21 ms·
Star neuroscientist may have manipulated data to support a major stroke trial
- rand0mx1 3y agoEarlier posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38257700 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38257700
- mhb 3y agoIt's happened to many of us.
- tokai 3y agoUniversities and funders should start suing these quacks. Like how sponsors sometimes have gone after an athlete busted for doping. Its insane how free scientific fraud is to do.
- notyofriend 3y agoThey want them to quietly go away less they reveal the rest of the fraud culture going on in other labs
- boringg 3y agoI doubt this is the case. However they should deal with it before it ruins the reputation of the broader community - it would prevent comments like this one from gathering steam.
- notyofriend 3y agoThey can’t… it’s so endemic they can’t just fire half the labs and give up all that sweet grant money. The reputation hit would be ruinous. Universities would rather look away and pretend there is no problem because it’s too big to deal with.
- jampekka 3y agoThis was downvoted for some reason but it is very clearly true that universities just can't go on firing sprees if they want to stay solvent. Universities run a lot of even basic functions on grant money (university takes a cut in money and/or labor) and researchers and labs are the ones that apply for the grants.
- brigadier132 3y agoOutright fraud, bad experiment design, and bad statistics. At this point a good rule of thumb is if it hasn't been replicated it's bullshit.
- jampekka 3y agoAnd replication studies are very difficult to get published, let alone funded.
- dumbo-octopus 3y agoThat's why commercialization is a better metric than replication. If nobody is willing to pay for it, why should my taxes fill the gap?
- pcrh 3y agoThere's no shortage of dodgy science in commerce.
- dumbo-octopus 3y agoPerhaps, but a sizable cohort of people that paid their hard earned cash for a product and go on the recommend others do the same is much more reliable a signal than an academic convincing their buddy in some government agency to allocate them more taxpayer dollars.
- jampekka 3y agoIt took a few millenia from discovery to commercialize such things as number theory, electricity and the wheel.
- dumbo-octopus 3y agoAnd nobody's tax dollars paid for their development. What's your point?
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y agoSimilar to the VC industry not seeking damages against fraudulent CEOs. It would just make them look worse and make people question why they're giving that VC money.
- peteradio 3y agoWouldn't companies with frauds for CEOs avoid VCs that are diligent? Wouldn't that mean those bulldog VCs would get more (honest) money? I guess investors want to support the good ol' pump and dump rather than real new value creation.
- notyofriend 3y agoWhy do you think soft bank is so popular with the frauds
- uoaei 3y ago> I guess investors want to support the good ol' pump and dump rather than real new value creation. This is the primary critique from the left of the VC phenomenon.
- stillwithit 3y agoGen pop wants ultimate freedom from obligation and endless externalization of responsibility too Turns out human meat suits are just driven by biology to survive and not egalitarian human philosophy and psychology
- dspillett 3y agoUniversities themselves likely don't have the reserves required to fund a good legal team for that. Commercial sponsors maybe benefitted from the positive results and don't want to risk losing future such benefits by biting the hands that feed them…
- conception 3y agoEnough Universities, such as USC in the article, definitely have the funding to do this however. Enough Universities do that could start some precedence and give researchers at smaller unis payse before bad behavior.
- mvdtnz 3y agoAccording to Wikipedia, USC has a $7.4 billion endowment.
- some_random 3y agoUniversities are some of the wealthiest institutions on the planet, and they don't seem to have any issues getting a legal team together when it comes to other matters.
- jampekka 3y agoWhy would universities sue them? They are benefactors of research funding, not the ones paying them. NIH and other funders would be the ones that would like their money back (although they don't probably care either).
- GartzenDeHaes 3y agoThe call is coming from inside the house. Why do you think this is a systemic problem in the first place?
- ethanbond 3y agoDo we know this is a systemic problem? There is a lot of research going on. A few cases here and there do not "systemic" make.
- whythre 3y agoYes it is a systemic issue. A cursory search for academic research fraud will reveal this. Some fraudsters are very high profile. There are all kinds of perverse incentives; prestige, grant money, not wanting to waste time with ‘useless’ negative results.
- jampekka 3y agoAlso outright fraud is just the tip of the iceberg.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- renewiltord 3y agoYeah, it's systemic. Faked fluorescence etc. Lots of photoshopped biotech. Everyone who I know who has encountered it just switches who their research is based on. Then doesn't go get smacked down. Quite risky to do so.
