4 ms·

Agree. The perpetrator should go to prison for some sort of criminal fraud or racketeering or whatever a prosecutor can apply. This is serious crime.

Ekaros 4y ago
Also anyone who used the results without sufficient due diligence should be barred from working as researcher or receiving grant money. They are not quilt free either.
- schnitzelstoat 4y ago
  What is due diligence though? Are they supposed to do a forensic analysis of every paper they cite? It's sad if it's arrived to this point. Reproducing the original result can be prohibitively expensive and difficult in many fields (ideally, this wouldn't be a concern - but generally, research groups aren't rolling in cash and resources, plus you need to be fast not to get scooped for the next paper and lose future grant money)
  - SturgeonsLaw 4y ago
    Given the replication crisis, more questions should be asked. Everyone knows a disturbingly large number of papers are on shaky foundations, but nobody is good at picking which ones
- dash2 4y ago
  Steady on now. Scientists rely on each other, they're not supposed to be fraud investigators.
- evandijk70 4y ago
  What about a researcher that measures the kinetics of AB-aggregation in vivo, performs X-Ray crystallography to determine the structure of this (or another amyloid), or performs simulations to determine free binding energies of various antibodies with the oligomer and cites this paper as the reason it has clinical relevance? I know people in the field that do all this kind of research and do not know much about mice-experiments or even about the experimental techniques used to obtain these results. To me, they are victims of this fraud more than anything.
mike_hearn 4y ago
Unfortunately it's probably not serious crime. It would have been in the private sector, see Theranos, but not in academia. The USA is rather unusual in having the ORI, but it's toothless and does only a handful of announced sanctions per year. There aren't the laws on the books, nor prosecutors and investigative forces in governments dedicated to pursuing scientific fraud. So I'm afraid to say that assuming the allegations are true, they will probably get away with it. It's absolutely standard when these sorts of things are discovered that everyone sweeps it under the rug as vigorously as possible. Fixing it would be difficult. There are a huge variety of ways to produce fraudulent science. Even coming up with a law that captures half of them is fiendishly hard, and how to do enforcement in a timely manner? In this case capitalism came to the rescue because the investigation was funded by short sellers, so this has to be one of the best arguments for short selling around. But by the time there's a publicly listed company whose share price is dominated by research suspected to be fraudulent it's way too late. There's probably also a fear of looking too closely. There's a culture of coverups in science that I've seen first hand. It's deeply unpleasant and breeds the suspicion that they do it so blatantly because it's become a way of life, because they know there won't be any consequences even if they're called out on it. If you start going after image tampering, well, it's only a tiny next step to say that if your paper reports a mean that's statistically impossible given the data set then that's also fraud. But then you'd have to investigate and mount prosecutions for a significant fraction of all psychology researchers. And then you're going to have to make it a crime to not share data on request as otherwise incriminating data is always going to be inconveniently lost. And then you're up to 90%+ of researchers facing action. Draining this swamp would be very hard.

Ekaros 4y ago

Also anyone who used the results without sufficient due diligence should be barred from working as researcher or receiving grant money. They are not quilt free either.

schnitzelstoat 4y ago
What is due diligence though? Are they supposed to do a forensic analysis of every paper they cite? It's sad if it's arrived to this point. Reproducing the original result can be prohibitively expensive and difficult in many fields (ideally, this wouldn't be a concern - but generally, research groups aren't rolling in cash and resources, plus you need to be fast not to get scooped for the next paper and lose future grant money)
- SturgeonsLaw 4y ago
  Given the replication crisis, more questions should be asked. Everyone knows a disturbingly large number of papers are on shaky foundations, but nobody is good at picking which ones
dash2 4y ago
Steady on now. Scientists rely on each other, they're not supposed to be fraud investigators.
evandijk70 4y ago
What about a researcher that measures the kinetics of AB-aggregation in vivo, performs X-Ray crystallography to determine the structure of this (or another amyloid), or performs simulations to determine free binding energies of various antibodies with the oligomer and cites this paper as the reason it has clinical relevance? I know people in the field that do all this kind of research and do not know much about mice-experiments or even about the experimental techniques used to obtain these results. To me, they are victims of this fraud more than anything.

mike_hearn 4y ago

Unfortunately it's probably not serious crime. It would have been in the private sector, see Theranos, but not in academia. The USA is rather unusual in having the ORI, but it's toothless and does only a handful of announced sanctions per year. There aren't the laws on the books, nor prosecutors and investigative forces in governments dedicated to pursuing scientific fraud. So I'm afraid to say that assuming the allegations are true, they will probably get away with it. It's absolutely standard when these sorts of things are discovered that everyone sweeps it under the rug as vigorously as possible. Fixing it would be difficult. There are a huge variety of ways to produce fraudulent science. Even coming up with a law that captures half of them is fiendishly hard, and how to do enforcement in a timely manner? In this case capitalism came to the rescue because the investigation was funded by short sellers, so this has to be one of the best arguments for short selling around. But by the time there's a publicly listed company whose share price is dominated by research suspected to be fraudulent it's way too late. There's probably also a fear of looking too closely. There's a culture of coverups in science that I've seen first hand. It's deeply unpleasant and breeds the suspicion that they do it so blatantly because it's become a way of life, because they know there won't be any consequences even if they're called out on it. If you start going after image tampering, well, it's only a tiny next step to say that if your paper reports a mean that's statistically impossible given the data set then that's also fraud. But then you'd have to investigate and mount prosecutions for a significant fraction of all psychology researchers. And then you're going to have to make it a crime to not share data on request as otherwise incriminating data is always going to be inconveniently lost. And then you're up to 90%+ of researchers facing action. Draining this swamp would be very hard.