regressing to exclusively serving their own needs? It's not clear if as a species we can actually pull that off, at least not in perpetuity.
- kspacewalk2 5y ago
  Implicit in your comment is that once upon a time things were different. That is not at all clear to me. Rather, science, government, public health, etc have always been largely a mess, and whatever you conjure up in your idealized view of "the good old days" in those human endeavours is just good old fashioned selection bias.
  - blip54321 5y ago
    In academia, things were different. Science didn't really get like this until tenure became hyper-competitive. In the early days of the British tradition, science was a leisurely task by nobles. After WWII, academia was expanding rapidly, and there was a shortage of professors. Academic jobs were easy to come by. The strong incentives to cheat is very new in academia. I've seen academia for about a quarter-century, and at least MIT went from a pretty honest place to a shark tank full of crooks. That's not a general "the world was once better," but a very specific "academic fraud has grown out-of-control in the past 25 years."
neilv 5y ago
> It's not uncommon for research journals to defer to institutional misconduct investigations, in line with recommendations from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). I wonder whether any dark humor was involved when making that initialism.
atdrummond 5y ago
A good interview with Ken after the paper was retracted: https://stanforddaily.com/2021/10/31/qa-after-1-year-of-investigation-a-controversial-biology-paper-was-finally-retracted/ https://stanforddaily.com/2021/10/31/qa-after-1-year-of-inve...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sinab 5y ago
I wonder if the problems with the data would have been discovered sooner if data sharing been enforced. It's clear that the reason the article was retracted by the editor-in-chief was because of the lack of data: It appears that sequences were neither uploaded to Genbank nor to the BOLD system at the time of the study. It does appear that sequences related to this article have been uploaded to Genbank in September 2020, but as this happened six years after publication and no voucher information is presented in the article, post-publication review was unable to confirm whether these sequences were indeed derived from the research described in this article. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10531-021-02316-2 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10531-021-02316...
rscho 5y ago
If I could I'd disavow every paper that has my name on it except for one. But, if I want my children to have a good education I can't.

192 points by colinprince 5y ago

dang 5y ago

Related: http://ecoevoevoeco.blogspot.com/2021/05/wish-to-register-complaint.html http://ecoevoevoeco.blogspot.com/2021/05/wish-to-register-co...

pvaldes 5y ago

If is wrong disavow is one possible way, another would be to repeat the experiment and publish a correction criticizing your own article. On the other hand, if your name is on an article, you must do your homework and know if what you are signing is realistic or not.

pfortuny 5y ago
However, what you say in the second paragraph is exactly what the reviewers should ask the authors and question.
anormalpapier 5y ago
> if your name is on an article, you must do your homework and know if what you are signing is realistic or not. Definitely not the case when you're an undergraduate trying to get your foot in the door with your first paper.
- markwkw 5y ago
  Isn’t it the case that when you’re an undergraduate you do the grunt work and collect and process all the base data, and the risk is actually on the side of the supervisor?
  - CrazyStat 5y ago
    The base data in this case was (supposedly) collected by the Canadian Centre for DNA Barcoding, rather than anyone in the lab. However that Centre denies having the samples in their database.
  - joe_the_user 5y ago
    As far as I know, writing a research paper at all as an undergraduate is unusual. In the US, afaik, the purpose of undergraduate work is to learn the material of the field. A Phd program then teaches the student how to do research in a field and the student goes on to do actual research only then. An undergraduate would do a research paper as independent study or a special department class I think. With the provision that advisor is doing a lot of hand holding. So handing fake data to someone's whose effectively a complete newby and letting them process it and publish it as their first achievement, is really despicable as the article seems to describe.
- pvaldes 5y ago
  If an undergraduate accepts to cheat as exchange to have a career in science maybe simply shouldn't have a career in science.
fabian2k 5y ago
There's pretty much no way to do that in interdisciplinary publications. In those cases the main reason you have the other people on board is because you don't understand their field well enough. And there are plenty of cases where you won't notice anything is off unless you actually examine the raw data in detail, which isn't really realistic as it's an enormous amount of effort and duplicated work. There are certainly cases where co-authors should notice that something is off about the data. But there are plenty of situations where there is no reason at all to suspect a problem with the data, and where there is no way to know that someone is simply providing false data.
- kergonath 5y ago
  > In those cases the main reason you have the other people on board is because you don't understand their field well enough. “Don’t put your name on something you don’t understand” is a good rule to live by. All the authors share responsibility. We cannot accept credit when all works well and reject blame when it does not. > But there are plenty of situations where there is no reason at all to suspect a problem with the data, and where there is no way to know that someone is simply providing false data. Publishing an article with better results is definitely the best thing to do then. Short of that, publishing a letter to the editor sharing concerns is a good way of putting your doubts on record. Just removing your name looks too much like washing your hands of the whole thing.
joe_the_user 5y ago
A call replicate a paper that's demonstrably fraudulent seems even more of a cover-up of the fraud as just doing nothing. The original paper was published while the first author was an undergraduate, btw, so they probably didn't have a complete grasp of the issue.

