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Universities and funders should start suing these quacks. Like how sponsors sometimes have gone after an athlete busted for doping. Its insane how free scientif
by tokai 3y ago
Universities 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?
- jampekka 3y agoNumber theory and electricity development was/is very much paid from public funds, even dollars. For wheel there obviously was no money at all, let alone dollars. For most science there is no obvious commercialization at least in any predictable timeframes. When there is, it's typically called R&D.
- 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]