- jampekka 3y agoIt's very systemic. https://retractionwatch.com/ https://retractionwatch.com/
- pvaldes 3y agoThe unofficial motto in academy: "cheat or perish" but well... people gets what they asked for, so everybody should be happy with the current situation. If cheaters have the money it means also that somebody has zero money. Is a double loss. This people simply pass over the other researchers and push them out of the road.
- MattGaiser 3y agoHave these people become all that individually wealthy? Is there really any likelihood of recovering anything significant?
- jampekka 3y agoIf they don't start a company on the side or something, no. They get a relatively nice salary, but probably less than e.g. many high-in-demand programmers.
- thaw13579 3y agoIt depends, the compensation is highly skewed. The PI in question is likely compensated over $1M/year, while other investigators involved (assistant and associate professors) have compensation comparable to entry-level programmers. To confirm these things, you can explore this database (only public CA universities though): https://www.sacbee.com/news/databases/state-pay/ https://www.sacbee.com/news/databases/state-pay/
- jampekka 3y ago$1M/year sounds insane. In Finland at least top salaries for professors is about tenth of that. And I don't think any of the professors I know make much more, in Europe or North America. Admin people like the principal may get obscene salaries (like 4 times the max professor salary) though. As an academic, I think academics (including me) are paid too much. We need people who are interested in the science, not those who (pretend to) do it for money.
- SoftTalker 3y agoIt's rare for an academic to make over $1M in salary, but mid-high six figures is not uncommon for a highly published, well known name with a track record of winning large grants.
- floor2 3y ago> We need people who are interested in the science, not those who (pretend to) do it for money. In the US, the problem is mostly the opposite. Lots of people would rather do science, but it's hard to choose using your skills for real science when some company will pay you 2x-10x to instead optimize ad clicks on their website or algorithmic trading or whatever. In some of the humanities, liberal arts, social sciences etc academia may pay better than other options for those people. But for most STEM folks, it's a tradeoff between "low-paid meaningful work" vs "high-paid meaningless work". Medicine and AI research may be the only two areas where people can simultaneously do cutting edge research and make high salaries.
- luma 3y agoUniversities are the ones collecting the checks from the fraud, they have zero incentive to uncover anything for the same reason they never looked too hard at their athletes.
- SoftTalker 3y agoYep. 50% or more of the grant funding goes to "overhead" which is a huge income stream to the university.
- 303uru 3y agoMost of the grant money goes to the university, they have no incentive to crack down on this fraud.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- robswc 3y agoYou can make the data say almost anything. IMO, this happens way more than anyone thinks. When you only have 2-5 people that _actually_ read a paper and they have to slog through it, its not too shocking stuff like this could happen.
- llm_nerd 3y ago>"When you only have 2-5 people that _actually_ read a paper" Even when a paper goes through a vigilant, rigorous peer review, it relies upon the data that the research team supplied. Over and over again cases like this have encountered manipulated data. Humans are flawed creatures, and if you spent a lot of time and professional credibility on a hypothesis, there is a strong motive to find what you sought. Doubly so if the results are salacious or contrarian in some way and thus get viral attention. Just convince yourself that it's the data that was wrong somehow and you know your assumptions are right so just this One Time you need to do a little manipulation. A study I have seen cited on here countless times is the "honesty pledge" one by Ariely et al. It was the one that claimed that when a person signs a form at the beginning, they're more honest. It was complete and utter BS, based entirely on fabricated data. It joins an infamous list of studies that have had enormous influence (especially if they have an "aha!" factor -- if it is the sort of thing that Malcolm Gladwell would talk about, consider it suspect) but were the creation of someone making up data in Excel.
- bumby 3y agoIf I'm not mistaken, Ariely is asked about this on the "Armchair Expert" podcast. His claim was that he did not manipulate the data personally and it was someone further upstream whom he trusted. His point was that at some point, trust has to enter the process, except in the rare cases where a single person is doing all the research themselves (apologies if I'm misremembering this, but I think the following point still stands.) IMO the researcher still has some responsibility because ultimately, it's their research. So the questions to me are: 1) How much due diligence is reasonable? Does it change depending on the source? For example, is it more/less reasonable to accept government-provided data at face value vs. data collected by an undergraduate? 2) What processes can be implemented to safeguard data manipulation? I know there is a movement to provide data with peer-reviewed submittals, but it's still a low probability that a peer-reviewer has the time or inclination to really dive into the data to assess the claims.
