22 ms·

The staggering death toll of scientific lies

142 points by rntn 2y ago

roenxi 2y ago
People might not want to hear it but it is going to keep being an issue - we shouldn't force people to "follow the science" when it comes to medicine. Scientists - and science as a whole - do not have the moral standing that their opinions justify authoritarianism. People should make their own decisions about whether they trust the remedies involved.
- giraffe_lady 2y ago
  People should make their own decisions about highly technical aspects of their own surgeries? And then also I presume bear the full responsibility for the outcome? No, surgeons should make decisions informed by their own experience and, yes, recommendations from medical researchers. How we're doing it is how it should be, the fraud remains the problem here.
  - msandford 2y ago
    Recommendations are optional. There is no enforcement. I might not be able to find a doctor to give me a surgery I want. But rarely does a surgeon force upon someone a surgery they don't want. An obvious counter example is electroshock therapy or a lobotomy. Typically there's some due process there before a doctor just does something against patient wishes. People don't like the vaccine debate for many, many reasons. Sadly a lot of the discussion is people talking past each other and refusing to acknowledge that the other side does have a point about assumptions that are damaging to their own position.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      > But rarely does a surgeon force upon someone a surgery they don't want. Depending on your definition. ER surgeons regularly force surgery on someone who is unconscious and thus we cannot ask if they want it or not. The law specifically says if someone cannot answer then the answer is automatically assumed to be they want it (at least in most places).
      - SoftTalker 2y ago
        If you are that entrenched in your refusal, you can have a DNR order or similar that you carry around with you or is referenced on a bracelet, etc.
        bluGill 2y ago
        The DNR may not mean anything. It is possible that one was planted on you via fraud. Hospitals have complex policies written by lawyers on what to do if one is found on someone unresponsive and sometimes that means the procedure is done anyway. As someone who is trained in first aid I am not qualified to determine if that is valid and so I can render aid even if I know it really is valid. (in some cases you may be required to render aid - I used to be on the office first aid team and then I was told I had no legal option other than render aid)
- alnwlsn 2y ago
  Ok, but that's supposed to be the reason we have scientific institutions in the first place. If I want to prove the earth is a globe and measure its diameter, all I need are a couple sticks and a tape measure. If I want to know if a drug or vaccine is effective, there is really no mechanism for me to determine this myself, and I am forced to base my opinion on someone else's opinion.
  - d4mi3n 2y ago
    You could say the same thing about your drinking water or the food you buy. Modern society is complex, and even simpler historical societies were dependent on cooperation before we got anywhere near the level of complexity and specialization we deal with today. At the end of the day it’s a trust issue. Studies, be they medical, scientific, or observational, are one way to build trust. There are many others, but I’m not sure how well they scale with the size of a society compared to the systems we have in place today.
- exe34 2y ago
  only if they can self-insure for the damage they cause and the cost of fixing the damage.
- jtxt 2y ago
  Follow the money? What financial (or power) incentives are there for faked science?
- tensor 2y ago
  You already have the freedom to make your own decisions. What you don't have is the freedom to endanger others. That's when we make laws, and those laws may be informed by science but they are not created or enforced by scientists. They are created and enforced by government agencies.
  - SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
    > You already have the freedom to make your own decisions. It’s not like there have ever been consequences like “if I don’t do this I’ll lose my job” or “I can’t travel here”, or “I can attend this school, even online”, right? That would all be public policy that would never fly by the law. Am I correctly reading your post?
    - orwin 2y ago
      I totally agree with this point of view on freedom, and that's my main issue with Ayn Rand followers, who do not understand basic power application effect (beside the fact that she read Kant's 'critic of pure reason' title, said to herself : 'he must be criticizing reasoning, science and the Enlightment, I must write and publish my basic thoughts on this' and now we have armies of idiots who never read Kant and try to criticize stuff he didn't say. Some are even famous.)
    - tensor 2y ago
      People frequently confuse freedom and consequences, but choices always have consequences in society. All schools have rules of conduct, if you violate them your kid gets kicked out. Jobs also have rules of conduct, dress code, etc. And yes, not being vaccinated means you cannot have certain jobs. The vaccine debate is really quite straight forward. On one side you have people arguing that vaccines might cause damage and they shouldn't be forced to take them. Of course, you are not forced to take them, but then those people argue that you shouldn't have consequences from it like losing your job or your kid getting kicked out of school. On the other side, people argue that they shouldn't be forced to be exposed to someone who might cause them harm (by transmitting a preventable disease). This group also doesn't want negative consequences by having to hide from these people. So the argument is similar from both groups, but the difference is that there is virtually no evidence of the harms the first group claims to want to avoid, while an abundance of factual evidence of the deaths of people and children caused by the lack of vaccines or by the spread of disease due to enough people not getting a vaccine. Thus, as a society we choose to collectively put in a law siding with the second group. That's democracy. edit: but I'll note that actuality in many cases people do get to send their unvaccinated kids to school and do end up killing other people's kids as a result. I wonder why we're talking about charging scientists with crimes and not people who do things we know with 100% certainty cause kids to die.
- stvltvs 2y ago
  Medicine is not entirely based on science, so I wouldn't equate MDs to scientists. Lots of treatments are based on clinical experience which is more anecdotal and traditional than scientific. So much so that "science-based medicine" is a thing. Don't get me wrong: I trust medicine a lot and it has literally saved my life, but doctors aren't primarily scientists.
mikrl 2y ago
It happened to agriculture in Stalin’s USSR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
- wakawaka28 2y ago
  Such a good piece of history. I'm surprised I wasn't taught this in school.
  - Der_Einzige 2y ago
