19 ms·
Two decades of Alzheimer’s research was based on deliberate fraud
- lettergram 4y agoWelcome to science folks. Having worked a decade around a campus regularly sitting in on presentations (and being in research myself) I can say I believe 80% of science wrong AND not reproducible, 10% being an outright fraud (10% being legit). Highly recommend this book to discuss why: https://www.amazon.com/Rigor-Mortis-Science-Worthless-Billions/dp/0465097901 https://www.amazon.com/Rigor-Mortis-Science-Worthless-Billio... It all comes down to incentives. (1) As a researcher you lose funding m if you don’t produce (2) funds aren’t allocated to reproduce (3) Researchers who publish will block research that disagrees with their work (as they’re also reviewers) (will lose future funding / have more competition) (4) Researchers wont rescind their work if later findings warrant it (no incentive to) (5) N numbers are way too low (higher N is more money)
- api 4y agoYou get what you incentivize, and this is what we incentivize. It’s probably about the worst in any field dominated by studies and statistics. Harder sciences are harder to fake as bad results can be more conclusively falsified.
- melling 4y agoYes, it’s great when we rediscover some nugget of wisdom that everyone has already explained. It’s quite useful to listen to Buffet and Munger. They’ve accumulated lots of wisdom. “You get what you reward for” https://youtu.be/hJYLJRr3hEY https://youtu.be/hJYLJRr3hEY This hour of Munger is well worth it: https://youtu.be/4ICaAKuAudQ https://youtu.be/4ICaAKuAudQ Here’s the transcript: https://fs.blog/great-talks/psychology-human-misjudgment/ https://fs.blog/great-talks/psychology-human-misjudgment/
- lettergram 4y agoI think any parent or manager also knows this…
- fweimer 4y agoEven in the hard sciences, the results are fundamentally about statistics. And they often require very expensive machines for reproduction. I'm not sure if it is a good idea to try to optimize the scientific process for fraud resilience. In the end, we still rely on people doing the right thing most of the time.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago> (1) As a researcher you lose money if you don’t produce This is the biggest problem in my view. My work in R&D taught me that most of the time we don't produce anything. It's high risk. But it's high in rewards, often in adjacent areas not primarily the focus of the initial brief. Surely all serious investors understand this. Research is something we do for marginal returns. It's not an "innovation factory". With things currently stacked against risk, research can only yield tepid results.
- throwawaylinux 4y ago> Surely all serious investors understand this. Not necessarily when the investor is an academic institution or a government.
- nonrandomstring 4y agoBy "investor" I was thinking of people who risk their own money.
- throwawaylinux 4y agoOne of the major root causes of the problems with the system.
- ncmncm 4y agoInvestors are making solar farms be sited in deserts, are pouring money into fusion startups, and bid up fraudulent Energy Vault (NRGV) to $2B. Investors canonically do not understand.
- zeristor 4y agoThe thing is the difference between “Science” provable hypothesis, challenges and the current research industry. It would appear that this isn’t really “Science” if the ideal of research is being veered away from so much. Vested interests suffocating the process.
- redeeman 4y agowould be nice if people kept this in mind before they crucify others for not "trusting the science"
- itsdifferent 4y ago
- hammock 4y ago
- riley_dog 4y agoI saw this comment coming a mile away...
- nathanaldensr 4y agoGood for you. Maybe you should ask yourself why so many people are skeptical? Is it really that they are all crazy wingnuts, or is it perhaps that humans have shown for all of our existence to be untrustworthy, greedy, power-hungry creatures?
