11 ms·

Dana-Farberications at Harvard University

221 points by RadixDLT 3y ago

ShamelessC 3y ago
[flagged]
- cjbgkagh 3y ago
  I don't know, it's another chip in the foundation, straw on the camel's back. While none of this is new to me, and was one of the reasons I left academia for industry a very long time ago, the general population are becoming increasingly distrustful of the academics, and trust once lost is very difficult to get back.
  - CobrastanJorji 3y ago
    Yeah. While these specific professors or schools or research institutes may not see any immediate consequences, the general opinion of universities has been increasingly taking a beating. That's a dangerous thing in a place where there's an everpresent conservative drumbeat of anti-intellectualism in general and the liberal elites in their ivy towers. I'm not sure what the ultimate consequences will be for US universities might be if this course continues, but it won't be good.
    - tastyfreeze 3y ago
      > conservative drumbeat of anti-intellectualism What does that even mean?
      - helf 3y ago
        [dead]
      - andirk 3y ago
        Anti-intellectualism is a very real thing in this country, and mostly found in ultra conservative circles. For example, it is VERY popular at certain rallies to believe that 1) Obama is still running the show behind the scenes as a communist, AND 2) Donald won in 2020, AND 3) Donald is the current sitting prez, AND 4) that the January 6th hilarity was both 4a) a psy-ops by the then Speaker AND 4b) those brave patriots that were involved are political prisoners. These are ANDs, not ORs. They are often all believed at once. Anti-intellectualism and a distaste for upper education in general because it "indoctrinates" is not fringe. Keep in mind no one in power of any political party actually believes ANY of that but it is one of the popular drum beats.
        cjbgkagh 3y ago
        Q Anon is a modern incarnation of the Soviet counter intelligence program ‘Operation Trust’ when combined with the deliberate Pied Piper strategy it should be understood that the craziness of these people is something that was intentionally done to them by cynical political operatives.
        tastyfreeze 3y ago
        Painting all conservatives with the same brush as "ultra conservative" (whatever that means) is disingenuous. Idiots abound in all walks of life. Better to judge individuals than to judge a whole group by the actions of a few. Really, it reads like you need to talk to more real people. If I were to watch videos of blue haired liberals all day I might get the impression that all liberals are that way. That just isn't true. It is an extreme that is not representative of the group as a whole. The liberal/conservative line isn't as distinct as media makes it out to be. Most people hold views that belong in both camps.
        andirk 3y ago
        I agree, hence said "it is VERY popular at certain rallies". The "ultra-conservative" label = a huge % of that party. No assumptions whatsoever about people who believe in economic Darwinism, lower corporate taxes because the ultra ultra rich earned it, no welfare state because bootstraps, etc. The other side of the aisle is rarely an opposing party. Outside USA it's common knowledge, inside USA they're communists somehow. The parties work hand-in-hand to protect the tippy top (remember the overlord unelected barely official Parliamentarian when the other side had House, Senate, Prez in 2020 who stopped any progress, similar in 2009). It's mostly for show. The topic I brought up is _anti-intellectualism_ which is championed by one side far moreso than the other. We're speaking of the weight and desire and scandal around upper education devolving for various reasons. I mentioned one. What is your opinion?
    - AmericanChopper 3y ago
      I guess you can choose between worrying about the influence all these corrupt, ivory tower intellectuals have on society, or worry about them getting caught for it…
    - cjbgkagh 3y ago
      The problem with the left having a stranglehold on culture, and especially academic culture, is that its sacred cows are left un molested to the point they forget they have any. Healthy at any size is a personal favorite because of how immediately obvious it is false to even the most causal of observers yet academics and doctors will line up to preach that ridiculous gospel. When people see those who have died from Covid while being clearly morbidly obese being described in the news media as perfectly healthy with no preexisting conditions - it does beg a few questions.
  - p-e-w 3y ago
    The "foundation" of Harvard is institutional power. Academic excellence is at best a consequence of that. I can guarantee that Harvard's many powerful alumni aren't going to let that institutional power be eroded, regardless of how bad academic standards ever become. And they control sufficiently many other institutions to ensure that Harvard retains its shine, at least to the outside world.
    - ryandrake 3y ago
      What’s the end state? Harvard eventually doesn’t even have to provide an education. It’s role is as a manufacturer of prestige. It selects N people a year, deems those people “elite,” and those people end up employed in elite investment banks and consulting companies because they were deemed elite by an institution with that power. Those elites then go on to recruit the next year worth of elites. I mean, this already is happening in name brand education institutions. The value is all in the name and network of fellow elites, and the education itself is largely irrelevant. I’d name schools, but I bet a lot of HN readership got their first lucrative FAANG jobs based entirely on their attendance at one of these institutions…
      - jackcosgrove 3y ago
        The end state is very close to the starting state, unfortunately. Bureaucracies that select their own incoming ranks are very, very hard to reform from the outside. The liberal reforms of the 18th and 19th centuries such as checks and balances were devised to counteract this tendency. Many universities predate these reforms.
delichon 3y ago
The teaching standards at Harvard have been declining remarkably steadily for many years now. https://www.chartr.co/stories/2023-12-08-2-grade-inflation-at-harvard https://www.chartr.co/stories/2023-12-08-2-grade-inflation-a... Apparently teachers' standards have declined for themselves too. Some of that would be a result of being trained at Harvard, a vicious circle.
- IceHegel 3y ago
  They thought it would never catch up to them, they thought grade inflation didn’t matter because it was still hard to get in.
  - gonzo41 3y ago
    "Hard to get in" is relative. I only recently learned about legacy admissions.
- Gustomaximus 3y ago
  Could this be because Harvard is increasingly desirable & hard to get into? From this, the average standard of students + their dedication to their work/GPA may well have steadily grown too. From a quick google, the acceptance rate to Harvard was 20% higher in the 70's. In 1940 it had an absolute acceptance rate of 85%. I dont actually know the answer, but from that graph only, the rising rate could be as much from a higher standard of student as lowering standards of marking.
  - somenameforme 3y ago
    In the past a university education was 100% optional - as was high school for that matter, and so the only people pursuing such tended to be exceptional academic/intellectual outliers. The pool of people interested was very low, and standards were exceptionally high. For instance, this [1] is a Harvard entrance exam from 1869! [1] - https://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvardexam.pdf https://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvard...
perihelions 3y ago
Dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39090959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39090959 (34 comments)
- dang 3y ago
  That article cites this one as the original source, so even though this one is rather strangely written, I guess we can let the current thread run.
p-e-w 3y ago
All rankings that attempt to compare the academic quality of universities are self-fulfilling prophecies. Rankings influence prestige. Prestige influences perception, even among experts. Is Nature really going to reject that paper? It was written by a Harvard guy, after all. And next, the number of "high-impact" publications (such as in Nature) is used to rank universities. Good luck...
- whatyesaid 3y ago
  You can have double blind papers and double blind research funding I guess to help that a little? Not sure what else you can do. Table rankings are actually only applicable for undergrads in practical terms. At research level, You have world leading experts at random universities often, and then people who worked in top universities who advanced the field by none after decades. I wonder how many universities actually mega climbed ranks in the past decades though
  - p-e-w 3y ago
    The peer review process isn't actually blind in practice. The number of experts working in a given problem space is small enough that they know most of their peers, and usually can identify at a glance who the author of a paper is, from the topic, writing style, and experimental design, which they can recognize from previous publications and correspondence.