    Part of this is because the modern academy holds thinkers who are just as fraudulent in high regard today, and they are unwilling to hold them accountable. exhibit A (by far the worst): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Lacan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Lacan exhibit B: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deleuze_and_Guattari https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deleuze_and_Guattari exhibit C: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek exhibit D: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung exhibit E: All Chiropractors Most of the academy holds Freud, and most of his followers in very high regard despite zero of his analysis being reproducible, falsifiable, replicatable, or coherent. Modern social sciences are infected with a modern version of Lysenkoism.
- Joel_Mckay 2y ago
  It was a scandalous story of the first seed bank operators literally starving to death around food to protect their peoples future post war, American attempts to help with corn crops failing (the two politically were already distrustful), and an insane farmer favored politically.... literally putting his critics in front of firing squads. Science makes "mistakes" most of the time, but documents the process to improve the accuracy of models that represent reality. It is notable many westerners recognize the first seed bank scientists, and in particular Nikolay Vavilov. The legal process can't enforce research ethics, but on rare occasion people are stripped of their credentials for egregious behavior. Despotism is ugly, and it is arrogant to think any one is immune to the phenomena: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaWSqboZr1w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaWSqboZr1w Have a great day, and have faith the smarter Russians will again figure out a path to peace eventually. =3
throrbfi 2y ago
[flagged]
darth_avocado 2y ago
I would say, a better approach would be to have better checks and balances in play. Maybe he falsified research, why was it recommended as a standard procedure by European Medical Guidelines without proper evaluation? I would hold them criminally liable before I hold the researchers liable.
- jessriedel 2y ago
  Why? Like, from the practical standpoint I understand why we need procedures that are robust to individual evil actors. But, from a moral standpoint, if you prove unambiguous fraud by a very brilliant person who has been entrusted with incredible resources and freedom by the public, why shouldn’t that person go to jail? Civil engineers understand the seriousness of their job, and medical researchers should too. (And of course, many do understand, and very few commit unambiguous fraud.)
  - SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
    Agree but… What if it isn’t a person you can point to, but rather a company? And what if you can’t jail a company, but you can fine them. And what if the fine ends up just being the “cost of doing business” to the company? Which company received the largest criminal fine ever handed out? Hint, it’s a pharmaceutical company.
    - graemep 2y ago
      A company is made up of people. A fraud like this (i.e. actually involving falsifying data) would have to be done by an individual or a group of individuals. They can be jailed. if there are aspects of it (e.g. inadequate procedures and checks that fall short of criminal by any identifiable people) then you need fines that are too large to be just a cost of doing business.
      - SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
        Pfizer was the answer, 2 billion.
fnord77 2y ago
A big problem in today's political climate is if you question certain scientific findings, at best you get shouted down and at worst you get branded a far right fascist and have your career put at risk.
asdasdsddd 2y ago
The nice thing about running bad studies and cooking the p is that you can usually reap the rewards immediately and for a long time because reproducing studies is lame and no one wants to do it.
VSerge 2y ago
A scientist that causes, through willful fraud, the death of people seems to be guilty of something like manslaughter. Using fake data is a pretty clear-cut example of willful fraud, and a reasearcher fudging data over such a life and death question should 100% be held accountable. Scientists making errors in good faith should on the other hand be insulated from any kind of liability.
- auggierose 2y ago
  You cannot insulate scientists making errors in good faith from any kind of liability, if you make the wilful frauds liable. Because there is no 100% way of distinguishing the two.
  - zug_zug 2y ago
    There are cases where people have doctored images in their research data, or completely fabricated data to meet a significance threshhold. There may be ambigious cases but there are non-ambiguous cases too.
    - j16sdiz 2y ago
      or scientist who just don't understand statistics. a biologist can understand how zillions of proteins interact with each other without understanding how to work with raw data.
      - pvaldes 2y ago
        We had to pass statistic courses in biology also.
  - tines 2y ago
    Not that I'm in favor of the proposed measure, but saying because we can't identify wilful frauds 100% of the time then we can't protect the non-fraudsters, is just a bit silly, no? You have this kind of problem detecting any kind of fraud. One test is, is there written communication between people about committing the fraud? If so, there you go.
jl6 2y ago
> One crucial question he studied: Should you give patients a beta blocker, which lowers blood pressure, before certain heart surgeries? Poldermans’s research said yes. European medical guidelines (and to a lesser extent US guidelines) recommended it accordingly. What the guy did was clearly wrong but it’s a slightly tenuous causal chain between that and 800,000 deaths. Questions may be asked, for example, about whether the medical guidelines should have been based on studies that seemingly had a single point of failure (this one corrupt guy). There’s an extremely toxic (and ironically very anti-scientific) culture of “study says it so it’s true” that permeates medical and scientific fields and the reporting thereof. Caveats and weaknesses in the primary research get ignored in favor of abstracts and headlines, with each layer of indirection discarding more of the nuance and adding more weight of certainty to a result that should in truth remain tentative. Prosecuting one type of bad actor might not make a lot of difference and might distract from the much larger systemic issues facing our current model of scientific enquiry.
- renewiltord 2y ago
  > There’s an extremely toxic (and ironically very anti-scientific) culture of “study says it so it’s true” that permeates medical and scientific fields and the reporting thereof. Source? Where’s the proof of this? Some online blogpost is not peer-reviewed evidence. We need to back up our claims with science.
  - AlgorithmicTime 2y ago
    [dead]
  - Spooky23 2y ago
    Outside of a national cancer center, liability management is priority 1. Thinking creates liability.
  - UIUC_06 2y ago
    [dead]
- marcuskane2 2y ago
pfdietz 2y ago
One solution would be bonding. If you publish a scientific result, put up some money with a bonding firm, perhaps for a specified period of time. If someone successfully identifies fraud, they get the money. The more money you put up, the more confident you are. This also provides an incentive for fraud finders.
- fao_ 2y ago