px1999 5y ago

This is a widespread problem. A close friend went through a similar experience collaborating at another supposedly reputable Canadian university. He reported the academic dishonesty (copies of figures from another paper presented as new experimental results), and the university went to great lengths to keep the whole thing quiet. 5 years later, the lead researcher who faked the results still works at the university, the paper has not been retracted, and my friend left what became a pretty hostile lab (and AFAIK is still under NDA) At that point, what is left aside from trying to publicly remove your own name from a paper you know is fraudulent?

ren_engineer 5y ago
modern academia has become a meta game where its more about being able to navigate the system(get grant funding, go with status quo to get tenure, collude with others for citations, etc.) rather than actually being good at the field. We spend drastically more government money on research funding than in the past yet get less in return see the Alzheimer's amyloid plaque cartel- https://www.statnews.com/2019/06/25/alzheimers-cabal-thwarted-progress-toward-cure/ https://www.statnews.com/2019/06/25/alzheimers-cabal-thwarte... https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2019/12/31/Amyloid-plaques-may-not-cause-Alzheimers-disease-study-says/1551577796692/ https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2019/12/31/Amyloid-plaques-m... “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
- magicalist 5y ago
  > modern academia has become a meta game where its more about being able to navigate the system rather than actually being good at the field. Sounds like the entire history of academia (and most human endeavors, honestly) > We spend drastically more government money on research funding than in the past You didn't define "in the past" but pure science spending has generally declined as a percentage of GDP and has barely changed in inflation adjusted dollars in the last twenty years. > yet get less in return* As measured how?
  - ipaddr 5y ago

encryptluks2 5y ago

[flagged]

74B5 5y ago
You know about the fraudsters publishing about ivermectin?
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  I know you're just trying to make a point here, but not all of the Ivermectin research was fraudulent. There was some (seemingly) legit work from India/Bangladesh where Ivermectin did significantly increase the chance of survival among COVID patients. (To be fair, these same regions where the legit studies are from also have a high prevalence of parasitic worm infections, but it's still a poignant reminder that removing complicating factors can help heal the primary disease.)
  - mst 5y ago
    Thank you for bringing this up because so much of the Ivermectin discourse forgets about it and I continue to be very glad that doctors in those areas have an extra tool for saving lives. The anglosphere yelling at itself in counterproductive ways would, I presume, have happened anyway albeit over a different treatment, so this seems to me like it was at least close to a pure win and "fewer dead people" is a pretty solid win, all things considered.
- loudtieblahblah 5y ago
  Tell me who you voted for without telling me who you voted for.
  - encryptluks2 5y ago
    Voted for Biden

surlyadopter 5y ago

Here is a much longer writeup of the situation. https://www.science.org/content/article/this-scientist-accused-supplement-industry-of-fraud-now-his-own-work-is-under-fire https://www.science.org/content/article/this-scientist-accus...

wnevets 5y ago

It's been said before but once it was decided having papers published became a target everything started to go to shit.

vkou 5y ago
Sure. Which alternative metric would you prefer we use for allocating jobs and funding, and why do you expect that a generation from now, it won't be gamed into absurdity?
jltsiren 5y ago
The root issue is that many people want to become scientists but other people are only willing to fund far fewer scientists. When the supply of scientists far exceeds the demand, there must be a way to decide who gets jobs and funding. Some people favor objective measurements, because they are less prone to corruption and nepotism than subjective ones. But when you have objective measurements, people will try to game them, and some will use dishonest means.
- oconnor663 5y ago
  I think tech company hiring is in a loosely similar situation. No one thinks whiteboard coding is an awesome way to test candidates. Everyone agrees that it doesn't reflect what programmers do day-to-day, and everyone knows there are lots of strong programmers out there who don't do well in whiteboard settings. But I'm not aware of any viable alternatives. The good old fashioned approach of "judge people based on what school they went to, what companies they worked for, and who they know" is probably worse for everyone. The ideal approach might be "hire anyone who asks and then fire them after a year if they're not doing well", but that's very expensive for everyone involved.
  - jimmaswell 5y ago
    There are tons of alternatives, anywhere from take home tests to just gauging their general experience and answers to some technical questions.

