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Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza tallies tenth retraction (2023)
- igStorySaver 3y ago[dead]
- throwaway81523 3y ago"A Nobel prize-winning researcher whose publications have come under scrutiny has retracted his 10th paper for issues with the data and images. Gregg Semenza, a professor of genetic medicine and director of the vascular program at Johns Hopkins’ Institute for Cell Engineering in Baltimore, shared the 2019 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for “discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability.”
- tomlockwood 3y agoRemember the Sokal Hoax and Sokal Squared? Turns out that STEM also has all those problems. For profit universities pushing academics to "publish or perish" are the real enemies here, for all disciplines.
- aetherson 3y agoI'm pretty sure that this Nobel Prize winner does not work at a for profit university.
- tomlockwood 3y agoJournals are also absolutely involved and incentivised.
- derbOac 3y agoFor what it's worth, I sort of read that as "universities incentivized to maximize profit or income", not literally formally for-profit universities. Sort of a biting remark about typical university motivations, not literal. Even if the poster didn't intend it that way, I think it could easily be read that way.
- croes 3y agoJust because it's non-profit doesn't mean it's not about money.
- dekhn 3y agoHe works at Johns Hopkins, which is a private university that works closely with a health system called Johns Hopkins and the Johns Hopkins hospital (the medical school). When you say "for profit", be aware that they definitely take money from the government and patients and use it to develop new intellectual property that generates large amounts of money for them (although I guess the "profit" from that doesn't benefit the shareholders). These "non-profits" have multi-billion dollar budgets and are highly "profitable" depending on how you like to define it. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/opinion/nonprofit-hospitals.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/opinion/nonprofit-hospita... In these cases, the non-profits are given tax incentives provide a certain amount of community benefit.
- manquer 3y agoPublish or perish and other academic pressures are hardly unique to for profit or even non profit universities, even Government institutions have similar incentive models to get tenure or other advancements, it seems pretty universal ? Do you know of a study or citation about any academic research quality/quantity challenges that are found at a higher rate in for profit / non profit private institutions ?
- tomlockwood 3y agoTenure = money
- BeetleB 3y ago> Remember the Sokal Hoax and Sokal Squared? The Sokal Hoax, while famous, is not very notable. They did not even publish in a peer reviewed journal.
- bsdpufferfish 3y agoPublish or perish is primarily about peer competition and promotion, not pressure from admins. Teaching is the money maker.
- tomlockwood 3y agoIn order to get tenure people need to have published.
- bsdpufferfish 3y agobecause of competition with peers.
- red-iron-pine 3y agoThis is true but a critical difference is that STEM is a lot more falsifiable. Postmodern deconstruction lends itself to a million interpretations, but biological testing either works or doesn't, and inconclusive generally means it doesn't.
- vmurthy 3y agoOne has to wonder if the Nobel prize was a mistake. Even if it was, no , a Nobel prize can't be revoked as per this[0] [0]https://www.nobelprize.org/frequently-asked-questions/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20statutes%20of,Nobel%20Prize%20cannot%20be%20revoked https://www.nobelprize.org/frequently-asked-questions/#:~:te....
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nojs 3y agoLucky for this guy https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1949/moniz/facts/ https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1949/moniz/facts/
- somenameforme 3y agoIn many ways though, I think it's a strength that such a prize cannot be revoked, because it emphasizes the zeitgeist of a time. I think it can help provide not only some humility to us in a different era, but also perhaps help us learn more from the past. As an interesting factoid, lobotomy was practiced at all levels of society at the time. Even JFK's sister was secretly lobotomized [1]. It was covered up for years as it went about as well as one would expect a lobotomy to go. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy
- roomey 3y agoWhat a story, I never knew about this. Again and again these public families with public images doing the most toxic things behind closed doors. Thanks for sharing this.
- vmurthy 3y agoBut Moniz's case isn’t a case of fraud , no? I’m not insinuating this case is fraud fyi
- ggm 3y agoWorth remembering that Linus Pauling went off the deep end on Vitamin C. Not that he faked stuff, but that even very smart people get sucked into wierd science sometimes. So leaping from this, to Semanza is emperor's-new-clothes is pushing too far. If he's moved into a space where marginal behaviour around research is normalised thats really bad but it doesn't have to mean his Nobel wasn't warranted, that depends on other questions: Questions which might still need to be asked, but this isn't the smoking gun. It's maybe more why asking those questions might become more important.