  Over time you'd see a socially dictated (or even regulation dictated) amount of money go up for bonding if this became regular practice. I don't think adding more of a worry around "can we afford this" would create a positive impact in a world where a) scientists and academics routinely spend more time filling out requests for money (grants/funding/etc.) and justifying their use of said money than they spend actually doing research, and b) there is already a paucity of replication.
- KK7NIL 2y ago
  Yes, we really need to make scientific publishing even more expensive and bureaucratic./s I appreciate your creativity but the real solution is to fund replication studies and improve statistics education in the sciences.
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    We actually need less scientific publication. Bonding would encourage a smaller number of higher quality publications.
    - KK7NIL 2y ago
      I agree with your goal of getting more high quality publications but it's not at all clear to me that bonding would effectively lead to that. I think it's more likely that it would reward incremental studies that don't question the "scientific consensus" and so don't risk getting sued. Not to mention that it would be a major publishing expense, which are already infamously high and just ends up being financed by grant giving organizations which was instead meant to go towards research.
photochemsyn 2y ago
Fundamentally scientific rigor and accuracy is often misaligned with larger societal norms and values - a pharmaceutical corporation with a profit-making pill doesn't want to hear about the 1% of users who suffer catastrophic medical conditions as a result of using their product (e.g. Vioxx with 88,000 heart attacks and 38,000 deaths out of 107,000,000 prescriptions from 1999-2004). Similarly the Soviet Union's Lysenko tailored his research results to align with Stalinist ideology on adaptability, thereby securing his position in the academic structure - behavior that was remarkably similar to that of Anthony Fauci regarding the origins of Sars-CoV2 and the efficacy of the various treatments and vaccines that were so highly profitable to the corporate pharmaceutical sector. Reckless virology research that he supported caused a global pandemic that cost at least $10 trillion in economic damage and took millions of lives - but admitting that opens the door to liability, so no. I've worked with both ends of the spectrum - fraudulent tenured PIs at leading research universities are not that rare, but highly skilled and reliable PIs are more common. The fundamental difference always seems to be record-keeping - frauds aren't interested in keeping detailed records of their activities that can be used by others to replicate their work (since their work is non-replicable). In contrast, the reputable researcher will want such detailed records for various reasons, including defense against false claims of fraud or incompetence, which is quite common if the research results are not aligned with corporate profit motives in areas like pharmaceuticals, fossil fuels and climate, environmental pollutants, etc. If the powers that be really wanted to reduce research fraud, the easiest way is to make detailed record-keeping a requirement of federally-funded research, with regular audits of lab notebooks and comparisons to published work. This matters, because the problem is set to get worse with the spread of AI tools that make it possible to generate hard-to-detect fake datasets and images. In the past a great many frauds were caught because their fake data generation was so obvious, often just a copy and paste effort.
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
This article sort of just glosses over any reasons why existing laws aren't enough. It states that existing scientific fraud is rarely prosecuted (e.g. under fraud statutes), so it seems to me the right course of action should be to prosecute it! In the US at least, it's nearly impossible to commit this kind of malfeasance without committing federal wire fraud - faked research would nearly always be part of a grant application, at least eventually, for example. Plus, I'm surprised some enterprising lawyers haven't at least tried some massive class action lawsuits. The actual researcher may not have much to go after, but surely their institutions would. If you can get huge class action payouts for the dubious connection of talc in baby powder to cancer, why can't you get a payout here where (a) the malfeasance was intentional from the get go and (b) the harms are unambiguously clear from follow-up meta-analysis studies. I guess I would like to understand if there is some fundamental reason that existing statutes aren't enough before adding laws.
- reillys 2y ago
  IANAL... The reason you can get a huge settlement in the talc case but not in this case is because people are purchasing the talc and so it is a product liability issue. In the research case people are basing their care and procedures off another person's research. There is no direct payment from the person receiving the care to the researcher and so it is difficult to draw a direct line from Person A says X to Person B gets injured.
- jltsiren 2y ago
  I think it rarely prosecuted because prosecuting is risky and expensive. You have a complex technical issue few people truly understand, you are probably not 100% sure there was actual fraud, and there is always a real risk that the court makes the wrong decision. And unless the situation was completely clear, you know that the prosecution will discourage honest researchers from studying topics that could be controversial or have a significant real-world impact. As for class action lawsuits, the researcher who published the fraudulent result is the wrong target. The responsible engineer is not the person who designed the product but the person who approved the design, and the responsible scientist is not the person who published the result but the person who made decisions based on it.
bunderbunder 2y ago
Independent replication is the cornerstone of Karl Popper's formulation of the scientific method. If we were really holding to philosophical basis for how science is supposed to work, then we'd be careful to consider results that have only been demonstrated by one laboratory to be tentative at best, and be cautious about making policy decisions based on it until there has been truly independent replication. Physicists seem to be really good about this, and many other aspects of implementing the scientific method too. I wish the other sciences would get on board. It would eliminate almost all the chronic problems that plague biological and social sciences: falsification, p-hacking, failing to notice honest methodological mistakes, outright fraud, etc. I fear that the problem is, we can't get there from here for social reasons. The people at the top of these fields - the ones who drive culture in academic institutions, set publication standards for journals, influence where grant money is allocated, etc. - all got there by using sloppy methods and getting lucky. I think that, on some level, many of them know it, and know that fixing the rotten core of their field inevitably involves subjecting their own work - and, by extension, reputations - to a level of scrutiny that it is unlikely to survive.
- stonethrowaway 2y ago