CoastalCoder 5y ago

I understand that Melinda Gates is looking for different charities to invest in. I wonder if she'd fund researchers to attempt to replicate crucial publications / studies. I expect that she has enough money to put a serious dent in this problem, at least if she focused on some specific area.

HarryHirsch 5y ago
It doesn't work like that. When you do actual science at the bench you find out fairly quickly whose work is solid and whose is like weak reeds. The trouble is the misaligned incentives, everyone has good reason to keep silent for fear of attracting the attention of the funding agency. If something is afoot (the rumours are usually true), soon you are looking at 7-figure damages.
- CoastalCoder 5y ago
  I don't understand why that invalidates my idea though. In this case, Gates would be the funding agency. And its published findings would hopefully steer much academic teaching and research away from bad assumptions.
  - HarryHirsch 5y ago
    The problem isn't discovering who is a shady type, everyone knows who they are already. But they just won't get outed or dealt with. The Hellinga scandal at Duke is very typical. This is what is looks like from outside: https://www.buffalo.edu/content/dam/www/news/imported/pdf/May08/NatureChemistryPaperWithdrawn.pdf https://www.buffalo.edu/content/dam/www/news/imported/pdf/Ma... And this is an inside account: https://caffeinatedchemist.medium.com/hellinga-66449cf4699e https://caffeinatedchemist.medium.com/hellinga-66449cf4699e It's exclusively an accountability issue.
  - joe_the_user 5y ago
    Just to elaborate on the "it doesn't work that way" part. Science is hard. Replicating an experiment is costly in time and money. The papers in scientific field are organized like a tree. A good paper by a good and credible researcher will be a base node that other papers branch off of. A poor or not credible paper will be leaf that won't be cited by others. Testing all the poor papers would be tremendous waste of time. And it wouldn't catch fraudsters as such because not being replicable isn't proof of fraud.

CPLX 5y ago

At this point we are all just living in The Wire all the time. So many of our institutions have been corrupted from the inside by the more ruthless nature of careerism that’s taken over the modern world. Bond rating agencies endorse junk debt, doctors say opiates aren’t addictive any more, epidemiologists say the politics of your protest determine if it’s safe during a pandemic, elite educational institutions tell you going into crippling debt will be good for you. Literally every institution, including ones supposed to serve the public, is rotting from the inside out from people bullshitting to keep their job or get promoted. https://youtu.be/_ogxZxu6cjM https://youtu.be/_ogxZxu6cjM

8f2ab37a-ed6c 5y ago
Without necessarily endorsing the premise of the comment, I wonder what can be done to prevent this. Has humanity ever been successful at preventing institutions from regressing to exclusively serving their own needs? It's not clear if as a species we can actually pull that off, at least not in perpetuity.
kspacewalk2 5y ago
Implicit in your comment is that once upon a time things were different. That is not at all clear to me. Rather, science, government, public health, etc have always been largely a mess, and whatever you conjure up in your idealized view of "the good old days" in those human endeavours is just good old fashioned selection bias.
- blip54321 5y ago
  In academia, things were different. Science didn't really get like this until tenure became hyper-competitive. In the early days of the British tradition, science was a leisurely task by nobles. After WWII, academia was expanding rapidly, and there was a shortage of professors. Academic jobs were easy to come by. The strong incentives to cheat is very new in academia. I've seen academia for about a quarter-century, and at least MIT went from a pretty honest place to a shark tank full of crooks. That's not a general "the world was once better," but a very specific "academic fraud has grown out-of-control in the past 25 years."

neilv 5y ago

> It's not uncommon for research journals to defer to institutional misconduct investigations, in line with recommendations from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). I wonder whether any dark humor was involved when making that initialism.

atdrummond 5y ago

A good interview with Ken after the paper was retracted: https://stanforddaily.com/2021/10/31/qa-after-1-year-of-investigation-a-controversial-biology-paper-was-finally-retracted/ https://stanforddaily.com/2021/10/31/qa-after-1-year-of-inve...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

sinab 5y ago

I wonder if the problems with the data would have been discovered sooner if data sharing been enforced. It's clear that the reason the article was retracted by the editor-in-chief was because of the lack of data: It appears that sequences were neither uploaded to Genbank nor to the BOLD system at the time of the study. It does appear that sequences related to this article have been uploaded to Genbank in September 2020, but as this happened six years after publication and no voucher information is presented in the article, post-publication review was unable to confirm whether these sequences were indeed derived from the research described in this article. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10531-021-02316-2 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10531-021-02316...

rscho 5y ago

If I could I'd disavow every paper that has my name on it except for one. But, if I want my children to have a good education I can't.