- raverbashing 4y agoBecause 90% of it was not reasonable doubt, it was manipulative BS (If you can discuss the fine points between "lab leak theory" and "result of genetic manipulation" without mentioning any politician or anything that came out of a fb page or entertainment channel with "news" in its name that's a good discussion to have
- mandmandam 4y ago... To balance your point, which tbf has some truth in it, 99% of coverage on that topic from so called respected sources was manipulative bullshit. Dissenting opinions were censored by the millions across social media. Meanwhile, anyone who felt the lab leak theory was at least worth investigating was accused of being a Russian, Trumpist, anti-science piece of shit. Daszak's paper was obvious bullshit. Not in hindsight, not on close reading, but on immediate reading by anyone with basic experience and logic. Yet across government, media and academia it was cited as the definitive scientific position on the matter, case closed, stfu. ... So if you're going to blame people for mixing their discussion with corporate news and political stunts, then you're going to have to share that blame with all responsible parties. They've fully earned the ire and distrust which many across the political spectrum now hold them in. And we still haven't had a proper investigation in Wuhan, there's been no accountability for Daszak's conflict of interest, there's been no one held to account for the unprecedented censorship across Twitter and FB. No corporate media have been held responsible for their bullying and their bullshit. If you want people to have smarter discussions about this, I'd remember the above before accusing everyone of just 'getting their info from politicians and FB'.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 4y agoI don't have much to add, only that it's been my personal experience as well. Fraud and non-reproducibility used to be such ethereal concepts to me, issues that are discussed at a systemic level as an intellectual exercise. But after becoming a scientist, coming across so many fraudulent papers, so much non-reproducible and poorly done research. And seeing how it's affected my own, the thing that's dearest to me, having to build on top of those results and work in that global environment. It's been heart breaking, I feel no love for science anymore.
- epistasis 4y agoWhat field are you in where you are coming across lots of fraudulent papers?! I spend most of my career reanalyzing others' data and combining it together into larger datasets, in molecular biology and genomics. The only time I encountered mistakes it was from my own labeling errors or bugs, pre-publication. And in pre-publications datasets I would sometimes detect accidental swaps on the labels of samples as part of QC checks.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 4y agoMachine learning
- riffraff 4y agoBut surely ML did advance a lot in recent years? As the saying goes, science advances one funeral at a time, but it does advance. It seems overall you can still have an optimistic point of view of science while accepting it does not work as well as it could.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 4y agoThat's fair but that's the systemic view of the issue. When you are in the trenches you can't look at the good and throw away the bad. You have to compare your work to the fraudulent work, spend a lot of time reading and trying to reproduce the fraudulent work, cite the fraudulent work, compete with the fraudulent work, publish as fast they do, with results better than they produce. And even the work that's not fraudulent but just bad or rushed. It's a race to the bottom, and how can we ask that people compromise the quality of their work to compete when the only motivation for doing this work is the love of the craft. It's certainly not the money, or the environment, or the work-life balance, or the prestige.
- FredPret 4y agoWe should introduce a maximum number of papers per researcher per period, like one per year or one per quarter. That way the only possible competition will be number of citations. The pressure will be for quality, not quantity.
- Turing_Machine 4y ago> The pressure will be for quality, not quantity. Well, popularity, anyway. While popularity is sometimes a useful proxy for quality, that's not always the case.
- FredPret 4y agoProbably the best proxy for quality is popularity that endures for centuries since we can’t measure quality directly. Either way, if there’s a max of one paper per year, scientists will be trying for the most impactful work.
- Retric 4y agoPeople are already boosting their impact scores by requiring papers they review to add citations for their past work. Performance Metrics always result in people gaming the system, and impact scores have quickly become unreliable.
- ModernMech 4y agoAt the same time, reviewers are chosen based on their expertise in a field, and one of the things reviewers look for is that new papers cite relevant prior research. Are you suggesting that reviewers should just let papers go through without citing relevant prior research if it is their own research? Does it actually matter whose research it is as long as it is relevant prior research?
- Retric 4y agoOf course it matters, adding citations to already written research is deceptive and thus actively harmful. The point of citations isn’t simply an index of prior research it’s there to inform readers of the writers context.
- Calavar 4y agoI agree with everything on your list. Most of these problems are quite difficult to solve, but I think (2) is doable if we can convince politicians to unfreeze science spending that has been stagnant for decades. We need a new set of early career awards that require 50% of time/effort to be spent on reproduction studies.
- ModernMech 4y ago> We need a new set of early career awards that require 50% of time/effort to be spent on reproduction studies. Then you also need a realignment of the entire academic system as well. A new professor spending 50% of their time redoing the experiments of others, especially on capital expenditures and grad student time is going to be at a severe disadvantage against others who spent 100% of their time building their own research agenda. We'd probably need a whole new degree that's like a PhD, but whose dissertation isn't a novel extension of the field, but reproduction of other studies. Because as it is, a grad student can spend up to a decade on a Ph.D. just doing novel research. Now you want them to spend 50% of their time on reproduction? So is a Ph.D. supposed to take up to 20 years with your proposal? Or does a dissertation contain 50% less novel research? Certainly we should have funding for reproduction studies, but it's not enough to just have a grant; you have to have a valid career path doing such work. That doesn't exist today.