- epups 3y agoThere should be stronger consequences for this behavior. It costs hundreds of millions of dollars and several careers to deal with the outcome of data fabrication. Meanwhile, the worst case scenario for the fraudster is losing their job.
- ceejayoz 3y agoIt also indirectly delays advances in medical care that, on a population-level scale, undoubtedly kills people. Murder in everything but name.
- packetlost 3y agoDoes it though? I find it hard to believe that this type of fraud wouldn't also lead death in some circumstances (maybe not this one).
- bumby 3y agoThe difficulty is in proving damages, though. Even if probable, it's still conjecture and our court systems have a higher bar than that, generally.
- ceejayoz 3y agoYeah, we have a societal problem in this regard; statistical murder is tough to quantify and thus is largely unpunishable. Coal power, for example, likely kills thousands of people a year in the USA, but none of it directly enough to count as a crime. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/23/coal-power-plants-deaths-pollution https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/23/coal-pow...
- bumby 3y agoI think negative externalities should be priced in. But it's a very complicated problem. With the above premise, where do you draw the line? For example, are you complicit if you use that electricity (or buy that cell phone made from unsavory practices)? From a legal standpoint, should you be charged because you materially benefitted from a criminal action?
- laborcontract 3y agoHow are the feds able to stick a wire fraud charge on almost anything except for academic fraud? It's one thing to make a mistake like Reinhart and Rogoff's embarrassing excel blunder. It's entirely something else to falsify data. > Under Zlokovic’s leadership, the USC institute has expanded to more than 30 labs and grown its annual funding more than 10-fold, exceeding $39 million in 2022. NIH grants to Zlokovic have totaled about $93 million. A prodigious fundraiser, in the past decade alone he has added at least $28 million from private sources, according to USC. So the NIH has given the man $93m. Surely that's a place to start?
- boringg 3y agoThe LOE to figure out if someone manipulated data vs wirefraud is significantly different and probably much harder.
- alistairSH 3y agoI would assume that once law enforcement has established facts were materially altered for the purpose of obtaining funding, the jump to wire fraud would be relatively trivial (given today's heavy reliance on email/internet to do just about anything).
- chiggsy 3y ago> once law enforcement has established facts were materially altered for the purpose of obtaining funding If you establish this, that's the case right there.
- jvans 3y agoWire fraud and prison sentences would be a good start. Besides the absolute dollar amount, the amount of damage done in the form of second order affects is enormous.
- nerdponx 3y agoCould the NIH file some kind of civil suit here?
- louwrentius 3y agoFeels to me the risk of discovery is deemed so low that it is cultural/ systemic. How many other cases will be uncovered? But speaking to Science anonymously, four former members of Zlokovic’s lab say the anomalies the whistleblowers found are no accident. They describe a culture of intimidation, in which he regularly pushed them and others in the lab to adjust data. Two of them said he sometimes had people change lab notebooks after experiments were completed to ensure they only contained the desired results. “There were clear examples of him instructing people to manipulate data to fit the hypothesis,” one of the lab members says. The incentives are clear to me, but punishment is less of a deterrent than good incentives, but which incentives would reduce this allegedly fraudulent behavior?
- shever73 3y agoAn example of what Charlie Munger would have called "the power of incentives to cause rationalized, terrible behavior".
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoI like that quote a lot. Incentives scale.
- mnode 3y agoIn this case perverse incentives. Check out 'How not to study a disease: the story of Alzheimer’s' (by Karl Herrup) for a perspective on why this is not at all surprising. That being said, I think it would be unfair to tarnish all of science with this brush though. There are many fields that don't suffer these problems nearly as much.
- thenerdhead 3y ago"Medicine is broken. We like to imagine that it's based on evidence and the results of fair tests. In reality, those tests are often profoundly flawed." - Ben Goldacre
- suoduandao3 3y agoI think we have an inflated respect for modern medicine because it gets a lot of the credit for health outcomes we actually owe to modern sanitation.