  > I wish the other sciences would get on board It’s not about science it’s about politics and corruption and power plays. At the expense of being accused of posting lazily, you really have to follow the money. 2 more weeks to flatten the curve while the oligarchs pillage the economy some more.
  - fastball 2y ago
    It's definitely not just politics. Popper was not just a champion of reproducibility but also a champion of falsifiability. This is something many a scientist also loses sight of. People will formulate their hypothesis and then try to prove it, rather than trying to disprove it, which is often the much more effective strategy for avoiding bias and other issues. You see this most often with the "soft" sciences, but it crops up in the harder ones as well. Focusing on reproducibility and falsifiability would go a long way to improving the current state of science, regardless of the political games happening at the same time.
odyssey7 2y ago
Why is it that so many of the PhDs and MDs out there are unable to tell when someone's lying to them about their very own areas of expertise? Either they're not that smart or the processes aren't very good -- though no single researcher is responsible for their field's poor processes. Either way, we shouldn't assume that any one PhD or MD recipient is an expert until something changes. Degrees, on their own, don't signify expertise or credibility.
- tboyd47 2y ago
  This is an excellent question, and your corollary is sound.
- beryilma 2y ago
  > Why is it that so many of the PhDs and MDs out there are unable to tell when someone's lying to them about their very own areas of expertise? I'd wager that they can actually tell. They just choose to accept it, or, at least, not to do anything about it. I see it in my own field (software engineering). Sometimes pushing against lies and stupidity is just too hard and tiring.
- PaulKeeble 2y ago
  The standard of evidence in medicine research generally is really poor. Most of the papers have serious problems and reach to conclusions they can not defend. Worse is huge areas of medical research are full of fraudulent research, almost all of Psychology and Psychiatry is atrociously low quality studies and they rarely replicate even then. There is widespread corruption around the sale and adoption of treatments and the entire system of peer review and journal acceptance is almost exclusively based on the authority of the main author and not on the value of the paper. In short medical research is nothing like Physics or other science papers and endeavours its evidence base for most of what it already does is often severely lacking.
brodouevencode 2y ago
[flagged]
tmaly 2y ago
This seems more like an institutional failure more than anything. I recall there was a discussion on HN a few years back about the Alzheimer plaque connection being established on fake data.
UIUC_06 2y ago
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glitchc 2y ago
Scientific fraud or medical fraud? Are we tarring all of science because of fraud in one sub-field (medicione)? How about social science fraud, where poor economic policies can cause millions to starve? Before I get pilloried for whataboutism, all I'm trying to illustrate is that the title is a hyberbole. Fraud in medical research is definitely a problem leading to serious consequences for patients everywhere. Let's just call it what it is.
g42gregory 2y ago
Have anybody thought about asking the same questions about COVID-19 prevention and treatment research?
leoc 2y ago
Compare the 2011-14 L'Aquila earthquake trials, when Nature magazine and most of the I-love-science claque rallied behind the scientists who gave incorrect reassurances to L'Aquila residents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_L%27Aquila_earthquake#Prosecutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_L%27Aquila_earthquake#Pro... . Is it that the facts are very different in this case, or it more that attitudes have shifted since then?
jbandela1 2y ago
What is really interesting is looking at the meta analysis cited in the Vox article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3932762/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3932762/ This reaches the conclusion that beta blockers are harmful. However, if you look at the meat analysis, specifically figure 2, you find that the conclusion is mainly driven by a single trial - the 2008 POISE trial. If you go to the POISE trial: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(08)60601-7/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... You find that they discovered fraud in at least some of the hospitals: " Concern was raised during central data consistency checks about 752 participants at six hospitals in Iran coordinated by one centre and 195 participants associated with one research assistant in three of 11 hospitals in Colombia. On-site auditing of these hospitals and cases indicated that fraudulent activity had occurred. Before the trial was concluded, the operations committee—blinded to the trial results at these hospitals and overall—decided to exclude these data (webappendix 1). " We have an important question - should pre-op patients be given beta blockers - and the largest, most definitive trials to answer that question have at least some taint of fraud.
casey2 2y ago
Yes the people setting guidelines based on non-reproducible or unreproduced studies should be held accountable. But they are part of the same power structure that makes laws, so don't hold your breath. Literally anybody can write bullshit and anybody with some cash or connections can get it published, deciding to make it a medical guideline because the text and it's metadata looks a certain way is basically as competent as just using ChatGPT.
BrandoElFollito 2y ago
A close friend of mine was doing her PhD in nutrition (in Germany). She asked me to have a look at the math (statistics) and it was a monstrosity. I told her that I cannot read that further because she either won't get her PhD or I will be morally wounded. She asked me for some examples of errors and to each of them she was saying, with evidence, that this is what "everyone does". This was nutrition, something that is at least to some extend innate so there won't be disasters (I hope). The same thing with pharma is a disaster hanging by a thread.
aaron695 2y ago
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just_some_guy_2 2y ago
Suggestions: 1) Any research institutions that receive government funding are required to spent 10% (or 15% or 20% or whatever) of their total budget on replication. If they don't, they stop receiving any government funding. 2) When citing a paper scientists are required to include any replication studies, both successful and not successful. This would hopefully lead to more replication studies being done, even if it doesn't answer the question of what to do with a study until it's been replicated sufficiently. The second part would help us guess the validity of a paper. Papers that base their central premise on studies with multiple independent replication would probably be a bit more trustful than papers based on unverified studies.
fungiblecog 2y ago
This is a drop in the bucket. The real crime is rich corporations using “science” to enrich themselves. Examples: denying that smoking causes cancer. Demonising fat while promoting excess sugar in processed food, and look at how many organisations are denying man-made climate change…