- Calavar 4y ago> We'd probably need a whole new degree that's like a PhD, but whose dissertation isn't a novel extension of the field, but reproduction of other studies. I don't think that would work - those positions would go empty. People apply for grad school because they want to do original research. On the other hand, once people are already in the academic pipeline and they run into struggles advancing from postdoc to assistant prof or maintaining funding as an assistant prof, I think a lot of people would take a 50/50 grant if lets them keep one foot in the door for original research. They aren't going to turn their noses up at the only grants they are competitive for. You do raise a good point that labs with 50/50 grants wouldn't have as good of a value proposition for prospective grad students as labs doing 100% original research. I'm not sure what the solution is there.
- endgame 4y agohttps://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2018/10/02/no-its-not-the-incentives-its-you/ https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2018/10/02/no-its-not-the-in... Humans are not incentive-following automata, though we have incentive-following tendencies.
- pcurve 4y agoI have a friend with degree and Ivy, got phd, and did post doc. He said something exactly the same, and his conscious wouldn't allow him to work in the field of science. He left the field many years ago. He delivers mails now.
- themitigating 4y agoWhat is the field of science
- calvinmorrison 4y agosimilar to the field of dreams but motivated by money instead of altruism
- themitigating 4y agoSo capitalism?
- codethief 4y ago> I believe 80% of science wrong AND not reproducible Maybe that's the case in your area of research. In mine (math, physics) it definitely isn't. So I would be a bit more careful about the wording here. ("80% of science" – what science?)
- OrangeMonkey 4y agoIn healthcare and life sciences research, I absolutely believe at least 80% is wrong and/or not reproducible. Not due to bad actors but, more likely, dataset bias or accidents upon patient matching algorithms or confounders. P < 0.05 is outdated at this point, for anything truly ground breaking p < 0.005 or < 0.0005 is probably a better choice, and even then I would ask "Where did you get your dataset from and did you combine (!!!) datasets from multiple orgs."
- nradov 4y agoIoannidis JPA (2005) Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. PLoS Med 2(8): e124. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
- epistasis 4y agoThis paper would be more relevant if most science came down to evaluating a single p-value. Perhaps there are some fields of science where that is true, but I have not encountered them. I mostly look at molecular biology and infectious disease. Clinical trials in medicine come down to a single p-value by design, but don't fall prey to what he's talking about.
- themitigating 4y agoWhat is the source for your belief? Something unscientific perhaps?
- OrangeMonkey 4y agoThe source for my beliefs is that I perform life sciences research to either generate new studies that are for publication or validate our studies against studies ran in the past. Its actually my job.
- rgrieselhuber 4y agoWait, doesn’t this mean that funding sources can impact what “science” gets settled?
- nathanaldensr 4y agoA more cynical take (or maybe realistic?) is that science becomes "settled" once the revenue streams are established.
- rgrieselhuber 4y agoWhich would also imply a total lack of funding for counter-narrative research.
- OrangeMonkey 4y ago100% agreed. I can't seem to get people to understand - most research studies find results that are not reproducible. Putting it nicely "Research has a reproducibility problem."
- synu 4y ago80% of science? How would things like GPS or rockets work if that was the case? What we consider reliable technology would be blowing up everywhere around us constantly.
- woevdbz 4y agoScience, not engineering
- synu 4y agoIs rocket science possible sans science? Can you be more specific what engineering without dependency on any science is? Like how do you even approach inventing gps as an engineer if 80% of physics calculations don’t actually work for example?
- ncmncm 4y agoAlmost all of what is called "rocket science" is firmly in the engineering wheelhouse. GPS relies very little on 20th century science, beyond GR corrections. The science behind orbital mechanics is just Newton's Laws, stuff thoroughly settled centuries ago.
- orzig 4y agoWhere do you think engineers get their equations?
- hcks 4y agoFor the science part of it: >100 years old scientific literature
- synu 4y agoPossibly this was sarcasm, but I’ll bite just in case. There is quite a lot of scientific research that informs modern aerospace engineering: https://phys.org/tags/aerospace+engineering/ https://phys.org/tags/aerospace+engineering/ You’ll find similar physics research for example in nuclear power, optics, quantum computers, telecommunications, engines.. all kinds of engineering really. Chemistry is also quite relevant and there are new, stronger materials being engineered all the time based on research. It’s definitely not all just 1900s physics driving everything, even if you say that for some reason anything researched then doesn’t fall under the 80% of science that doesn’t work (which GP didn’t).