- ls612 3y agoAntibiotics and the childhood vaccines are modern medicine and have had an enormous impact on modern health outcomes. The bigger issue is that we picked a lot of the low hanging fruit in the 20th century so now advances are harder to come by.
- refurb 3y agoThe outcomes of antibiotics, diabetes drugs, cancer drugs is indisputable. You can't fake someone dying of those diseases versus being alive today.
- u32480932048 3y ago"Never trust a drug that hasn't been on the market for at least 30 years" - Samuel Shem's "The Fat Man" character(IIRC)
- nvoeiah 3y ago[flagged]
- Eumenes 3y agoFrom the inside, researchers/scientists see this as a non-issue. A few bad apples. From the outside, the public sees this as a systemic problem. Theranos, failed promises of covid vaccine efficacy, to mask or not mask, polyunsaturated fats are bad for you .. no wait, they're good for you. Science has a PR problem and like it or not, science needs the support of society at large to succeed and move forward.
- mhb 3y agoThat's the opposite of what the "few bad apples" expression is intended to mean.
- light_hue_1 3y ago> From the inside, researchers/scientists see this as a non-issue. A few bad apples. What "inside" are you in? I don't see this as a non-issue as a scientist. It's a massive problem. It means that when I read papers, I'm constantly extremely suspicious of the results.`
- wddkcs 3y agoIf it is widely perceived as a massive problem, why are there no moves to change the system? The intransigence shows there is no recognition of the problem, or the perverse incentives prevent change, which is the same problem at another level.
- bumby 3y agoUpton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." This applies to multiple levels in the publication game. Lab grants would likely dry up if the size of the problem was revealed to be massive. Publications would lose credibility, prestige, and money if the problem proved large. It can be recognized as a problem by those who's salaries don't depend on it, but still remain unchanged because those in the best position to change it have salaries that do.
- coolhand2120 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- DanielleMolloy 3y agoMany destructive behaviours are rewarded in a system that is putting emphasis on the quantity and proposed impact of publications. Many scientific fields suffer from behaviours of individuals who are more interested in social status (or just economic security) than in seeking truth. Just like in overall society the humble truth seekers necessary for slowly chiseling out the firm ground of solid knowledge are in the minority. They are definitely disadvantaged in this system, and more likely to be driven out than those who lie, rush or cut corners. At the modern complexity and importance of science, we do need to put much more emphasis on checking whether it is done right. The original vision of the Royal Society involved rigorous peer review, to the point of demanding scientists to demonstrate their experiments in front of their peers: https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/17th-century-society-transformed-science https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/17th-ce... The curator of these literal peer reviews held the first paid position in science. Journals do have the profits to hire or otherwise pay peer reviewers full time. They would become experts in their field in the process, and thus more suited for the task than the ones in the current system, where even undergrads are asked to review for high-profile outlets like NeurIPS. Also, full-time rigorous peer reviewing would be an interesting career prospect for many current scientists. And here is your startup idea..
- jampekka 3y agoRigorous peer review, let alone paid (which causes its own issues beyond money), is totally infeasible with the current publication pressure. It's hard to find reviewers even with the current lax criteria of both reviewers and quality of their review (the latter is more problematic). The publication volume is just way way way too high. But researchers who don't publish multiple articles per year, regardless if you have anything of value to publish, perish. If you don't churn out paper-per-year in your PhD, you don't get the PhD. Much of the manuscripts that get submitted to journals are incredibly bad. Most are just bad. But as both editor and reviewer, I usually let them be published out of pity if the stuff isn't blatantly wrong; the poor PhD student's whole career is on the line. Journals being full of crap is not SO bad within science because everybody knows they are full of crap. But if an "outsider" thinks that being published in a peer-reviewed journal, even a "good" journal, means that the article isn't crap, it can be literally life-or-death (like in this case). Academia is broken because it's being run as a business whose purpose is to churn out papers. Welcome to neoliberalism.
- moralestapia 3y agoI support the (probably unpopular) opinion that scientific fraudsters should face criminal consequences. People die because of this, and the authors of these schemes go and get awards for their "substantial contributions".