- CalChris 3y agoJohn Clauser has gone off the deep end with his climate denialism.
- alberto_ol 3y agoAnd William Shockley with eugenics
- efournie 3y ago...as well as Luc Montagnier with DNA teleportation, homeopathy and COVID.
- ralfd 3y agoEugenics are "merely" deeply political incorrect/blasphemic/unethical, but not a wrong crackpot theory per se. Obviously what works for plants and animals would work for humans too.
- eesmith 3y ago"Eugenics" is not simply a synonym for the selective breeding of humans, but for a certain type of selective breeding - one that depends very much on who gets to decide what "good" means in the Greek prefix "eu-". For example, people do not use the term "eugenics" to describe the unintentional selective breeding of humans who maintain the childhood ability to produce lactase and thus can digest milk as an adult. The term is also tainted by a long history of proponents and advocates wanting to apply the principles of selective breeding to non-inheritable traits, like "criminals", due to a naive understanding of genetics (eg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics#Objections_to_scientific_validity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics#Objections_to_scienti...). The phrase "what works for plants and animals" seems to be hiding a lot under the covers, like the number of gene lines killed off because they weren't profitable enough for the people doing the breeding. Even in domesticated plants there is an ongoing debate about decline and extinction of heirloom/landrace varieties, and consequential loss of genetic diversity, in the face of "what works" for industrialized agriculture in short-term/decade time-scales. The "new eugenics" movement emphasizes how choice should be left to the parents, as an alternative to the history of the state deciding these matters. However, if we really are looking at "what works for plants and animals", we can see that optimizing for an individual doesn't always result in what benefits the group. For example, you can breed an aggressive chicken, more willing to attack other chickens and take their food. The aggressive chicken will be bigger and heavier than the others, but if they are all that aggressive then they end up fighting each other, to the overall detriment of all. Some of these options will result in a Prisoner's Dilemma, where if some parents choose trait X for their children than those children benefit (as defined by both the parents and children), but if all parents choose X then things becomes worse (again, as defined by both the parents and children.) Which leads us back to how politics and ethics are inherently connected to the "eu-"/"good" in the deliberate selective breeding of humans, and not simply "merely" connected.
- Aeolun 3y agoHow do you accidentally have 3 images that are exactly the same?
- mianos 3y agoOnly half joking, but have you ever had the issue on a Mac where you copy something and it randomly fails to copy, so when you paste, it pastes the previous copy? Easy to imagine, slack that it did not get seen. (I think the bug is at least 15 years old).
- cm2187 3y agoOr if you have 20 files in a folder called IMG0887.jpg, IMG0897.jpg, etc, and you need to open them one after the other with an open file dialog, easy to pick the wrong one. A scientist isn't necessarily IT smart, particularly in medicine. Not saying it's what happened though.
- passwordoops 3y agoHence I'm hammering in the importance of good data handling and clearly identified file structure to the (chemistry) grad students working in the lab with me
- mft_ 3y agoSeems to happen a lot when I'm pasting in/out of a browser; not sure if that's the same issue, or one further augmented by Firefox? :)
- agos 3y agowait it does not happen just to me? is it widespread? I thought I was going mad or my keyboard starting to break down!
- mianos 3y agoNo it's not just you. There was an Apple ticket with thousands of 'me too', but they said it does not exist and deleted the whole thing about 10 years ago.
- i_love_limes 3y agoFor those not in Academia, it's worth noting that when you get to his level, it's more like being a VP or senior leader. Ultimately, yes you are responsible for the quality of output of your team, but you are absolutely not looking in detail at every paper, more the ideation and focus of the department. He should be grilling his assistant profs / research fellows to get their act together and raise the bar, but this doesn't show malfeasance.
- iancmceachern 3y agoImportant point, thank you. It doesn't mean we shouldn't work to fix the systemic issue though. It may not he his "fault", but how do we improve our system as a soceity so we put ourself on a upward trajectory not the seemingly downward trajectory we've been on lately.