    - UncleMeat 3y ago
      This is true to an extent, but also overblown. There have been a few experiments testing this and people wildly overestimate their ability to unblind paper authors correctly.
  - sbalamurugan 3y ago
    Desk rejects also happen regularly from Editors (who are not blind to the author names and affiliations). Editors can also make final decisions to accept or reject when reviewers don't agree. Even in a blind peer review, the subject of study introduces another layer of bias in the process. Let's say two economics papers are submitted that discusses how people spend their last part of their pay check. One studies a pool of people across United States and other studies of people across Nigeria. Which one do you think is going to get positive review from editors and reviewers? The Nigeria paper might not even go to review. The editor is going to say something on the lines of "the focus of the study is too narrow for the journal" but won't say the same when it is across US. This is in addition to the trust issues with any research conducted outside western countries. For researchers from the "low ranked" universities, the game is rigged against them and there is nothing they can do to swing it to their favour.
ossicones 3y ago
I would’ve preferred a less editorialized article about this. In particular, this article has left me wondering who’s actually written fraudulent articles and whose biggest mistake was trusting the wrong collaborators.
- deleted 3y ago
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- mitchellst 3y ago
  Agreed. I don't think the snark helps. Not my field, but my understanding of how these things work in big medical research factories: first few authors tend to be young researchers (maybe med students or even undergrads) trying to match residency or get into grad school. They do much of the work actually assembling the submission. The later names on the author list (who this article is taking to task) run labs or oversee research groups. Should they correct the record when it's pointed out? Yes. (But the snark and tenor of the post doesn't exactly convince someone they can admit an oversight in good faith.) Should they be vigilant enough to check and notice these things? Of course. Some of the fakes are not subtle. Others, like the copy-paste of empty space in the lane to cover some undesirable result? Way harder to spot with the naked eye. I don't think there was great automated tech to detect image duplication in the 00's when these were published. So your med student fudges data on a paper. The ethical answer is to expel them—"the world needs plenty of bartenders." But it appears big institutions these days are pretty invested in the sunk costs of prestige, dislike admitting error in admission or hiring, and prioritize go-along-get-along environments. It could be career limiting if students don't get any/enough pubs working in your lab. It'd a lot of hearings and paperwork to report him, plus I heard his uncle's a donor. If she got kicked out she'd lose her visa. And if I reported them, I'd be obliged to report everyone, and I'd be sunk in discipline hearings three times a year. So much easier to just... not look very hard. It's bad science and bad ethics, but if you want better, reform the incentives. "Public" shaming by a niche newsletter... might be better than nothing, but doesn't qualify as an incentive.
  - wrs 3y ago
    They won't correct the record because they "can't admit an oversight" due to the snark in a niche newsletter...a newsletter which you then say isn't important enough to serve as an incentive? So which is it, important or not? I would think they can't admit an oversight due to the institutional incentives you mention; the snark is irrelevant. If anything, it encourages publicity for the oversight, which is the only thing that might change the incentive.
ta8645 3y ago
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patryn20 3y ago
[flagged]
- boxed 3y ago
  And yet the world does in fact improve year over year. Kicking and screaming, but still moving forward. Technology and science improves and that compounds.
  - patryn20 3y ago
    [flagged]
- dang 3y ago
  This comment breaks the site guidelines, as have some others that you've been posting. Can you please not do this? We're trying for something other than slow internet degradation here. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
  - patryn20 3y ago
    You are of course welcome to administer this site as you wish. However: This site hasn’t represented balanced discourse or intellectual debate in at least a decade. I’ve watched it become just yet another Ivy League and big tech echo chamber as YC has pursued its existing investments over its stated goals and creative ideals. Money ruins everything. And I’m tired of it.
    - dang 3y ago
      I don't think HN has changed that much, but perceptions differ. Perceivers also change, though—especially over a longish time frame like a decade. I can tell you for sure that we don't run HN to "pursue YC's existing investments". We're trying to optimize for intellectual curiosity [1] because that's the way to maximize HN's value for YC [2, 3]. The point is that it's in YC's business interests to run HN this way, and the argument holds no matter how cynical one wants to be about it. HN is an interesting corner case in internet economics. If we tried to optimize it for existing investments (or worse, tried to squeeze money out of it directly), its value would go down, because that would make it less interesting to the community, and HN's value comes from the interest and quality of the community. Basically: the more one tried to make money out of HN, the less it would be worth. That's interesting, no? I suppose you could say HN's value comes more from future investments, not existing ones. We can optimize HN for that by having it be as interesting as possible, so people want to continue to hang out here. (Btw, that phrase "as possible" is important. There are limits on how good or interesting a large public internet forum can ever get. But we can try.) [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=yc%20business%20interests%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... [3] There are a few exceptions to this, but they're secondary, and all explained in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
galkk 3y ago
The piece reads very weirdly. In the beginning the picture of copypasted images and doctored results is very clear. But when it goes to the passage about genius, and it is so strange. Out of place, weird rant about chosen word… Whatever bastard Sabatiny is, the author’s approach also leaves bad taste in mouth
- deleted 3y ago
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theGnuMe 3y ago
Man what a mess. I guess if you give someone something to optimize (publications) they will do so. Science has become distracted by celebrity and money. What a waste of grant money. I hope the NCI, NSF and NIH fund a program to route out scientific fraud, it is clearly needed. When I was in grad school some fellow students were admonished for plagiarism but allowed to stay. I always think of who was denied a place by these folks.
- mike_hearn 3y ago
  The US has a whole department that is supposed to police scientific fraud, the ORI. It was set up in the 70s after a series of fraudulent studies caught the attention of Congress. Unfortunately after a few failed prosecutions early in its history the ORI now does very little, only a handful of cases per year. Compared to the scale of the problem which is often measured in something like 50%+ or more of papers, it's just irrelevant. There is no "police department" you could staff up that'd be big enough to get a handle on this problem.
pessimist 3y ago
My brother is dying of a grade 4 brain tumor, and I've spend countless hours poring through papers. Horrifying to realize they may be falsified. I am always sceptical of pre-clinical studies since so many have tended to fail in the real world, but now I wonder how many were just fake? These aren't scientists but thieves robbing public money with no skin the game.
- patryn20 3y ago
  Reading through papers on cholangiocarcinoma: most of them ARE falsified. And I want to harm people for it. Only three new drugs in 29 years. And I can’t help but think it’s partially due to this. Mother has stage 4 intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma.
  - mista2nith 3y ago
    [dead]
- boxed 3y ago
  The deepest irony is of course that they themselves are probably going to get cancer at some point and die years earlier than if they hadn't poisoned the science.
- theGnuMe 3y ago
  Sorry to hear about your brother that is rough.
User23 3y ago
I look forward to seeing the Gell-Mann amnesia the next time an obviously cooked climate study comes out and people get all worked up over nothing. If reading that makes you upset, do you have a rational reason why? Can you explain how climate science is immune to the social dynamics at work here? Or is it just knee-jerk offense at having your religious beliefs questioned?
- throwaway20222 3y ago