- londons_explore 3y agoWe shouldn't have any one scientist able to manipulate results like this When it comes to trials where the results matter (ie. for approving a medecine), the blinding process should blind the scientists doing the trial. There should be a third party who will mix up the placebo and real vials of treatments. The treatments should stay in a sealed bags until used, and when used there should be two people in the room recording anything that happens. For treatments involving "inject this drug", the scientists, investors, and anyone else with a horse in the race shouldn't even be present.
- noqc 3y agoI'm sure you've thought of how to keep the third party's incentives clean? Not just organizationally, but down to the man.
- robertlagrant 3y agoThat's why you need a fourth party[0]! [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zo9PqubWSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zo9PqubWSg
- londons_explore 3y agoI don't really see how the third party can manipulate stuff... The third party is told "please mix up these tubes randomly and don't tell me how you mixed them". Both the third party and the scientists would need to be dishonest for the scheme to break down.
- CoastalCoder 3y agoStories like this make me a smidge more sympathetic towards people who were against coerced COVID vaccinations. I.e., this supports the suspicion that policy makers who claim "the science" supports certain policies are drawing on bad information / compromised experts. Note: I'm personally very pro-vaccine. I'm suggesting that we treat academic misconduct according to the harm it could cause.
- bradley13 3y agoDitto. I took all the vaccinations, but the reality is that the testing of the vaccines was rushed. It was only in the real world that we discovered that they could cause blood clots and myocarditis. The vaccinations were still a net benefit for COVID, but the unexpected side effects have seriously damaged people's trust in vaccines in general. We're going to pay the price for that for decades to come.
- fabian2k 3y agoYou cannot see these kinds of very rare side effects in typical phase III trials. Those trials are already pretty large for vaccines, but even then they're simply not powerful enough to detect very rare events. Nothing would have changed here with the normal vaccination approval process, those side effects would not have been detected there either. That's why side effects are monitored after approval of the vaccines as well, because then you have the large numbers you need to detect very rare events.
- callalex 3y agoThe side effects you discuss are much more rare than the harms caused by the disease itself.
- iinnPP 3y agoI have three shots and zero covid. See the problem? People who believe they know what is best for any other person are exclusively idiots.(not saying this is anyone in particular) Also, please don't suggest the shots did anything. I get sick once per five years. It's plausible that the shots helped but not definitive.
- newsclues 3y agoScience publications need to ensure reproducibility of research before publishing. There needs to be a journal dedicated to documenting unreproducible science studies and papers. The inability for scientists to police themselves is the death of Science.
- jampekka 3y agoThis would require/requires a total overhaul of how the current academia works. E.g. PhD would be unattainable with that publication criteria. Tenure and funding criteria would have to be totally overhauled. I'm all for the overhaul of course. But it's not fixable solely by publication criteria. In fact publishers benefit from poor quality. The publisher system makes no sense and is actively detrimtal to science and disseminating information.
- fabian2k 3y ago> Several former lab members provided details of experimental data from Zlokovic’s lab that they say were falsified. These included experiments referenced in the whistleblower dossier. In some cases, they said, data points that would have invalidated the desired results were removed. “It was not real science. He already knew what he wanted to say” before the experiment was completed, one says. “I started hating science. … It made me sick.” > Two of the insiders also say Zlokovic sometimes had his team improperly alter existing notebooks. Normally these notebooks—in which scientists record details of their work as it proceeds—provide a ground truth for an experiment’s methods and results. As a result, they’re also often central to misconduct investigations. > But two of the former lab members say that after an experiment was completed and its results published, Zlokovic sometimes admonished his scientists to make sure the notebooks were “clean.” That was understood to mean pasting into them printouts of the published results and methodology or omitting contrary details that challenged the paper’s conclusions. Zlokovic explained that those changes were needed in case of an “audit,” according to the two scientists. Those allegations are pretty damning if they are true. Falsifying lab notebooks is very obvious scientific misconduct, and there are no benign explanations for that.
- nerdponx 3y ago> scientific misconduct At what point do we just call it "lying" and "fraud"?
- ramraj07 3y agoIt is literally the same but a more refined term. Just like calling something distended instead of fat.
- dist-epoch 3y agoAt no point, because that would increase distrust in science. Trust scientists, even when they lie and cheat, they do it for a higher purpose that the general public can't understand.