142 points by rntn 2y ago

People might not want to hear it but it is going to keep being an issue - we shouldn't force people to "follow the science" when it comes to medicine. Scientists - and science as a whole - do not have the moral standing that their opinions justify authoritarianism. People should make their own decisions about whether they trust the remedies involved.

giraffe_lady 2y ago
People should make their own decisions about highly technical aspects of their own surgeries? And then also I presume bear the full responsibility for the outcome? No, surgeons should make decisions informed by their own experience and, yes, recommendations from medical researchers. How we're doing it is how it should be, the fraud remains the problem here.
- msandford 2y ago
  Recommendations are optional. There is no enforcement. I might not be able to find a doctor to give me a surgery I want. But rarely does a surgeon force upon someone a surgery they don't want. An obvious counter example is electroshock therapy or a lobotomy. Typically there's some due process there before a doctor just does something against patient wishes. People don't like the vaccine debate for many, many reasons. Sadly a lot of the discussion is people talking past each other and refusing to acknowledge that the other side does have a point about assumptions that are damaging to their own position.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    > But rarely does a surgeon force upon someone a surgery they don't want. Depending on your definition. ER surgeons regularly force surgery on someone who is unconscious and thus we cannot ask if they want it or not. The law specifically says if someone cannot answer then the answer is automatically assumed to be they want it (at least in most places).
    - SoftTalker 2y ago
      If you are that entrenched in your refusal, you can have a DNR order or similar that you carry around with you or is referenced on a bracelet, etc.
      - bluGill 2y ago
        The DNR may not mean anything. It is possible that one was planted on you via fraud. Hospitals have complex policies written by lawyers on what to do if one is found on someone unresponsive and sometimes that means the procedure is done anyway. As someone who is trained in first aid I am not qualified to determine if that is valid and so I can render aid even if I know it really is valid. (in some cases you may be required to render aid - I used to be on the office first aid team and then I was told I had no legal option other than render aid)
alnwlsn 2y ago
Ok, but that's supposed to be the reason we have scientific institutions in the first place. If I want to prove the earth is a globe and measure its diameter, all I need are a couple sticks and a tape measure. If I want to know if a drug or vaccine is effective, there is really no mechanism for me to determine this myself, and I am forced to base my opinion on someone else's opinion.
- d4mi3n 2y ago
  You could say the same thing about your drinking water or the food you buy. Modern society is complex, and even simpler historical societies were dependent on cooperation before we got anywhere near the level of complexity and specialization we deal with today. At the end of the day it’s a trust issue. Studies, be they medical, scientific, or observational, are one way to build trust. There are many others, but I’m not sure how well they scale with the size of a society compared to the systems we have in place today.
exe34 2y ago
only if they can self-insure for the damage they cause and the cost of fixing the damage.
jtxt 2y ago
Follow the money? What financial (or power) incentives are there for faked science?
tensor 2y ago
You already have the freedom to make your own decisions. What you don't have is the freedom to endanger others. That's when we make laws, and those laws may be informed by science but they are not created or enforced by scientists. They are created and enforced by government agencies.
- SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
  > You already have the freedom to make your own decisions. It’s not like there have ever been consequences like “if I don’t do this I’ll lose my job” or “I can’t travel here”, or “I can attend this school, even online”, right? That would all be public policy that would never fly by the law. Am I correctly reading your post?
  - orwin 2y ago
    I totally agree with this point of view on freedom, and that's my main issue with Ayn Rand followers, who do not understand basic power application effect (beside the fact that she read Kant's 'critic of pure reason' title, said to herself : 'he must be criticizing reasoning, science and the Enlightment, I must write and publish my basic thoughts on this' and now we have armies of idiots who never read Kant and try to criticize stuff he didn't say. Some are even famous.)
  - tensor 2y ago
    People frequently confuse freedom and consequences, but choices always have consequences in society. All schools have rules of conduct, if you violate them your kid gets kicked out. Jobs also have rules of conduct, dress code, etc. And yes, not being vaccinated means you cannot have certain jobs. The vaccine debate is really quite straight forward. On one side you have people arguing that vaccines might cause damage and they shouldn't be forced to take them. Of course, you are not forced to take them, but then those people argue that you shouldn't have consequences from it like losing your job or your kid getting kicked out of school. On the other side, people argue that they shouldn't be forced to be exposed to someone who might cause them harm (by transmitting a preventable disease). This group also doesn't want negative consequences by having to hide from these people. So the argument is similar from both groups, but the difference is that there is virtually no evidence of the harms the first group claims to want to avoid, while an abundance of factual evidence of the deaths of people and children caused by the lack of vaccines or by the spread of disease due to enough people not getting a vaccine. Thus, as a society we choose to collectively put in a law siding with the second group. That's democracy. edit: but I'll note that actuality in many cases people do get to send their unvaccinated kids to school and do end up killing other people's kids as a result. I wonder why we're talking about charging scientists with crimes and not people who do things we know with 100% certainty cause kids to die.
stvltvs 2y ago
Medicine is not entirely based on science, so I wouldn't equate MDs to scientists. Lots of treatments are based on clinical experience which is more anecdotal and traditional than scientific. So much so that "science-based medicine" is a thing. Don't get me wrong: I trust medicine a lot and it has literally saved my life, but doctors aren't primarily scientists.