  Can you clarify what you mean please? And what evidence you have to support the social dynamics whichever way you are saying they are being swayed? This is a genuine question because I may be the one with the religious beliefs, but I am not beyond them being questioned.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- boxed 3y ago
  The difference here is that anti-warming studies are the ones with the money behind them. Your conspiracy theory is falsified in that one stroke.
  - ejb999 3y ago
    don't kid yourself - there is plenty of money to be made on both sides of the climate misinformation industry.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39090959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39090959
- Semaphor 3y ago
  [dupe comment] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39099565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39099565 ;)
profsummergig 3y ago
David Sabatini was anointed a future Nobel Laureate by the university-academic complex. What's astonishing is that when his work was discovered to have silly photoshop manipulations, he reacted by calling (on Twitter) the people who caught him "steaming turds". https://forbetterscience.com/2020/01/29/david-sabatini-tormented-by-steaming-turds/ https://forbetterscience.com/2020/01/29/david-sabatini-torme...
- ramraj07 3y ago
  Guess who’s bankrolling his “uncancellation” with a $25MM fund? Bill Ackman lol.
  - throwaway81523 3y ago
    I hadn't heard of Bill Ackman before the Claudine Gay thing, but this is amazing: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/bill-ackman-neri-oxman-twitter-posts/677164/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/bill-ackma... (https://archive.is/ypLSo https://archive.is/ypLSo)
  - lupire 3y ago
    https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/02/12/us/ackman-sabatini-mit-whitehead-institute-sexual-misconduct/index.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/02/12/us/a... I'm a bit suspicious of your attempt to impugn Ackman, who is the leading voice in the fight against academic dishonesty... at Harvard... by women... not married to him... who tolerate Palestinians. His focus is oddly specific, if it's still an important contribution to scientific integrity. Yes, this is sarcasm.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - bmitc 3y ago
    Who is also husband to former MIT Media Lab professor Neri Oxman, a place and people also embattled with dubious research methods and funding sources.
neilv 3y ago
"Dana-Farberications" is indirectly playing on the name of someone who presumably had nothing to do with these allegations, and who sounds more at the other end of the spectrum of respectability: > Sidney Farber (September 30, 1903 – March 30, 1973) was an American pediatric pathologist. He is regarded as the father of modern chemotherapy for his work using folic acid antagonists to combat leukemia, which led to the development of other chemotherapeutic agents against other malignancies. Farber was also active in cancer research advocacy and fundraising, most notably through his establishment of the Jimmy Fund, a foundation dedicated to pediatric research in childhood cancers. The Dana–Farber Cancer Institute is named after him. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Farber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Farber
- CartyBoston 3y ago
  It's the name of an institution, not just a person.
- bmitc 3y ago
  They or their estate are perfectly capable (maybe, depending on contracts) of removing their name from the institute. If you want to pay to have your name attached to something, you should be prepared to have your name attached to that something and its activities.
harry8 3y ago
There’s literally f.all point having peer review if the peer reviewers who passed this junk for publication aren’t the ones deciding if the paper needs to be retracted when this stuff comes out. How are these journals retaining any prestige when this stuff is un-retracted? The stink should be smeared all over all of them. The publishers should be sued into the ground for fraud given the exorbitant subscription fees. I can’t think of a single reason not to burn it all down.
- bsenftner 3y ago
  We need to burn these failed institutions down, and hard. A lesson needs to be taught to our larger terribly immature public: do this crap and you'll be destroyed.
- UncleMeat 3y ago
  Peer review means "other academics read the paper and provide feedback about whether the paper is novel, important, and clear." This usually involves a couple hours of work from the reviewer. It is woefully incapable of detecting fraudulent data. How could it? Some fraud has been caught through statistical analysis of datasets, but this takes a lot of time and requires expertise that most academics don't have. Detecting faked images has an even less clear path that people can follow. Academic fraud is bad. But it isn't like other ecosystems are more effective and capable of detecting fraudulent work. The journals suck, but mostly for reasons totally unrelated to the limitations of peer review.
  - harry8 3y ago
    The peer reviewers are clearly capable of going back and reviewing the new criticism about the paper at the direction of the journal and deciding, “Yes. We didn’t see this at the time but the criticism is valid and the paper should be withdrawn.” Note that there is presently no note on the publications that the papers should not be relied on in any way. The authors are pretending there is no problem which is utterly ridiculous and embarrassingly so. I’m not ok with that as the status quo. I don’t think anyone should be.
patryn20 3y ago
[flagged]
- smsm42 3y ago
  I went into it way before I knew how well it would pay - in fact, back then (and there) it paid ok, but nothing like "unicorns" and Google's seven figure salaries were even remotely something you could conceptualize, let alone think it'd be reality someday. It's lucky in the US it pays really well, but I'd likely be doing it anyway if it paid less well. Don't generalize that readily and broadly.
  - patryn20 3y ago
    I was so fortunate to get in at a startup paying $90k/y usd in 2004. Now I’m poorly paid compared to the people I “mentor” at $160k + bonuses with no RSU. But at least I’m working on stuff I care about. I hear these fresh college grads getting $300k offer that have the right university on their meaningless tech degree they drank 24/7 to achieve, and I just want to scream. In three years I’ll be rejecting them for positions writing the software that makes their current employer run. I’ve nixed so many Amazon and Facebook employees in the interview process that couldn’t answer anything about basic programming skills. Their answers were just “I’d use this off the shelf solution”. Well sorry, but we create that off the shelf solution or an alternative. So you actually have to know how to use binary arithmetic. Bye bye brat.
    - smsm42 3y ago
      Amazon has over 30k engineers. I'm sure there are mediocre ones among them - thousands probably. But for a lot of tasks in the company of Amazon's size, "I’d use this off the shelf solution" is exactly the right answer. Sometimes it isn't, but there would be thousands of places where it is. > I hear these fresh college grads getting $300k offer that have the right university on their meaningless tech degree they drank 24/7 to achieve, and I just want to scream. But why? Assume everything you say is right and somebody makes a lot of money undeservedly. Why should it make you scream? You're not paying that money. Some rich idiot does. Why be upset about it? Are you envious? Wasn't what you're doing your own choice?
cosmojg 3y ago
Hot take, but if the FDA hadn't raised the bar for clinical trials to where it sits now (specifically with regard to the expenses associated with bureaucratic approval and regulatory compliance), I'd expect we'd see far fewer falsified studies. When it's impossible to test an idea in the real world, bias and whimsy run rampant, free to rule the printed page. In the absence of empiricism, passing the vibe check passes for peer review.
- stdbrouw 3y ago
  How cheaply do you think you can run a clinical trial with human patients in the absence of bureaucracy? I imagine increased insurance and recruitment costs would eat up the difference.
  - concordDance 3y ago
    I expect we could empirically look at how much trials cost 50 years ago on the assumption there has been a regulatory ratchet effect. I don't know how to find that data though...
    - jimberlage 3y ago
      A confounder here is that diseases targeting common ailments (pain, colds, etc.) have already been developed. The FDA requires that new medications be better than the existing ones one some axis. So before, you had to find people with pain. Then, you had to find women with pain. Then, you have to find pregnant women with pain. Then, you have to find pregnant women also suffering from gestational diabetes with pain. That’s hypothetical, but it’s a real trend. Costs go up based on the number of people you have to sift through to find someone eligible. Things like viagra (10 years ago) or ozempic are still in the honeymoon period where inclusion/exclusion criteria are broad enough that you can enroll lots of people in any given place.
alejohausner 3y ago