- macinjosh 3y ago
- codekilla 3y agoPeer (or any type of institutional) review needs to be implemented at the national level--same as the funding for the original research. Why would you pay for research and not check that it is correct? Congress needs to fund a new science agency that explicitly does this. I have suggested before that part of graduate training should be replicating select studies that are published (a national review board could select those that seem the most high impact). State-funded schools could take this on, and students would probably learn at least as much doing this as they do in their other studies.
- bumby 3y agoWhat about all the funding that's not done at a national level? There's still a large amount of research funding that is private.
- codekilla 3y agoSure, and that's on the private funders to ensure they are getting what they pay for. Google pays for plenty of research--since they are the payee, it's their responsibility to ensure it's accuracy to whatever degree satisfies them. Institutions like the FDA are supposed to regulate private research when it comes to market (.i.e pharmaceuticals and the like). Whether or not the FDA and related agencies are effective is a different, but just as important question. Taxpayers desperately need a formal, funded system to verify the science they are paying for--particularly for biomedical research where the incentives for fraud are so high.
- bumby 3y agoI think that's reasonable for the "institutional review" aspect of the OP. But regarding the "peer review" aspect, I don't think it works, at least in the bulk of the current framework. Peer-review is typically performed by separate organizations, independent of the funding organization. To expect a national-level organization to essentially take over the duties of peer-review journals is a very big ask (not in small part because the current system benefits from free labor from the reviewers).
- pneumic 3y agoWhere are there so many seemingly dishonest Alzheimers researchers lately?
- coolhand2120 3y agoWe were hoping you would forget.
- ChoHag 3y ago[dead]
- wouldbecouldbe 3y agoFalsifying in research feels a bit like doping in sports. At some point the prestige & funding are just too much of an incentive to not take advantage of it. It's probably easy to morally justified in their minds because they believe their hypthosis is correct
- nerdponx 3y agoDoping in sports doesn't waste millions of taxpayer dollars and murder stroke victims who might have otherwise recovered.
- starcraft2wol 3y agoMaybe the public shouldn’t be handing out these incentives then.
- wouldbecouldbe 3y agoSports benefit to society is hard to quantify. But most agree there is benefit to having sport activities in our society. And that doping is detrimental to it. It also attracts millions of taxpayers money, lots of athletes, especially those going to Olympics, get funded. But originally I wasn't making a comparison based on negative impact on society, but comparing the incentive structure.
- sproketboy 3y ago[dead]
- bradley13 3y agoThere are three reasons this happens, and money is at the root of all of them. - Publish-or-perish: You want to keep that professorship, you had better publish, frequently. Experiments that don't yield results don't count. - Grant money: You want to get funding for your lab, your assistants and your students, you had better publish. Experiments that don't yield results don't count. - Start-up culture: Just another permutation of "get rich quick", but you need a saleable product. Experiments that don't yield results don't count. So there are massive incentives to fake results. "Fake it until you make it", only with actual lives at risk. Say hello to Elizabeth Holmes.
- robertlagrant 3y ago> money is at the root of all of them Money doesn't seem to be at the root of the first one.
- jampekka 3y agoPerishing here means losing your career and the sustinence its salary gives. So its very much about money, just not getting wealthy type money.
- monero-xmr 3y agoA friend did her PhD in climate science and the research involved weather station data. She said all of the data is full of gaps, outliers, messy, and the way the "science" solves it is to just get rid of reports that don't align with priors and use very basic functions to fill in missing data. When people say "trust the science" it means making scientists and researcher High Priests of the Religion of Truth. Until every single experiment is pre-registered, all data is public and transparent, and all results are published, the entire experimental scientific establishment should be treated with massive skepticism.
- adam_smith123 3y agoThat's called fraud and no it's not how "science" functions.
- doitLP 3y agoIt’s absolutely how a dishonest science institution functions. Science itself is nothing more than a method. The disdain is for people who confuse the process with the institution. And at that point it is just blind faith like any old religion. Show me the preregistration, the conflict of interest disclosure and the third party replication and then I’ll “trust the science”.
- adam_smith123 3y agoPEOPLE are abusing bad incentives. I'm quite certain that if this lab was exposed for doing what the poster claims it would be a major controversy just like other cases we've seen. That's the institution correctly reacting to bad actors.