- themitigating 4y agoFirst off science isn't a section of society, company, or group of people. Second 80%? Your wild hyperbole has no value, makes no point, and reeks of immaturity
- Gimpei 4y agoI dunno, I feel like it’s bad but getting better. 20 years ago, nobody tried to replicate anything. Now it’s much more common and, I hope, expected for results like this one.
- dahart 4y ago> Welcome to science folks. There is no question that a very significant portion is wrong and some of it is fraud, but I feel like this is the wrong summary takeaway. Science isn’t the reason that science is messed up, people are the reason. All fields of human endeavor suffer from the same problems due to emotional and political and selfish people. It’s more like, welcome to humanity. Science is actually the best thing we’ve got, there is no alternative that has less BS and more truth. The 10% or so of science that’s right has transformed the earth in the last century. I worry about framing this the right way, about the subtleties of how you say it, because there is currently a war being waged on public trust in science, and to some degree that anti-science war is being won. It’s potentially damaging to say “most of science is wrong” and just stop there. That’s a misleading framing in my opinion. In order to fix the funding problems, society as a whole needs to have trust in science, to believe that the majority of people doing science are politically impartial and also not wasting money or lining their own pockets, to believe that scientific progress is human progress. It’s important to note that the incentive problems you cite mostly aren’t caused my any malicious intent. Disagreeing with someone else’s research, in my experience, isn’t often done with the primary goal of holding back good research, it’s done because the researchers actually disagree on the science, and the reviewer actually believes the proposed paper isn’t complete or correct or up to publication standards. Moreover, for science it’s very important for researchers to be critical of each other. That is part of why we need more replication study.
- charlieyu1 4y agoThe current funding system needs a massive change at least. Funding should go to universities in general instead of specific projects. Get rid of most of the KPIs.
- dahart 4y agoI’ve never seen KPIs in academics, is that a thing now? I’ve seen KPIs in tech companies who like to model Google. There is a lot of funding going to universities, and a lot going to specific projects. I think maybe the main model for research funding generally is that funding doesn’t just appear, people have to go ask for it in the form of a grant proposal. Those grants typically once granted go 40% to the university anyway. Universities, for their part, have been absorbing money for larger and more expensive administrations for the last 30-40 years, and it’s out of hand. Most people I know practicing science feel the opposite of what you said - that less funding should go to the university and more directly toward funding research.
- throwawaymaths 4y agoThere's probably a higher percentage if the article comes from the journal organic syntheses
- orzig 4y agoFor everyone reading, and appropriately outraged, I challenge you to put your money where your mouth is. Even $5 to someone with a long history of finding scientific fraud puts you on the right side of history: https://www.patreon.com/elisabethbik https://www.patreon.com/elisabethbik I’ve been donating for years and I’ve never been more proud of that decision.
- hownottowrite 4y agoYes indeed. The sexy world of academia. Fast cars and easy money.
- ta988 4y agoIn biology and some parts of chemistry, I would say yes 80% of papers have a wrong conclusion (experiments are ok but not interpreted correctly) or completely wrong. But in other fields it is not the case. I'm pretty sure mathematics are much better. Physics it will depend on which branch some are closer to science-fiction anyway so are not verifiable, but most physics is good quality. It is hard to consider science as a whole because it is absolutely not an homogenous lump and practices in reviewing, publishing and peer pressure are radically different.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- stewbrew 4y agoAd 5: more data doesn't help if the main problem of your research is that your data is shit. People benefit from generating tons of shity data because they get more money, which looks good on their resume. If their results are shit, they simply write "more data is needed" and they benefit even more from the call for more data.
- nonrandomstring 4y agoThis is a tragedy. Academia and research needs a new broom. Presently incentives are peverse. Impact factors, publisher corruption, grant applications and funding are a blight on science.
- rawoke083600 4y agoKickstarter for science ?
- saalweachter 4y ago... because there are never fraudulent Kickstarters?
- rawoke083600 4y agoYou have a better idea to contribute ?