mikrl 2y ago

It happened to agriculture in Stalin’s USSR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

wakawaka28 2y ago
Such a good piece of history. I'm surprised I wasn't taught this in school.
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  Part of this is because the modern academy holds thinkers who are just as fraudulent in high regard today, and they are unwilling to hold them accountable. exhibit A (by far the worst): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Lacan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Lacan exhibit B: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deleuze_and_Guattari https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deleuze_and_Guattari exhibit C: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek exhibit D: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung exhibit E: All Chiropractors Most of the academy holds Freud, and most of his followers in very high regard despite zero of his analysis being reproducible, falsifiable, replicatable, or coherent. Modern social sciences are infected with a modern version of Lysenkoism.
Joel_Mckay 2y ago
It was a scandalous story of the first seed bank operators literally starving to death around food to protect their peoples future post war, American attempts to help with corn crops failing (the two politically were already distrustful), and an insane farmer favored politically.... literally putting his critics in front of firing squads. Science makes "mistakes" most of the time, but documents the process to improve the accuracy of models that represent reality. It is notable many westerners recognize the first seed bank scientists, and in particular Nikolay Vavilov. The legal process can't enforce research ethics, but on rare occasion people are stripped of their credentials for egregious behavior. Despotism is ugly, and it is arrogant to think any one is immune to the phenomena: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaWSqboZr1w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaWSqboZr1w Have a great day, and have faith the smarter Russians will again figure out a path to peace eventually. =3

throrbfi 2y ago

[flagged]

darth_avocado 2y ago

I would say, a better approach would be to have better checks and balances in play. Maybe he falsified research, why was it recommended as a standard procedure by European Medical Guidelines without proper evaluation? I would hold them criminally liable before I hold the researchers liable.

jessriedel 2y ago
Why? Like, from the practical standpoint I understand why we need procedures that are robust to individual evil actors. But, from a moral standpoint, if you prove unambiguous fraud by a very brilliant person who has been entrusted with incredible resources and freedom by the public, why shouldn’t that person go to jail? Civil engineers understand the seriousness of their job, and medical researchers should too. (And of course, many do understand, and very few commit unambiguous fraud.)
- SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
  Agree but… What if it isn’t a person you can point to, but rather a company? And what if you can’t jail a company, but you can fine them. And what if the fine ends up just being the “cost of doing business” to the company? Which company received the largest criminal fine ever handed out? Hint, it’s a pharmaceutical company.
  - graemep 2y ago
    A company is made up of people. A fraud like this (i.e. actually involving falsifying data) would have to be done by an individual or a group of individuals. They can be jailed. if there are aspects of it (e.g. inadequate procedures and checks that fall short of criminal by any identifiable people) then you need fines that are too large to be just a cost of doing business.
    - SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
      Pfizer was the answer, 2 billion.

fnord77 2y ago

A big problem in today's political climate is if you question certain scientific findings, at best you get shouted down and at worst you get branded a far right fascist and have your career put at risk.

asdasdsddd 2y ago

The nice thing about running bad studies and cooking the p is that you can usually reap the rewards immediately and for a long time because reproducing studies is lame and no one wants to do it.

VSerge 2y ago

A scientist that causes, through willful fraud, the death of people seems to be guilty of something like manslaughter. Using fake data is a pretty clear-cut example of willful fraud, and a reasearcher fudging data over such a life and death question should 100% be held accountable. Scientists making errors in good faith should on the other hand be insulated from any kind of liability.

auggierose 2y ago
You cannot insulate scientists making errors in good faith from any kind of liability, if you make the wilful frauds liable. Because there is no 100% way of distinguishing the two.
- zug_zug 2y ago
  There are cases where people have doctored images in their research data, or completely fabricated data to meet a significance threshhold. There may be ambigious cases but there are non-ambiguous cases too.
  - j16sdiz 2y ago
    or scientist who just don't understand statistics. a biologist can understand how zillions of proteins interact with each other without understanding how to work with raw data.
    - pvaldes 2y ago
      We had to pass statistic courses in biology also.
- tines 2y ago
  Not that I'm in favor of the proposed measure, but saying because we can't identify wilful frauds 100% of the time then we can't protect the non-fraudsters, is just a bit silly, no? You have this kind of problem detecting any kind of fraud. One test is, is there written communication between people about committing the fraud? If so, there you go.

jl6 2y ago

> One crucial question he studied: Should you give patients a beta blocker, which lowers blood pressure, before certain heart surgeries? Poldermans’s research said yes. European medical guidelines (and to a lesser extent US guidelines) recommended it accordingly. What the guy did was clearly wrong but it’s a slightly tenuous causal chain between that and 800,000 deaths. Questions may be asked, for example, about whether the medical guidelines should have been based on studies that seemingly had a single point of failure (this one corrupt guy). There’s an extremely toxic (and ironically very anti-scientific) culture of “study says it so it’s true” that permeates medical and scientific fields and the reporting thereof. Caveats and weaknesses in the primary research get ignored in favor of abstracts and headlines, with each layer of indirection discarding more of the nuance and adding more weight of certainty to a result that should in truth remain tentative. Prosecuting one type of bad actor might not make a lot of difference and might distract from the much larger systemic issues facing our current model of scientific enquiry.

renewiltord 2y ago
> There’s an extremely toxic (and ironically very anti-scientific) culture of “study says it so it’s true” that permeates medical and scientific fields and the reporting thereof. Source? Where’s the proof of this? Some online blogpost is not peer-reviewed evidence. We need to back up our claims with science.
- AlgorithmicTime 2y ago
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- Spooky23 2y ago
  Outside of a national cancer center, liability management is priority 1. Thinking creates liability.
- UIUC_06 2y ago
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marcuskane2 2y ago

pfdietz 2y ago

One solution would be bonding. If you publish a scientific result, put up some money with a bonding firm, perhaps for a specified period of time. If someone successfully identifies fraud, they get the money. The more money you put up, the more confident you are. This also provides an incentive for fraud finders.