Ralph Moss’s “Cancer Incorporated” is a must read. It details the deep corruption in the oncology industry. Oncologists are paid a lot of money for each prescription. Clinical trials for new cancer drugs are absolutely full of shenanigans, such as cherry picking test subjects. New breakthroughs are announced weekly, but death rates remain unchanged from 50 years ago (aside from lung cancer deaths, which decreased due to anti-smoking campaigns). Depressing. It’s a very profitable industry, and profits corrode science.
- stefantalpalaru 3y ago
  [dead]
- vasilipupkin 3y ago
  I don't think this is true https://usafacts.org/articles/how-have-cancer-rates-changed-over-time/ https://usafacts.org/articles/how-have-cancer-rates-changed-...
deleted 3y ago
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hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
Huh, a blast from the past. After dropping out of high school and before getting into college I remember visiting the DFCI once or twice to talk with one of the PhDs in there about suffix trees in bioinformatics. I even recognize some of the names in this article. Weird to think I could have ended up working there if I had cut getting my philosophical act together short and set myself to my education immediately. It was a really cool place right in the center of the city near my high school. Suffix trees are still rad and any DSA-inclined teenager will benefit greatly from learning them :)
astrolx 3y ago
This is insane. As a researcher I had to take research ethics course, and obviously we study some cases of research misconduct and fraud. But this kind of stuff is next-level. I know Sweden launched a national board to investigate research misconduct [1], I hope more countries do the same. [1] https://npof.se/en/ https://npof.se/en/
- cm2187 3y ago
  Though many of them look like outright fraud (anytime photoshopping is involved), I think some could be honest mistakes. If you have dozens of images that are small variants of the same study, it's very easy to misname one of the files or pick the wrong one when loading it into the image editor.
  - astrolx 3y ago
    Exactly, honests mistakes can be made (happens to me), and it happened that I spotted some in a paper and contacted the authors and they publish an erratum (or not). But this kind of photoshopping, done over a period, really gets me.
DonsDiscountGas 3y ago
It always amazes me how lazy and amateurish this type of fraud is. Copying and pasting pictures? Can't even add a little fuzz? I'm often trying to teach scientists to code, if they actually learned they could fake data much more credibly. Schon[0] was another big one; he didn't copy images but rather numbers which made up graphs. Adding some noise would've been really easy. It makes one wonder how much fraud is never caught simply because the fraudsters are a little smarter. A basic assumption in science is that the raw facts a scientist presents are true. People question the statistical methods, they question which conclusions are appropriate given the data, but raw data itself is assumed to be accurate. We apply a lot more scrutiny to clinical trials (for obvious reasons), but trying to apply that same standard to all research everywhere would be cost prohibitive and slow research by a huge amount. A lot of journals use image-duplication detectors now (the post mentions ImageTwin.ai) so I expect this particular form of fraud will stop. I suspect cherry-picking data ("inappropriate data exclusion") is the most common form, and will remain so. It's very difficult (often impossible) to detect. On the positive side, I suspect the impact of stuff like this is fairly minimal. Everybody in the field knows that experimental biology is difficult and results are untrustworthy. Even excluding outright fraud, it's really easy to just mess something up. Or get a result which is "true" but doesn't generalize, and so it's useless. Good scientists don't trust something just because it's in Nature/Science/Cell, if they really care about the result then they replicate it before building on it. This would remain true even if all deliberate fraud stopped immediately. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal [1] I dunno about the mouse one, it doesn't seem to be a direct copy/paste and a good experimentalist will do a lot to ensure consistent conditions. Everything else is pretty blatant though.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  This is all true, but think your conclusions are not correct. I don't think this is true for everyone. If it is difficult, and easy to mess something up, then all the more reason to have as accurate results as possible. Fudging data isn't acceptable. "Everybody in the field knows that experimental biology is difficult and results are untrustworthy" "Good scientists don't trust something just because it's in Nature/Science/Cell, if they really care about the result then they replicate it before building on it" -> But, I'm Joe Blow, I'm not setting up a lab to replicate every study I read about. This might be fine for a VC, test it before building something. But it forgets how many people might make smaller decisions based on an article in Nature or Cell. or Extrema: I just read about the Higgs-Boson, do I need to not trust the results until I can build a collider and replicate it.
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Guess it is a lot worse than I thought. I'm usually a science apologist, defender. Sure, the Harvard president might have misquoted something. And social sciences have a lot of difficulty re-staging the same trials to replicated them, but aren't doing it nefariously. But here, a hard science, with hard data, and blatantly falsifying it. This is pretty unforgivable.
rdtsc 3y ago
This looks systemic. Cheating like this is probably rampant by now. Fresh students watched carefully as others in the department did it, and got promoted, finished faster, got funding and good positions. This on top of minimal repercussions if anyone got caught. These students become department heads and then everyone under them start tolerating it. It spreads like a cancer. Apologies for the pun but it fits aptly here.
- 2cynykyl 3y ago
  Think about it the other way...what would happen if they didn't cheat? Imagine spending 6 of your prime years in a lab doing experiments that refused to work...your hypothesis is totally wrong, etc. It is not hard to imagine a student in this situation resorting to this option, because it is barely an exaggeration to say their life depends on it.
  - rdtsc 3y ago
    > Imagine spending 6 of your prime years in a lab doing experiments that refused to work...your hypothesis is totally wrong, etc. It is not hard to imagine a student in this situation resorting to this option, because it is barely an exaggeration to say their life depends on it. Actually that might be ok if the system allowed just publishing the results and saying "I had this hypothesis and it didn't work, here are the experimental results". However, the main problem is they watch others around them who bend the rules and get away with it and succeed. The system overall seems to reward cheating, so they get "on board" with it, thus perpetuation the system. Even more, once it becomes pervasive, the standards are raised for everyone. Now those who don't cut corners, to put it very mildly, are not even able to compete. Honest works becomes impossible. The choice is either leave or start cheating.
sydbarrett74 3y ago
Just goes to show that scientists are human too and are no more inherently virtuous than those in any other field. Replication, whilst unsexy, is one of the few checks against human venality.
StreetChief 3y ago
Wow the evidence is so damning.
jl2718 3y ago
Imagine a machine learning paper that released no code, and no data, and was funded by public money, and the IP was owned by a startup that was also funded by public money, and the PI was on the payroll. Laughable, right? Generally there is more trust when the theory, the data collection, the data analysis, the model development, the product, and the application, are all completely separate and open. It also advances the science much faster. However, it definitely kills a lot of those monopoly profits. I propose that there’s really no reason that pharmaceuticals research can’t progress in this manner, with great public benefit. And it would be so simple to enforce: all public grants require everything to be developed in the open, not just data release at the time of publication, or pre-registration, but full release at each stage, no patents, and a preference for funding independent dataset production rather than results. As it is, we pay for the research, then we pay monopoly prices for the drug. It’s like these companies don’t really do anything but collect money. Also, If anybody knows of a way to donate money to cancer research in a way that doesn’t feed directly into somebody’s profits, please let me know. I have recently become loosely connected to a foundation that has been dumping a lot of money into Dana Farber, and this is highlighting a lot of my concerns as I learn more about the industry.
astrolx 3y ago
There's a follow up to this blog post on Nature https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00202-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00202-9