- mistermann 3y agoAre these bad actors scientists, or not?
- adam_smith123 3y ago
- adam_smith123 3y agoIf it didn't come out of a Physic Lab or a hard Engineering Lab dont trust the results at face value and even it did there's plenty of reason for doubt. See LK-99 or Ranga Dias.
- u32480932048 3y ago[flagged]
- u32480932048 3y ago[flagged]
- meroes 3y agoSeems like freshmen need to practice their academic dishonestly more to have these skills ready by career time! Maybe the academic integrity councils need to include professors’ work.
- perihelions 3y agoI'm astounded that this guy's the world #1 in his subfield by academia's success metric, citation count. (The table about 2/3rd of the way into the article).
- bumby 3y agoIt kinda makes sense to me. The people who are most likely to have a high citation count are those who value making publications. Those who treat publications are the primary goal are probably those most likely to take an "ends justify the means" approach to publishing. (That's not to say all those who value publication count are unethical, just that the unethical group is more likely a subset of those whose primary metric is publication count). Goodhart's Law says: "When the measure becomes the target, it ceases to be a good measure." When the target is "publication or citation count" rather than "meaningful research or the pursuit of truth" things can get weird.
- bsimpson 3y agoFrancesca Gino was famously prolific before she was outed as a fraud - publishing monthly when her peers were publishing a few times a year.
- wslh 3y agoI think corruption is a very poorly studied (and solved) topic. Not religious, but the Ten Commandments seems to have more wisdom that its application in the real world.
- jboggan 3y agoThe best "researchers" are poor scientists and vice versa. I thought I had hitched my wagon to a star in grad school when I joined a lab with a high profile and big money-raising PI. After awhile I realized they did no research themselves and focused solely on hype and raising money. When I found out a software bug had invalidated a year's worth of simulations they pressured me to present the false data as true at a large talk. That's when I realized that being honest and truthful with data was not the way to succeed in academia. I also unknowingly ended my career that day by not going along with my professor's fraud. That being said, nothing surprises me anymore about academic dishonesty and research grant funding.
- KittenInABox 3y agoUnfortunately the systemic incentives support PIs that are basically hype salespeople. PIs gain prominence on metrics: number of dollars raised, number of PhDs mentored, number of post-docs on staff, number of papers landed, number of awards granted... They are not supported on number of hours of research done-- they arguably put in that time when they were PhD candidates or post-docs themselves. When I was a PhD candidate (couldn't handle the papers-or-die academic environment so I left) I really, really loved my PI. He had immense academic and intellectual humility. But even he had 10+ papers in-flight at the same time and rarely had time to do any work himself!
- strikelaserclaw 3y agoThese days science is done as a "collaborative" effort, there are tons of people gaming that, like putting their names on papers where they didn't do that much, churning out papers which doesn't really add much to science etc...
- dguest 3y agoIn my collaboration you get to be an author on every paper (around 100 a year) just by doing any work in the experiment. I'm an author on around 1000 papers that I haven't even downloaded, much less read.
- 3y ago
- yafbum 3y agoScientific fraud robs the community twice: the first time by wasting research funds on fraud, the second time because experiments with the appearance of success funnel more dollars to them, taking away funding from other areas that might look less sexy but might have yielded a breakthrough of they'd been pursued. Grant issuers should insist on some form of end-to-end third-party data custodianship to prevent tampering with data during analysis. Seems better than the many billions of $ being wasted on fraud and subsequent missed opportunity.
- Voultapher 3y agoSo many problems in science could be alleviated if we changed the culture and processes to multi replication. Your paper can only be accepted into a paper if an unrelated group can replicate the results with only the paper and associated submitted info.
- ska 3y agoYou don't really need that (and it would be too expensive), you just need to fix the incentives so that people do more replication.
- ffgjgf1 3y agoSomeone will need to pay that other group though. Sometimes quite a lot.
- Voultapher 3y agoI'd argue it's worth it. Some practical ideas, when allocating the money for research 30% or so has to be kept back for replication. Public science is mostly government funded. And the government could allocate X% percent of the budget for replication work. It sounds like a solvable problem to me.
- ffgjgf1 3y agoI agree in principle but forcing institutions or governments to allocate money for this and enforce is pretty much an unsolvable problem at this point IMO.