- orzig 4y agoI actually freelanced on a project 10 years ago which was exactly that. Don’t take its failure as proof that such an idea cannot succeed, but the major headwinds were that most research is pretty difficult to explain (and scientists are not selected for their ability to communicate with Lee people). Also remember that Kickstarter found it necessary to write a blog post “Kickstarter is not a store“, because people were expecting projects to return fast, reliable, tangible results. By its nature, science will be even further from that revealed preference of funders
- rawoke083600 4y agoMaybe that is the business case ? Making science accessable and in return get ppl that care or help with funding ? Neither solutions are perfect as most things in life, I guess the question is, will it be better enough compared to what we have now ?
- rocqua 4y ago
- api 4y agoThe most likely motive for this kind of fraud at this level is that the researchers “know” their hypothesis is correct and are just fixing some “mistakes” in the data. People do this all the time. In fact I’d say it’s the usual reaction when confronted with data contradicting one’s beliefs. Scientists are supposed to learn to go past that but I wonder how many actually do, especially when there is both social and economic pressure to conform to a school of thought.
- xbar 4y agoI'm not sure that's the most likely motive.
- api 4y agoI think people want it to be a worse motive because they don’t want to admit how irrational and deliberately ignorant the vast majority of humans are most of the time. Looking at reality in an unbiased way and trying to draw rational conclusions is incredibly rare and requires effort. Ego and social group pressure are the enemy. Cackling evildoers are also very rare. Most evil is a product of how we normally behave and of normal social and economic incentives.
- plutonorm 4y agoIt takes a lot of life experience for someone with integrity to find out that other people are simple dopamine hunting monkeys who will flip flop to whatever social pressure is being applied at that present moment. We assume that others are like ourselves. And so the very people who are supposed to call out and fight the irrationality are actually blind to it. You do get people calling out the irrationality, but mostly they are driven by social incentives rather than duty and so they turn their eyes away from realms that are deemed pure. They have no incentive to look inwards to the scientific institutions because that way they lose the social esteem they gain from association with the scientific establishment.
- pigtailgirl 4y ago-- the article in science a couple of days ago is a bit more comprehensive however the submission is easier for quick digesting -- https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabricatio...
- kurupt213 4y agoThis isn’t supposed to be possible. This is soo much public money wasted.
- pigtailgirl 4y ago-- from reading - the problem was there are no imaging experts - so basically all images in scientific publications are not scrutinized for photoshop - good thing this guy didn't have access to dall-e --
- mwt 4y ago> basically all images in scientific publications are not scrutinized for photoshop This was (mostly) true back then, but it is definitely not true today. People tempted to commit fraud now have to be worried about people like Elisabeth Bik exposing them and ruining their careers. In my experience, the type of people known lie in papers overlap strongly with those that are career-minded/money-driven. So having a few journalists with the skills to detect fraud is an obvious win. Some of the frauds will just get better at, that's just how it does, but it's not like there are no imaging experts in the field.
- BurningFrog 4y agoSo the frauds of today are done in smarter ways. Maybe they will be discovered with new tools developed in a few decades.
- mwt 4y ago
- formerly_proven 4y agoThe bit at the end about the NIH continuing to allocate funds to the exposed researchers... with the program director being one of the authors of the exposed paper - that stings. But it also shows how deep corruption and "networking" runs in places like this.
- chki 4y agoIf what is presented in this article is actually true that would be a systemic failure of epic proportions, right? Not just in this concrete case but don't these fundamental papers get reproduced before everybody takes them for granted and pours in enormous amounts of research grants believing in them? Is this article an exaggeration?
- marcosdumay 4y agoAs a rule, papers do not get reproduced. Reproducing papers is a lot of boring work that beings no benefit to oneself.
- w-m 4y agoThis Twitter thread highlights that this is a hyperbole/misinformation: https://twitter.com/samuel_marsh/status/1550883405105168386 https://twitter.com/samuel_marsh/status/1550883405105168386 „I sincerely doubt that the absence of this particular paper and AB*56 from historical scientific record would have significantly changed the last 20 years of AD drug development. That is because there is strong genetic and other evidence for the role of amyloid in disease.“
- bigDinosaur 4y agoThat thread appears to be defending what appears to be one of the deadest ends ever in medical research. How much failure do these people need? I'm genuinely curious.
- jcranmer 4y agoReading it carefully, not really. The author is equally against anti-amyloid drugs as a solution to Alzheimer's--arguing that amyloid is at best a starting gun to the disease, and when it goes off, fixing amyloid won't reverse the disease. Want to see amyloid defenders? Read comments on Derek Lowe's blog, and there's quite a few commenters there who are arguing that a better amyloid drug that actually clears out the plaques is needed (apparently not realizing that's what Aduhelm, and it still didn't work).