fao_ 2y ago
Over time you'd see a socially dictated (or even regulation dictated) amount of money go up for bonding if this became regular practice. I don't think adding more of a worry around "can we afford this" would create a positive impact in a world where a) scientists and academics routinely spend more time filling out requests for money (grants/funding/etc.) and justifying their use of said money than they spend actually doing research, and b) there is already a paucity of replication.
KK7NIL 2y ago
Yes, we really need to make scientific publishing even more expensive and bureaucratic./s I appreciate your creativity but the real solution is to fund replication studies and improve statistics education in the sciences.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  We actually need less scientific publication. Bonding would encourage a smaller number of higher quality publications.
  - KK7NIL 2y ago
    I agree with your goal of getting more high quality publications but it's not at all clear to me that bonding would effectively lead to that. I think it's more likely that it would reward incremental studies that don't question the "scientific consensus" and so don't risk getting sued. Not to mention that it would be a major publishing expense, which are already infamously high and just ends up being financed by grant giving organizations which was instead meant to go towards research.

photochemsyn 2y ago

Fundamentally scientific rigor and accuracy is often misaligned with larger societal norms and values - a pharmaceutical corporation with a profit-making pill doesn't want to hear about the 1% of users who suffer catastrophic medical conditions as a result of using their product (e.g. Vioxx with 88,000 heart attacks and 38,000 deaths out of 107,000,000 prescriptions from 1999-2004). Similarly the Soviet Union's Lysenko tailored his research results to align with Stalinist ideology on adaptability, thereby securing his position in the academic structure - behavior that was remarkably similar to that of Anthony Fauci regarding the origins of Sars-CoV2 and the efficacy of the various treatments and vaccines that were so highly profitable to the corporate pharmaceutical sector. Reckless virology research that he supported caused a global pandemic that cost at least $10 trillion in economic damage and took millions of lives - but admitting that opens the door to liability, so no. I've worked with both ends of the spectrum - fraudulent tenured PIs at leading research universities are not that rare, but highly skilled and reliable PIs are more common. The fundamental difference always seems to be record-keeping - frauds aren't interested in keeping detailed records of their activities that can be used by others to replicate their work (since their work is non-replicable). In contrast, the reputable researcher will want such detailed records for various reasons, including defense against false claims of fraud or incompetence, which is quite common if the research results are not aligned with corporate profit motives in areas like pharmaceuticals, fossil fuels and climate, environmental pollutants, etc. If the powers that be really wanted to reduce research fraud, the easiest way is to make detailed record-keeping a requirement of federally-funded research, with regular audits of lab notebooks and comparisons to published work. This matters, because the problem is set to get worse with the spread of AI tools that make it possible to generate hard-to-detect fake datasets and images. In the past a great many frauds were caught because their fake data generation was so obvious, often just a copy and paste effort.

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago

This article sort of just glosses over any reasons why existing laws aren't enough. It states that existing scientific fraud is rarely prosecuted (e.g. under fraud statutes), so it seems to me the right course of action should be to prosecute it! In the US at least, it's nearly impossible to commit this kind of malfeasance without committing federal wire fraud - faked research would nearly always be part of a grant application, at least eventually, for example. Plus, I'm surprised some enterprising lawyers haven't at least tried some massive class action lawsuits. The actual researcher may not have much to go after, but surely their institutions would. If you can get huge class action payouts for the dubious connection of talc in baby powder to cancer, why can't you get a payout here where (a) the malfeasance was intentional from the get go and (b) the harms are unambiguously clear from follow-up meta-analysis studies. I guess I would like to understand if there is some fundamental reason that existing statutes aren't enough before adding laws.

reillys 2y ago
IANAL... The reason you can get a huge settlement in the talc case but not in this case is because people are purchasing the talc and so it is a product liability issue. In the research case people are basing their care and procedures off another person's research. There is no direct payment from the person receiving the care to the researcher and so it is difficult to draw a direct line from Person A says X to Person B gets injured.
jltsiren 2y ago
I think it rarely prosecuted because prosecuting is risky and expensive. You have a complex technical issue few people truly understand, you are probably not 100% sure there was actual fraud, and there is always a real risk that the court makes the wrong decision. And unless the situation was completely clear, you know that the prosecution will discourage honest researchers from studying topics that could be controversial or have a significant real-world impact. As for class action lawsuits, the researcher who published the fraudulent result is the wrong target. The responsible engineer is not the person who designed the product but the person who approved the design, and the responsible scientist is not the person who published the result but the person who made decisions based on it.

bunderbunder 2y ago

Independent replication is the cornerstone of Karl Popper's formulation of the scientific method. If we were really holding to philosophical basis for how science is supposed to work, then we'd be careful to consider results that have only been demonstrated by one laboratory to be tentative at best, and be cautious about making policy decisions based on it until there has been truly independent replication. Physicists seem to be really good about this, and many other aspects of implementing the scientific method too. I wish the other sciences would get on board. It would eliminate almost all the chronic problems that plague biological and social sciences: falsification, p-hacking, failing to notice honest methodological mistakes, outright fraud, etc. I fear that the problem is, we can't get there from here for social reasons. The people at the top of these fields - the ones who drive culture in academic institutions, set publication standards for journals, influence where grant money is allocated, etc. - all got there by using sloppy methods and getting lucky. I think that, on some level, many of them know it, and know that fixing the rotten core of their field inevitably involves subjecting their own work - and, by extension, reputations - to a level of scrutiny that it is unlikely to survive.