221 points by RadixDLT 3y ago

ShamelessC 3y ago

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cjbgkagh 3y ago
I don't know, it's another chip in the foundation, straw on the camel's back. While none of this is new to me, and was one of the reasons I left academia for industry a very long time ago, the general population are becoming increasingly distrustful of the academics, and trust once lost is very difficult to get back.
- CobrastanJorji 3y ago
  Yeah. While these specific professors or schools or research institutes may not see any immediate consequences, the general opinion of universities has been increasingly taking a beating. That's a dangerous thing in a place where there's an everpresent conservative drumbeat of anti-intellectualism in general and the liberal elites in their ivy towers. I'm not sure what the ultimate consequences will be for US universities might be if this course continues, but it won't be good.
  - tastyfreeze 3y ago
    > conservative drumbeat of anti-intellectualism What does that even mean?
    - helf 3y ago
      [dead]
    - andirk 3y ago
      Anti-intellectualism is a very real thing in this country, and mostly found in ultra conservative circles. For example, it is VERY popular at certain rallies to believe that 1) Obama is still running the show behind the scenes as a communist, AND 2) Donald won in 2020, AND 3) Donald is the current sitting prez, AND 4) that the January 6th hilarity was both 4a) a psy-ops by the then Speaker AND 4b) those brave patriots that were involved are political prisoners. These are ANDs, not ORs. They are often all believed at once. Anti-intellectualism and a distaste for upper education in general because it "indoctrinates" is not fringe. Keep in mind no one in power of any political party actually believes ANY of that but it is one of the popular drum beats.
      - cjbgkagh 3y ago
        Q Anon is a modern incarnation of the Soviet counter intelligence program ‘Operation Trust’ when combined with the deliberate Pied Piper strategy it should be understood that the craziness of these people is something that was intentionally done to them by cynical political operatives.
      - tastyfreeze 3y ago
        Painting all conservatives with the same brush as "ultra conservative" (whatever that means) is disingenuous. Idiots abound in all walks of life. Better to judge individuals than to judge a whole group by the actions of a few. Really, it reads like you need to talk to more real people. If I were to watch videos of blue haired liberals all day I might get the impression that all liberals are that way. That just isn't true. It is an extreme that is not representative of the group as a whole. The liberal/conservative line isn't as distinct as media makes it out to be. Most people hold views that belong in both camps.
        andirk 3y ago
        I agree, hence said "it is VERY popular at certain rallies". The "ultra-conservative" label = a huge % of that party. No assumptions whatsoever about people who believe in economic Darwinism, lower corporate taxes because the ultra ultra rich earned it, no welfare state because bootstraps, etc. The other side of the aisle is rarely an opposing party. Outside USA it's common knowledge, inside USA they're communists somehow. The parties work hand-in-hand to protect the tippy top (remember the overlord unelected barely official Parliamentarian when the other side had House, Senate, Prez in 2020 who stopped any progress, similar in 2009). It's mostly for show. The topic I brought up is _anti-intellectualism_ which is championed by one side far moreso than the other. We're speaking of the weight and desire and scandal around upper education devolving for various reasons. I mentioned one. What is your opinion?
  - AmericanChopper 3y ago
    I guess you can choose between worrying about the influence all these corrupt, ivory tower intellectuals have on society, or worry about them getting caught for it…
  - cjbgkagh 3y ago
    The problem with the left having a stranglehold on culture, and especially academic culture, is that its sacred cows are left un molested to the point they forget they have any. Healthy at any size is a personal favorite because of how immediately obvious it is false to even the most causal of observers yet academics and doctors will line up to preach that ridiculous gospel. When people see those who have died from Covid while being clearly morbidly obese being described in the news media as perfectly healthy with no preexisting conditions - it does beg a few questions.
- p-e-w 3y ago
  The "foundation" of Harvard is institutional power. Academic excellence is at best a consequence of that. I can guarantee that Harvard's many powerful alumni aren't going to let that institutional power be eroded, regardless of how bad academic standards ever become. And they control sufficiently many other institutions to ensure that Harvard retains its shine, at least to the outside world.
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    What’s the end state? Harvard eventually doesn’t even have to provide an education. It’s role is as a manufacturer of prestige. It selects N people a year, deems those people “elite,” and those people end up employed in elite investment banks and consulting companies because they were deemed elite by an institution with that power. Those elites then go on to recruit the next year worth of elites. I mean, this already is happening in name brand education institutions. The value is all in the name and network of fellow elites, and the education itself is largely irrelevant. I’d name schools, but I bet a lot of HN readership got their first lucrative FAANG jobs based entirely on their attendance at one of these institutions…
    - jackcosgrove 3y ago
      The end state is very close to the starting state, unfortunately. Bureaucracies that select their own incoming ranks are very, very hard to reform from the outside. The liberal reforms of the 18th and 19th centuries such as checks and balances were devised to counteract this tendency. Many universities predate these reforms.

delichon 3y ago

The teaching standards at Harvard have been declining remarkably steadily for many years now. https://www.chartr.co/stories/2023-12-08-2-grade-inflation-at-harvard https://www.chartr.co/stories/2023-12-08-2-grade-inflation-a... Apparently teachers' standards have declined for themselves too. Some of that would be a result of being trained at Harvard, a vicious circle.

IceHegel 3y ago
They thought it would never catch up to them, they thought grade inflation didn’t matter because it was still hard to get in.
- gonzo41 3y ago
  "Hard to get in" is relative. I only recently learned about legacy admissions.
Gustomaximus 3y ago
Could this be because Harvard is increasingly desirable & hard to get into? From this, the average standard of students + their dedication to their work/GPA may well have steadily grown too. From a quick google, the acceptance rate to Harvard was 20% higher in the 70's. In 1940 it had an absolute acceptance rate of 85%. I dont actually know the answer, but from that graph only, the rising rate could be as much from a higher standard of student as lowering standards of marking.
- somenameforme 3y ago
  In the past a university education was 100% optional - as was high school for that matter, and so the only people pursuing such tended to be exceptional academic/intellectual outliers. The pool of people interested was very low, and standards were exceptionally high. For instance, this [1] is a Harvard entrance exam from 1869! [1] - https://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvardexam.pdf https://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvard...

perihelions 3y ago

Dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39090959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39090959 (34 comments)

dang 3y ago
That article cites this one as the original source, so even though this one is rather strangely written, I guess we can let the current thread run.

p-e-w 3y ago

All rankings that attempt to compare the academic quality of universities are self-fulfilling prophecies. Rankings influence prestige. Prestige influences perception, even among experts. Is Nature really going to reject that paper? It was written by a Harvard guy, after all. And next, the number of "high-impact" publications (such as in Nature) is used to rank universities. Good luck...

