3 ms·
Medicine is a great area for scientific fraud. Unless you research a super common disease you need to have the relevant patients (which means only a handful of
by cm2187 4y ago
Medicine is a great area for scientific fraud. Unless you research a super common disease you need to have the relevant patients (which means only a handful of people can replicate your study), the sample groups tend to be small, and there is a million other factors to explain away why your results may differ from another study. To the point that there is a large grey area between outright fraud and unconvincing results (small impact that may very well be noise).
- DanielBMarkham 4y agoMedicine is an interesting area because all of the incentives lean towards incremental, long-term subscriptions for small-but-measurable gains. So if your fraud is an improvement by 2.5% instead of 2.45%, it's both unlikely to get a lot of attention and quite likely to get incorporated into the new drug development pipeline. All of the players except for the general public seem to have reached their goals here. Even if the fraud is detected during drug production it's probably small enough not to warrant a scandal, and who wants to shut down their next great drug production pipeline for what might or might not be a fraud and even if it was doesn't amount to very much?
- epicureanideal 4y agoClearly we need adversarial science teams. Some people not connected and perhaps by law never connected directly or indirectly to each other that try to disprove the other team’s results. No husbands and wives and relatives and kids working for the other team.
- Haga 4y agoYou keep what you kill. If you proof something wrong you gain its funds for research.