- throwawaymaths 4y agoEh, we know diabetes is often reversible with careful diet and there's plenty of amyloid deposits in that disease. Evidence is mounting that amyloid is the downstream result of whatever actually causes these diseases.
- macintux 4y agoTwo days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32183302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32183302 A month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31828509 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31828509
- dang 4y agoThanks! Macroexpanded: Potential fabrication in research threatens the amyloid theory of Alzheimer’s - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32183302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32183302 - July 2022 (236 comments) Alzheimer’s amyloid hypothesis ‘cabal’ thwarted progress toward a cure (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31828509 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31828509 - June 2022 (307 comments) How an Alzheimer’s ‘cabal’ thwarted progress toward a cure - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21911225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21911225 - Dec 2019 (382 comments) The amyloid hypothesis on trial - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17618027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17618027 - July 2018 (43 comments) Is the Alzheimer's “Amyloid Hypothesis” Wrong? (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17444214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17444214 - July 2018 (109 comments)
- qwertyuiop_ 4y ago
- ncmncm 4y agoBy far the most effective preventer of dementia appears to be vaccinations, with 40% effect size. It doesn't seem to matter what against. Second might be antivirals against herpes. These people need to be formally immediately banned from any NIH activity, and criminally charged. We have known for years that their crap work was useless.
- BurningFrog 4y agoGot a source for this big and fascinating claim?
- kasabali 4y agoAlzheimer's risk 10 times lower with herpes medication https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17540094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17540094
- galangalalgol 4y agoIf it really doesn't matter which vaccine, is this a case of stirring up the immune system to get rid of anything the immune system recognizes as different? There are articles showing ivermectin helps shrink melanomas too. The leading hypothesis was that the immune system once woken does its thing. It does concern me that once woken it might also take offense to my pancreas or thyroid or gluten or...
- ncmncm 4y agoNobody knows. Nobody is dispensed anything, out of the $billions diverted to amyloid cultists, to find out.
- BurningFrog 4y agoWow. That's impressive. Though the effect is from "antiherpetic medication", not vaccines.
- 4y ago
- atombender 4y agoI recommend reading the comments on AlzForum [1]. From the discussions, it sounds like this fraud is significant in terms of Dr. Sylvain Lesné's work, but that the news has been vastly blown out of proportion. These comments are written by real Alzheimer's researchers. They all disagree with the notion that Lesné's papers have been important to the field, and therefore undermine the idea that this has any bearing on "two decades of Alzheimer's research". (Karen Ashe, co-author of the main paper referenced here, also stops by the thread.) [1] https://www.alzforum.org/news/community-news/sylvain-lesne-who-found-av56-accused-image-manipulation https://www.alzforum.org/news/community-news/sylvain-lesne-w...
- plutonorm 4y agoAnd how many of those commenters have a vested interest in the current research direction?
- mwt 4y agoIt's pretty disrespectful to signal (without evidence or elaboration) that researchers are not credible (or worse, broadly lying) in order to keep their research grants flowing. A hypothesis that turns out to be wrong is something both industry and government are obviously not going to invest further in. The people working in the field have skills to transfer to other departments and projects; these aren't the sort of scientists and engineers that are out of ideas or work to do. It's also plenty obvious that there is no single, monolithic "current research direction" or even that this researcher's work was of fundamental impact when it was published - not to mention the number of people that were highly skeptical from the beginning.
- nostrebored 4y agoGiven everything we know about how research funding has been captured and shaky ethics in particular domains, skepticism is warranted, not disrespectful.
- User23 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- atombender 4y agoCan we replace the link with the original Daily Kos article [1] that this is a copy-paste of? I have no idea what wallstreetpro.com is, but it looks like blog spam. [1] https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/22/2111914/-Two-decades-of-Alzheimer-s-research-may-be-based-on-deliberate-fraud-that-has-cost-millions-of-lives https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/22/2111914/-Two-deca...
- conchrat 4y agoActually, I believe the original would be the Science article [1] [1] https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabricatio...
- atombender 4y agoDepends on what you mean by original. The Daily Kos is reporting on the same news, but they are not the same articles.