whatyesaid 3y ago
You can have double blind papers and double blind research funding I guess to help that a little? Not sure what else you can do. Table rankings are actually only applicable for undergrads in practical terms. At research level, You have world leading experts at random universities often, and then people who worked in top universities who advanced the field by none after decades. I wonder how many universities actually mega climbed ranks in the past decades though
- p-e-w 3y ago
  The peer review process isn't actually blind in practice. The number of experts working in a given problem space is small enough that they know most of their peers, and usually can identify at a glance who the author of a paper is, from the topic, writing style, and experimental design, which they can recognize from previous publications and correspondence.
  - UncleMeat 3y ago
    This is true to an extent, but also overblown. There have been a few experiments testing this and people wildly overestimate their ability to unblind paper authors correctly.
- sbalamurugan 3y ago
  Desk rejects also happen regularly from Editors (who are not blind to the author names and affiliations). Editors can also make final decisions to accept or reject when reviewers don't agree. Even in a blind peer review, the subject of study introduces another layer of bias in the process. Let's say two economics papers are submitted that discusses how people spend their last part of their pay check. One studies a pool of people across United States and other studies of people across Nigeria. Which one do you think is going to get positive review from editors and reviewers? The Nigeria paper might not even go to review. The editor is going to say something on the lines of "the focus of the study is too narrow for the journal" but won't say the same when it is across US. This is in addition to the trust issues with any research conducted outside western countries. For researchers from the "low ranked" universities, the game is rigged against them and there is nothing they can do to swing it to their favour.

ossicones 3y ago

I would’ve preferred a less editorialized article about this. In particular, this article has left me wondering who’s actually written fraudulent articles and whose biggest mistake was trusting the wrong collaborators.

deleted 3y ago
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mitchellst 3y ago
Agreed. I don't think the snark helps. Not my field, but my understanding of how these things work in big medical research factories: first few authors tend to be young researchers (maybe med students or even undergrads) trying to match residency or get into grad school. They do much of the work actually assembling the submission. The later names on the author list (who this article is taking to task) run labs or oversee research groups. Should they correct the record when it's pointed out? Yes. (But the snark and tenor of the post doesn't exactly convince someone they can admit an oversight in good faith.) Should they be vigilant enough to check and notice these things? Of course. Some of the fakes are not subtle. Others, like the copy-paste of empty space in the lane to cover some undesirable result? Way harder to spot with the naked eye. I don't think there was great automated tech to detect image duplication in the 00's when these were published. So your med student fudges data on a paper. The ethical answer is to expel them—"the world needs plenty of bartenders." But it appears big institutions these days are pretty invested in the sunk costs of prestige, dislike admitting error in admission or hiring, and prioritize go-along-get-along environments. It could be career limiting if students don't get any/enough pubs working in your lab. It'd a lot of hearings and paperwork to report him, plus I heard his uncle's a donor. If she got kicked out she'd lose her visa. And if I reported them, I'd be obliged to report everyone, and I'd be sunk in discipline hearings three times a year. So much easier to just... not look very hard. It's bad science and bad ethics, but if you want better, reform the incentives. "Public" shaming by a niche newsletter... might be better than nothing, but doesn't qualify as an incentive.
- wrs 3y ago
  They won't correct the record because they "can't admit an oversight" due to the snark in a niche newsletter...a newsletter which you then say isn't important enough to serve as an incentive? So which is it, important or not? I would think they can't admit an oversight due to the institutional incentives you mention; the snark is irrelevant. If anything, it encourages publicity for the oversight, which is the only thing that might change the incentive.

ta8645 3y ago

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patryn20 3y ago

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boxed 3y ago
And yet the world does in fact improve year over year. Kicking and screaming, but still moving forward. Technology and science improves and that compounds.
- patryn20 3y ago
  [flagged]
dang 3y ago
This comment breaks the site guidelines, as have some others that you've been posting. Can you please not do this? We're trying for something other than slow internet degradation here. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- patryn20 3y ago
  You are of course welcome to administer this site as you wish. However: This site hasn’t represented balanced discourse or intellectual debate in at least a decade. I’ve watched it become just yet another Ivy League and big tech echo chamber as YC has pursued its existing investments over its stated goals and creative ideals. Money ruins everything. And I’m tired of it.
  - dang 3y ago
    I don't think HN has changed that much, but perceptions differ. Perceivers also change, though—especially over a longish time frame like a decade. I can tell you for sure that we don't run HN to "pursue YC's existing investments". We're trying to optimize for intellectual curiosity [1] because that's the way to maximize HN's value for YC [2, 3]. The point is that it's in YC's business interests to run HN this way, and the argument holds no matter how cynical one wants to be about it. HN is an interesting corner case in internet economics. If we tried to optimize it for existing investments (or worse, tried to squeeze money out of it directly), its value would go down, because that would make it less interesting to the community, and HN's value comes from the interest and quality of the community. Basically: the more one tried to make money out of HN, the less it would be worth. That's interesting, no? I suppose you could say HN's value comes more from future investments, not existing ones. We can optimize HN for that by having it be as interesting as possible, so people want to continue to hang out here. (Btw, that phrase "as possible" is important. There are limits on how good or interesting a large public internet forum can ever get. But we can try.) [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=yc%20business%20interests%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... [3] There are a few exceptions to this, but they're secondary, and all explained in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

galkk 3y ago

The piece reads very weirdly. In the beginning the picture of copypasted images and doctored results is very clear. But when it goes to the passage about genius, and it is so strange. Out of place, weird rant about chosen word… Whatever bastard Sabatiny is, the author’s approach also leaves bad taste in mouth

deleted 3y ago
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theGnuMe 3y ago

Man what a mess. I guess if you give someone something to optimize (publications) they will do so. Science has become distracted by celebrity and money. What a waste of grant money. I hope the NCI, NSF and NIH fund a program to route out scientific fraud, it is clearly needed. When I was in grad school some fellow students were admonished for plagiarism but allowed to stay. I always think of who was denied a place by these folks.

mike_hearn 3y ago
The US has a whole department that is supposed to police scientific fraud, the ORI. It was set up in the 70s after a series of fraudulent studies caught the attention of Congress. Unfortunately after a few failed prosecutions early in its history the ORI now does very little, only a handful of cases per year. Compared to the scale of the problem which is often measured in something like 50%+ or more of papers, it's just irrelevant. There is no "police department" you could staff up that'd be big enough to get a handle on this problem.

pessimist 3y ago

My brother is dying of a grade 4 brain tumor, and I've spend countless hours poring through papers. Horrifying to realize they may be falsified. I am always sceptical of pre-clinical studies since so many have tended to fail in the real world, but now I wonder how many were just fake? These aren't scientists but thieves robbing public money with no skin the game.

patryn20 3y ago
Reading through papers on cholangiocarcinoma: most of them ARE falsified. And I want to harm people for it. Only three new drugs in 29 years. And I can’t help but think it’s partially due to this. Mother has stage 4 intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma.
- mista2nith 3y ago
  [dead]
boxed 3y ago
The deepest irony is of course that they themselves are probably going to get cancer at some point and die years earlier than if they hadn't poisoned the science.
theGnuMe 3y ago
Sorry to hear about your brother that is rough.