stonethrowaway 2y ago
> I wish the other sciences would get on board It’s not about science it’s about politics and corruption and power plays. At the expense of being accused of posting lazily, you really have to follow the money. 2 more weeks to flatten the curve while the oligarchs pillage the economy some more.
- fastball 2y ago
  It's definitely not just politics. Popper was not just a champion of reproducibility but also a champion of falsifiability. This is something many a scientist also loses sight of. People will formulate their hypothesis and then try to prove it, rather than trying to disprove it, which is often the much more effective strategy for avoiding bias and other issues. You see this most often with the "soft" sciences, but it crops up in the harder ones as well. Focusing on reproducibility and falsifiability would go a long way to improving the current state of science, regardless of the political games happening at the same time.

odyssey7 2y ago

Why is it that so many of the PhDs and MDs out there are unable to tell when someone's lying to them about their very own areas of expertise? Either they're not that smart or the processes aren't very good -- though no single researcher is responsible for their field's poor processes. Either way, we shouldn't assume that any one PhD or MD recipient is an expert until something changes. Degrees, on their own, don't signify expertise or credibility.

tboyd47 2y ago
This is an excellent question, and your corollary is sound.
beryilma 2y ago
> Why is it that so many of the PhDs and MDs out there are unable to tell when someone's lying to them about their very own areas of expertise? I'd wager that they can actually tell. They just choose to accept it, or, at least, not to do anything about it. I see it in my own field (software engineering). Sometimes pushing against lies and stupidity is just too hard and tiring.
PaulKeeble 2y ago
The standard of evidence in medicine research generally is really poor. Most of the papers have serious problems and reach to conclusions they can not defend. Worse is huge areas of medical research are full of fraudulent research, almost all of Psychology and Psychiatry is atrociously low quality studies and they rarely replicate even then. There is widespread corruption around the sale and adoption of treatments and the entire system of peer review and journal acceptance is almost exclusively based on the authority of the main author and not on the value of the paper. In short medical research is nothing like Physics or other science papers and endeavours its evidence base for most of what it already does is often severely lacking.

brodouevencode 2y ago

[flagged]

tmaly 2y ago

This seems more like an institutional failure more than anything. I recall there was a discussion on HN a few years back about the Alzheimer plaque connection being established on fake data.

UIUC_06 2y ago

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glitchc 2y ago

Scientific fraud or medical fraud? Are we tarring all of science because of fraud in one sub-field (medicione)? How about social science fraud, where poor economic policies can cause millions to starve? Before I get pilloried for whataboutism, all I'm trying to illustrate is that the title is a hyberbole. Fraud in medical research is definitely a problem leading to serious consequences for patients everywhere. Let's just call it what it is.

g42gregory 2y ago

Have anybody thought about asking the same questions about COVID-19 prevention and treatment research?

leoc 2y ago

Compare the 2011-14 L'Aquila earthquake trials, when Nature magazine and most of the I-love-science claque rallied behind the scientists who gave incorrect reassurances to L'Aquila residents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_L%27Aquila_earthquake#Prosecutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_L%27Aquila_earthquake#Pro... . Is it that the facts are very different in this case, or it more that attitudes have shifted since then?

jbandela1 2y ago

What is really interesting is looking at the meta analysis cited in the Vox article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3932762/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3932762/ This reaches the conclusion that beta blockers are harmful. However, if you look at the meat analysis, specifically figure 2, you find that the conclusion is mainly driven by a single trial - the 2008 POISE trial. If you go to the POISE trial: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(08)60601-7/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... You find that they discovered fraud in at least some of the hospitals: " Concern was raised during central data consistency checks about 752 participants at six hospitals in Iran coordinated by one centre and 195 participants associated with one research assistant in three of 11 hospitals in Colombia. On-site auditing of these hospitals and cases indicated that fraudulent activity had occurred. Before the trial was concluded, the operations committee—blinded to the trial results at these hospitals and overall—decided to exclude these data (webappendix 1). " We have an important question - should pre-op patients be given beta blockers - and the largest, most definitive trials to answer that question have at least some taint of fraud.

casey2 2y ago

Yes the people setting guidelines based on non-reproducible or unreproduced studies should be held accountable. But they are part of the same power structure that makes laws, so don't hold your breath. Literally anybody can write bullshit and anybody with some cash or connections can get it published, deciding to make it a medical guideline because the text and it's metadata looks a certain way is basically as competent as just using ChatGPT.

BrandoElFollito 2y ago

A close friend of mine was doing her PhD in nutrition (in Germany). She asked me to have a look at the math (statistics) and it was a monstrosity. I told her that I cannot read that further because she either won't get her PhD or I will be morally wounded. She asked me for some examples of errors and to each of them she was saying, with evidence, that this is what "everyone does". This was nutrition, something that is at least to some extend innate so there won't be disasters (I hope). The same thing with pharma is a disaster hanging by a thread.

aaron695 2y ago

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just_some_guy_2 2y ago

Suggestions: 1) Any research institutions that receive government funding are required to spent 10% (or 15% or 20% or whatever) of their total budget on replication. If they don't, they stop receiving any government funding. 2) When citing a paper scientists are required to include any replication studies, both successful and not successful. This would hopefully lead to more replication studies being done, even if it doesn't answer the question of what to do with a study until it's been replicated sufficiently. The second part would help us guess the validity of a paper. Papers that base their central premise on studies with multiple independent replication would probably be a bit more trustful than papers based on unverified studies.

fungiblecog 2y ago

This is a drop in the bucket. The real crime is rich corporations using “science” to enrich themselves. Examples: denying that smoking causes cancer. Demonising fat while promoting excess sugar in processed food, and look at how many organisations are denying man-made climate change…