- photochemsyn 4y agoThis is very similar to another scientific fraud case from two decades ago, involving Bell Labs and Jan Hendrik Schön, and a series of major papers published in Nature and Science from 1998-2002, and described in an excellent book, Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World by Eugenie Samuel Reich. https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.3248480 https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.324848... A key point, from the above review, that I think explains a lot of this behavior: > "Reich points out that fraudsters like Schön could get credit for “first discovery” if, before they are caught, their false claims are confirmed by others on the basis of genuine data." It did shake up the field of organic semiconductor device research in physics by increasing scrutiny and changing some requirements (for example, electron microscope imagery of claimed devices is now a requirement for publication). However, as the top post at present notes, the incentives are backwards in academic science these days, and the role of funding organizations and high-profile journals is as problematic as that of the originating fraudsters. Maybe this instance of fraud will do the same for the biomedical field, by forcing researchers to release their raw data and full-resolution images as a condition of publication, although that would require a major shift in behavior in today's patent-driven startup-centered heavily-corporatized biomedical research world. Personally, I'll note that during the years I worked in academia, of the three PIs I worked with, I discovered two engaging in fraudulent research to greater or lesser extent. The main differences between them and the one who wasn't were (1) lab notebook discipline and recording and storing data securely, (2) in-house replication was required, (3) no toleration for BS and shady behavior. The others broke all those rules. (Unfortunately I picked the wrong PI to work with, and ended up leaving academia in a fit of contemptuous disgust.) A good rule of thumb: If some research claim hasn't been replicated, and if the data and methods aren't transparently available, then it's as likely to be fraudulent garbage as not, and it's not worthy of further examination.
- Calavar 4y agoThere is an excellent three part video series about the Jan Hendrik Schön fraud on YouTube: https://youtu.be/nfDoml-Db64 https://youtu.be/nfDoml-Db64
- kyouens 4y agoIn this conversation, it’s important to distinguish science itself (which, along with facts, are already under attack in our politics) from failings of the research industry.
- bencollier49 4y agoI'd like to know whether the police have ever been brought in for a scenario like this. It may not seem as clear cut as regular financial fraud, but the end goal is to further one's career, which results in monetary gain. As such, this does seem to fall within most countries' definition of fraud. For example, from the UK: Fraud by false representation (1) A person is in breach of this section if he— (a) dishonestly makes a false representation, and (b) intends, by making the representation— (i) to make a gain for himself or another
- throwaway6734 4y agoThis should result in a very long jail sentence and complete banishment from society
- verisimi 4y agoMost interesting to me, is how if you get the model wrong, thousands of scientists will use it anyway, billions will be spent, but no one challenges it! Amazing. It really lays open how easy it is to mislead everyone. All these siloed scientists won't have a clue anything is wrong. This is how conspiracies would work... if there is advantage to someone somewhere and they have the means to alter the model in their favour, why wouldn't they?
- aaron695 4y ago
- onionisafruit 4y agoThe linked article is sensationalized an disingenuously mixes the author's opinion with straight reporting on the Science article[0] previously discussed here[1]. Science never suggests that anybody other than Lesné was involved in falsifying results, and even then it is careful to not accuse him of deliberate fraud. Neither article suggests who the second scientist referenced in the headline may be. I suspect there was deliberate fraud, but this article doesn't provide any more evidence of that than previous articles. > Since that 2006 publication, the presence or absence of this specific amyloid has often been treated as diagnostic of Alzheimer’s. Meaning that patients who did die from Alzheimer’s may have been misdiagnosed as having something else. Those whose dementia came from other causes may have falsely been dragged under the Alzheimer’s umbrella. I think the author is confused about the controversy he is reporting on. Nobody is suggesting that there aren't elevated levels of Aβ in Alzheimer's brains. The controversy is only about the presence of Aβ56, and as far as I know Aβ56 was never used to diagnose Alzheimer's disease. It should also be noted that this is only relevant to postmortem diagnosis, so even if they were testing for Aβ*56 it wouldn't have affected the diagnosis of living patients. At the bottom of the article is a note, "Article written by Mark Sumner via Daily Kos". This explains a lot. Daily Kos is a site that got its start with sensationalized political articles. Now they've apparently expanded to subjects where they can do more damage. --- As I post the comment, the title of the linked article is: "Two decades of Alzheimer’s research was based on deliberate fraud by 2 scientists that has cost billions of dollars and millions of lives" [0] https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabricatio... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32183302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32183302