User23 3y ago

I look forward to seeing the Gell-Mann amnesia the next time an obviously cooked climate study comes out and people get all worked up over nothing. If reading that makes you upset, do you have a rational reason why? Can you explain how climate science is immune to the social dynamics at work here? Or is it just knee-jerk offense at having your religious beliefs questioned?

throwaway20222 3y ago
Can you clarify what you mean please? And what evidence you have to support the social dynamics whichever way you are saying they are being swayed? This is a genuine question because I may be the one with the religious beliefs, but I am not beyond them being questioned.
deleted 3y ago
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boxed 3y ago
The difference here is that anti-warming studies are the ones with the money behind them. Your conspiracy theory is falsified in that one stroke.
- ejb999 3y ago
  don't kid yourself - there is plenty of money to be made on both sides of the climate misinformation industry.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39090959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39090959

Semaphor 3y ago
[dupe comment] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39099565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39099565 ;)

profsummergig 3y ago

David Sabatini was anointed a future Nobel Laureate by the university-academic complex. What's astonishing is that when his work was discovered to have silly photoshop manipulations, he reacted by calling (on Twitter) the people who caught him "steaming turds". https://forbetterscience.com/2020/01/29/david-sabatini-tormented-by-steaming-turds/ https://forbetterscience.com/2020/01/29/david-sabatini-torme...

ramraj07 3y ago
Guess who’s bankrolling his “uncancellation” with a $25MM fund? Bill Ackman lol.
- throwaway81523 3y ago
  I hadn't heard of Bill Ackman before the Claudine Gay thing, but this is amazing: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/bill-ackman-neri-oxman-twitter-posts/677164/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/bill-ackma... (https://archive.is/ypLSo https://archive.is/ypLSo)
- lupire 3y ago
  https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/02/12/us/ackman-sabatini-mit-whitehead-institute-sexual-misconduct/index.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/02/12/us/a... I'm a bit suspicious of your attempt to impugn Ackman, who is the leading voice in the fight against academic dishonesty... at Harvard... by women... not married to him... who tolerate Palestinians. His focus is oddly specific, if it's still an important contribution to scientific integrity. Yes, this is sarcasm.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- bmitc 3y ago
  Who is also husband to former MIT Media Lab professor Neri Oxman, a place and people also embattled with dubious research methods and funding sources.

neilv 3y ago

"Dana-Farberications" is indirectly playing on the name of someone who presumably had nothing to do with these allegations, and who sounds more at the other end of the spectrum of respectability: > Sidney Farber (September 30, 1903 – March 30, 1973) was an American pediatric pathologist. He is regarded as the father of modern chemotherapy for his work using folic acid antagonists to combat leukemia, which led to the development of other chemotherapeutic agents against other malignancies. Farber was also active in cancer research advocacy and fundraising, most notably through his establishment of the Jimmy Fund, a foundation dedicated to pediatric research in childhood cancers. The Dana–Farber Cancer Institute is named after him. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Farber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Farber

CartyBoston 3y ago
It's the name of an institution, not just a person.
bmitc 3y ago
They or their estate are perfectly capable (maybe, depending on contracts) of removing their name from the institute. If you want to pay to have your name attached to something, you should be prepared to have your name attached to that something and its activities.

harry8 3y ago

There’s literally f.all point having peer review if the peer reviewers who passed this junk for publication aren’t the ones deciding if the paper needs to be retracted when this stuff comes out. How are these journals retaining any prestige when this stuff is un-retracted? The stink should be smeared all over all of them. The publishers should be sued into the ground for fraud given the exorbitant subscription fees. I can’t think of a single reason not to burn it all down.

bsenftner 3y ago
We need to burn these failed institutions down, and hard. A lesson needs to be taught to our larger terribly immature public: do this crap and you'll be destroyed.
UncleMeat 3y ago
Peer review means "other academics read the paper and provide feedback about whether the paper is novel, important, and clear." This usually involves a couple hours of work from the reviewer. It is woefully incapable of detecting fraudulent data. How could it? Some fraud has been caught through statistical analysis of datasets, but this takes a lot of time and requires expertise that most academics don't have. Detecting faked images has an even less clear path that people can follow. Academic fraud is bad. But it isn't like other ecosystems are more effective and capable of detecting fraudulent work. The journals suck, but mostly for reasons totally unrelated to the limitations of peer review.
- harry8 3y ago
  The peer reviewers are clearly capable of going back and reviewing the new criticism about the paper at the direction of the journal and deciding, “Yes. We didn’t see this at the time but the criticism is valid and the paper should be withdrawn.” Note that there is presently no note on the publications that the papers should not be relied on in any way. The authors are pretending there is no problem which is utterly ridiculous and embarrassingly so. I’m not ok with that as the status quo. I don’t think anyone should be.

patryn20 3y ago

[flagged]

smsm42 3y ago
I went into it way before I knew how well it would pay - in fact, back then (and there) it paid ok, but nothing like "unicorns" and Google's seven figure salaries were even remotely something you could conceptualize, let alone think it'd be reality someday. It's lucky in the US it pays really well, but I'd likely be doing it anyway if it paid less well. Don't generalize that readily and broadly.
- patryn20 3y ago
  I was so fortunate to get in at a startup paying $90k/y usd in 2004. Now I’m poorly paid compared to the people I “mentor” at $160k + bonuses with no RSU. But at least I’m working on stuff I care about. I hear these fresh college grads getting $300k offer that have the right university on their meaningless tech degree they drank 24/7 to achieve, and I just want to scream. In three years I’ll be rejecting them for positions writing the software that makes their current employer run. I’ve nixed so many Amazon and Facebook employees in the interview process that couldn’t answer anything about basic programming skills. Their answers were just “I’d use this off the shelf solution”. Well sorry, but we create that off the shelf solution or an alternative. So you actually have to know how to use binary arithmetic. Bye bye brat.
  - smsm42 3y ago
    Amazon has over 30k engineers. I'm sure there are mediocre ones among them - thousands probably. But for a lot of tasks in the company of Amazon's size, "I’d use this off the shelf solution" is exactly the right answer. Sometimes it isn't, but there would be thousands of places where it is. > I hear these fresh college grads getting $300k offer that have the right university on their meaningless tech degree they drank 24/7 to achieve, and I just want to scream. But why? Assume everything you say is right and somebody makes a lot of money undeservedly. Why should it make you scream? You're not paying that money. Some rich idiot does. Why be upset about it? Are you envious? Wasn't what you're doing your own choice?

cosmojg 3y ago

Hot take, but if the FDA hadn't raised the bar for clinical trials to where it sits now (specifically with regard to the expenses associated with bureaucratic approval and regulatory compliance), I'd expect we'd see far fewer falsified studies. When it's impossible to test an idea in the real world, bias and whimsy run rampant, free to rule the printed page. In the absence of empiricism, passing the vibe check passes for peer review.

stdbrouw 3y ago
How cheaply do you think you can run a clinical trial with human patients in the absence of bureaucracy? I imagine increased insurance and recruitment costs would eat up the difference.
- concordDance 3y ago
  I expect we could empirically look at how much trials cost 50 years ago on the assumption there has been a regulatory ratchet effect. I don't know how to find that data though...
  - jimberlage 3y ago
    A confounder here is that diseases targeting common ailments (pain, colds, etc.) have already been developed. The FDA requires that new medications be better than the existing ones one some axis. So before, you had to find people with pain. Then, you had to find women with pain. Then, you have to find pregnant women with pain. Then, you have to find pregnant women also suffering from gestational diabetes with pain. That’s hypothetical, but it’s a real trend. Costs go up based on the number of people you have to sift through to find someone eligible. Things like viagra (10 years ago) or ozempic are still in the honeymoon period where inclusion/exclusion criteria are broad enough that you can enroll lots of people in any given place.