- darig 3y ago[dead]
- 2cynykyl 3y agoI'm glad the GP pointed this out, because nobody talks about it. The "PI" of a lab is manager, so these issues are like an accountant embezzling money without the manager knowing. Maybe the manage should have put better processes and monitoring in place, but they were trusting their team members to behave properly, which is not unreasonable IMO. The real issue is that the people who conduct the fraud are usually grad students or postdocs, whose entire future depends on the success of their research project. Fake results are pretty much guaranteed. Think about it this way: Imagine you have a lab group with 10 PhD students, each with their own hypothesis to investigate (e.g. intervention A will reduce the rates of disease B in mice). What are the odds that all 10 students will prove their hypothesis and generate publishable results? No way it's 10/10 obviously...it's more like 5/10. So what is supposed to happen to those 5 students that were tasked with investigating the bad hypotheses? Our current system implicitly penalizes these students to the extent that their careers in academia are over, and even earning their PhD is not certain. BTW, I know I am being overly general here, and the student will likely have several parallel projects on-going, can pivot to other things, etc, but hopefully my general point is clear.
- JR1427 3y agoKeeping track of retractions is good, but I'm on the fence as to whether the community should be making it a shameful act (like committing a crime), or a positive one (like apologising, and admitting mistakes). We want scientists to have incentives to not deliberately commit fraud, but also feel that they can rectify mistakes. Having retraction be shameful might do the former, but will harm the latter. I don't have an answer off the top of my head, this is just my observation on this.
- leephillips 3y agoHonorable retractions, as a result of honest errors, happen all the time in science and, while unfortunate, are not a huge deal. Much different are the retractions based on research fraud. retractionwatch provides a valuable service in tracking all types of retractions, and in warning the community about unethical or predatory journals.
- JR1427 3y agoI like your term "honourable retraction". But if people and retraction watch don't differentiate between these and dishonourable ones, then it doesn't really help.
- leephillips 3y agoRetraction Watch provides information. They do an excellent job in following up on incidents and supplying the complete picture. It’s always clear from their reports whether an author was shady or simply made a mistake—and this is usually clear from the author’s behavior, as well. Of course neither they nor anyone else can be held responsible for unjustified assumptions of the mob, except the members of the mob.
- throw18376 3y agothere are a lot of "bad science" problems and people tend to get them mixed up. Here's a list of all the things I can think of, roughly ordered by my opinion of seriousness: 1. Fraudulent data in real publications in real journals, even sometimes the most prestigious journals like Science, Nature, Cell. (cases in article are this situation.) Worst of all is when it has a real impact on policy, or leads to bad investment in a new technology that can't work. 2. P-hacking, questionable research practices, etc. without fraud, by "legitimate" academics. This happens everywhere but seems to be a bigger problem in social sciences especially branches of psychology. Real-world impact has been less severe but does cause problems and wasted money sometimes. The worst impact is probably that it causes some young researchers to waste their careers on dead-end lines of research. 3. Really badly done studies to legitimate dubious supplements. Subcase of 2. I actually rate these as less severe, because the average consumer of dubious supplements is not reading these pointless studies, and supplements are basically unregulated, so I don't think getting rid of these studies would make much difference. 4. Completely fake garbage papers in paper mill journals. Not just fake data but outright total nonsense. These are ignored by most scientists, so less severe, but are a concern for the people who fund scientists, and they can cause real trouble if they end up in a meta-analysis. I only write this list because so much of the discussion of fraud and bad research seems to conflate all of them together. But they're all distinct. I had mentally accepted p-hacking and paper mill garbage, but seeing Nobel-prize-winning labs publish photoshopped blots in top journals has shaken my faith in our scientific institutions far more.
- throwawayqqq11 3y ago5. HARKing: "Hypothesis after results known" is also a problem to produce even "legitimate" papers by discarding the original hypothesis after negative findings and come up with a new one that fits the data. Its similar to p-hacking and also skews science into "promising" dead-ends. > but seeing Nobel-prize-winning labs publish photoshopped blots And they were caught because they edited poorly which could be detected automatically or by human eyes. Think about well versed image manipulators or generative AI... I think this erosion of trust is the worst, AI can produce and it will propably come.