- macinjosh 3y agoFraud is fraud, lock 'em up.
- iinnPP 3y agoThis. The answer is so simple.
- bilsbie 3y ago[flagged]
- wccrawford 3y ago"Trust the experts" is always "trust my experts". If you ask them to trust other people with the same (or similar) degree, but a different opinion, they don't. It's just an appeal to authority rather than a real philosophy.
- MadSudaca 3y agoGood question. Blind faith is never a good idea. However, one ought to ask, what is the alternative?
- taeric 3y agoHonestly? These kinds of stories should enforce the general idea. Trust has to be seen as a long term game, though. And requires well run checks to keep things trustworthy. So, if you view trust as only a short term, "the answer is always right," then that will fail. But you should not have a sole source here. And this style of system is no different from authority anywhere else. You should be able to trust your local religious/community leader. But you should also not have one that is absolute authority on their own authority.
- blackbear_ 3y agoHow do people who don't want anybody to "trust the experts" plan to live in a world without experts? To be a bit less snarky, basic education on philosophy and science should make it clear what are the disclaimers implicitly assumed when trusting the experts.
- whatscooking 3y agoPeople who are labeled as experts and who talk the loudest in society aren’t always capable of independent critical thought, so a lot of what they say is useless. Nothing is stopping you from independently investigating a subject. You don’t need to know about phylogenetic trees and be a bio wizard to understand how neurons work and learning how neurons work would take you a day or two max. Pick a narrow but not too narrow scope, research it and make your own conclusions. I don’t know why anyone would ever blindly follow “experts” other than sheer laziness
- smegsicle 3y agoi sure hope our sun never has a stroke
- somenameforme 3y agoI found this [1] interesting: "Zlokovic is recognized internationally as a leader in the fields of AD and stroke research. Thomson Reuters and Clarivate Analytics listed Zlokovic as one of “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds” for 21 consecutive years (2002-2022) for ranking in 1 % of the most-cited authors in the field of neurosciences and behavioral sciences. He received [lots of awards.]" [1] - https://keck.usc.edu/faculty-search/berislav-v-zlokovic/ https://keck.usc.edu/faculty-search/berislav-v-zlokovic/
- kingkawn 3y agoWhen will it be acknowledged that this corruption is a feature of academic institutional self-preservation not a bug? This is inherent to the process.
- mmmmpancakes 3y agoScientific fraud makes me sad and angry.
- SpaceManNabs 3y agoI have seen peer review hinder actual research more than actually catch fraudulent papers. There is no incentive to call out bullshit in academia because you might not even pass peer review when you call out bullshit. Might as well work on another paper instead. Meanwhile people doing actual work get scooped or ignored by people abusing the practice or just doing outright fraud.
- varelse 3y ago[dead]
- twothreeone 3y agoIt's a bit sad to see people jump on the witch-hunt bandwagon every time something like this is published. That kind of reaction is an absolute disservice to the public. Even if this guys turns out to be a totally 100% evil fraudster who took millions of NIH funding to buy coke, b&*#!es, and fancy cars while knowing that his drug might kill dozens of people, it just demonstrates that the system for awarding such funds is deeply flawed. Science is about fact finding, how are we even pretending that that's a remote possibility with a sample size of one? Studies need to be independently verified _multiple times over_ to actually establish them as facts.. that's standard procedure in other fields. That we just abandon that scrutiny by blindly accepting anyone's claims because they wrote X number of papers on a topic is not on that guy at all. And worse, nothing will change buy burning him at the stake of public opinion. The next guy comes along and the story repeats, science.org and the "whistleblowers" get their five minutes of fame (and click $$$). If we want things to change we need to hold the institutions who award such grants and fast-track permissions accountable, instead of allowing them to get away with a cheap scapegoat.
- drewcoo 3y agoFraud is lucrative. Everyone wants to say "fraud bad" but no one seems to want to distrust any science that's not validated by a second, unconnected source. My hypothesis is that fraud will continue.
- hilux 3y agoUSC again? They'd gone a few years since their last major public scandal. I guess the pandemic must have helped. This looks like a huge case of deliberate malfeasance. Real shame.
- 64operator 3y ago[dead]