alejohausner 3y ago

Ralph Moss’s “Cancer Incorporated” is a must read. It details the deep corruption in the oncology industry. Oncologists are paid a lot of money for each prescription. Clinical trials for new cancer drugs are absolutely full of shenanigans, such as cherry picking test subjects. New breakthroughs are announced weekly, but death rates remain unchanged from 50 years ago (aside from lung cancer deaths, which decreased due to anti-smoking campaigns). Depressing. It’s a very profitable industry, and profits corrode science.

stefantalpalaru 3y ago
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vasilipupkin 3y ago
I don't think this is true https://usafacts.org/articles/how-have-cancer-rates-changed-over-time/ https://usafacts.org/articles/how-have-cancer-rates-changed-...

deleted 3y ago

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hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago

Huh, a blast from the past. After dropping out of high school and before getting into college I remember visiting the DFCI once or twice to talk with one of the PhDs in there about suffix trees in bioinformatics. I even recognize some of the names in this article. Weird to think I could have ended up working there if I had cut getting my philosophical act together short and set myself to my education immediately. It was a really cool place right in the center of the city near my high school. Suffix trees are still rad and any DSA-inclined teenager will benefit greatly from learning them :)

astrolx 3y ago

This is insane. As a researcher I had to take research ethics course, and obviously we study some cases of research misconduct and fraud. But this kind of stuff is next-level. I know Sweden launched a national board to investigate research misconduct [1], I hope more countries do the same. [1] https://npof.se/en/ https://npof.se/en/

cm2187 3y ago
Though many of them look like outright fraud (anytime photoshopping is involved), I think some could be honest mistakes. If you have dozens of images that are small variants of the same study, it's very easy to misname one of the files or pick the wrong one when loading it into the image editor.
- astrolx 3y ago
  Exactly, honests mistakes can be made (happens to me), and it happened that I spotted some in a paper and contacted the authors and they publish an erratum (or not). But this kind of photoshopping, done over a period, really gets me.

DonsDiscountGas 3y ago

It always amazes me how lazy and amateurish this type of fraud is. Copying and pasting pictures? Can't even add a little fuzz? I'm often trying to teach scientists to code, if they actually learned they could fake data much more credibly. Schon[0] was another big one; he didn't copy images but rather numbers which made up graphs. Adding some noise would've been really easy. It makes one wonder how much fraud is never caught simply because the fraudsters are a little smarter. A basic assumption in science is that the raw facts a scientist presents are true. People question the statistical methods, they question which conclusions are appropriate given the data, but raw data itself is assumed to be accurate. We apply a lot more scrutiny to clinical trials (for obvious reasons), but trying to apply that same standard to all research everywhere would be cost prohibitive and slow research by a huge amount. A lot of journals use image-duplication detectors now (the post mentions ImageTwin.ai) so I expect this particular form of fraud will stop. I suspect cherry-picking data ("inappropriate data exclusion") is the most common form, and will remain so. It's very difficult (often impossible) to detect. On the positive side, I suspect the impact of stuff like this is fairly minimal. Everybody in the field knows that experimental biology is difficult and results are untrustworthy. Even excluding outright fraud, it's really easy to just mess something up. Or get a result which is "true" but doesn't generalize, and so it's useless. Good scientists don't trust something just because it's in Nature/Science/Cell, if they really care about the result then they replicate it before building on it. This would remain true even if all deliberate fraud stopped immediately. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal [1] I dunno about the mouse one, it doesn't seem to be a direct copy/paste and a good experimentalist will do a lot to ensure consistent conditions. Everything else is pretty blatant though.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago
This is all true, but think your conclusions are not correct. I don't think this is true for everyone. If it is difficult, and easy to mess something up, then all the more reason to have as accurate results as possible. Fudging data isn't acceptable. "Everybody in the field knows that experimental biology is difficult and results are untrustworthy" "Good scientists don't trust something just because it's in Nature/Science/Cell, if they really care about the result then they replicate it before building on it" -> But, I'm Joe Blow, I'm not setting up a lab to replicate every study I read about. This might be fine for a VC, test it before building something. But it forgets how many people might make smaller decisions based on an article in Nature or Cell. or Extrema: I just read about the Higgs-Boson, do I need to not trust the results until I can build a collider and replicate it.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

Guess it is a lot worse than I thought. I'm usually a science apologist, defender. Sure, the Harvard president might have misquoted something. And social sciences have a lot of difficulty re-staging the same trials to replicated them, but aren't doing it nefariously. But here, a hard science, with hard data, and blatantly falsifying it. This is pretty unforgivable.

rdtsc 3y ago

This looks systemic. Cheating like this is probably rampant by now. Fresh students watched carefully as others in the department did it, and got promoted, finished faster, got funding and good positions. This on top of minimal repercussions if anyone got caught. These students become department heads and then everyone under them start tolerating it. It spreads like a cancer. Apologies for the pun but it fits aptly here.

2cynykyl 3y ago
Think about it the other way...what would happen if they didn't cheat? Imagine spending 6 of your prime years in a lab doing experiments that refused to work...your hypothesis is totally wrong, etc. It is not hard to imagine a student in this situation resorting to this option, because it is barely an exaggeration to say their life depends on it.
- rdtsc 3y ago
  > Imagine spending 6 of your prime years in a lab doing experiments that refused to work...your hypothesis is totally wrong, etc. It is not hard to imagine a student in this situation resorting to this option, because it is barely an exaggeration to say their life depends on it. Actually that might be ok if the system allowed just publishing the results and saying "I had this hypothesis and it didn't work, here are the experimental results". However, the main problem is they watch others around them who bend the rules and get away with it and succeed. The system overall seems to reward cheating, so they get "on board" with it, thus perpetuation the system. Even more, once it becomes pervasive, the standards are raised for everyone. Now those who don't cut corners, to put it very mildly, are not even able to compete. Honest works becomes impossible. The choice is either leave or start cheating.

sydbarrett74 3y ago

Just goes to show that scientists are human too and are no more inherently virtuous than those in any other field. Replication, whilst unsexy, is one of the few checks against human venality.

StreetChief 3y ago

Wow the evidence is so damning.

jl2718 3y ago

Imagine a machine learning paper that released no code, and no data, and was funded by public money, and the IP was owned by a startup that was also funded by public money, and the PI was on the payroll. Laughable, right? Generally there is more trust when the theory, the data collection, the data analysis, the model development, the product, and the application, are all completely separate and open. It also advances the science much faster. However, it definitely kills a lot of those monopoly profits. I propose that there’s really no reason that pharmaceuticals research can’t progress in this manner, with great public benefit. And it would be so simple to enforce: all public grants require everything to be developed in the open, not just data release at the time of publication, or pre-registration, but full release at each stage, no patents, and a preference for funding independent dataset production rather than results. As it is, we pay for the research, then we pay monopoly prices for the drug. It’s like these companies don’t really do anything but collect money. Also, If anybody knows of a way to donate money to cancer research in a way that doesn’t feed directly into somebody’s profits, please let me know. I have recently become loosely connected to a foundation that has been dumping a lot of money into Dana Farber, and this is highlighting a lot of my concerns as I learn more about the industry.

astrolx 3y ago

There's a follow up to this blog post on Nature https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00202-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00202-9