5 ms·

Six top Alzheimer's researchers accused of fraud

65 points by apsec112 2y ago

7thpower 2y ago
Interesting. So assuming these allegations are true, is this lack of employment consequences common across academia?
- JPLeRouzic 2y ago
  I am highly interested in ALS research (retired engineer, not a scientist), once I found that in the same lab of a star scientists of the ALS domain, two papers were published in the same year that contradicted each other. The name of the star scientist was listed as author in both papers. He probably never read any of these papers. I have read also PR by a university that claimed about breakthrough because one guy in a phase III clinical trial have reacted extremely well to the drug. The trial was globally a success, but no other of the ~400 patients reacted so well, for most of them the disease progression was more or less stopped but not cured. In 2023 alone, more than 17,000 papers were published on Alzheimer's disease. The immense majority of these publications are about (complex) factoids that are useless to humanity. Yet their university will claim that each of them is a breakthrough. Most authors will publish only one paper on this subject and jump to an unrelated subject in the next paper. A shred of evidence is the ratio of proposed drugs by academics and the drugs that can enter a phase III clinical trial as they have shown some efficacy. It's something like 1000 to 1. The largest problem for leaders is how to organize research. There is a consensus that goals-oriented research is not the most efficient way to achieve great results. Instead, we have a free market and a star system. Most academics are free to work on whatever they want. I can't think of a solution out of those two obviously broken policies.
  - roflmaostc 2y ago
    > I am highly interested in ALS research (retired engineer, not a scientist), once I found that in the same lab of a star scientists of the ALS domain, two papers were published in the same year that contradicted each other. The name of the star scientist was listed as author in both papers. He probably never read any of these papers. could you please share the two papers?
  - relaxing 2y ago
    > A shred of evidence is the ratio of proposed drugs by academics and the drugs that can enter a phase III clinical trial as they have shown some efficacy. It's something like 1000 to 1. A shred of evidence of what? It sounds like the output of an extremely large effort that hasn’t panned out yet, which is obviously true.
ainiriand 2y ago
Maybe scientific progress shouldn't be driven by money, personal ego (fame, honors, etc.), or as part of a university’s strategy to attract funding or prestige. I think an international organization should collect funds from all UN member countries and pool them together. These resources could then support global labs where scientists work for a fair salary. A senior board (or boards per field) would decide which projects to pursue and which patents to develop. Participating countries would get free access to these patents, while others would pay royalties that feed back into the fund. Science should be globally coordinated, well-funded, and focused on advancing humanity, not driven by institutional agendas.
- biofox 2y ago
  I believe this approaches some of the ideas put forward for the forerunner of UNESCO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Committee_on_Intellectual_Cooperation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Committee_on_Int... Personally, I dislike idea, as competition can be a powerful motivator in science. I think three things would go a long way to improving the current situation: (1) more rigorous peer review, perhaps even paid reviews or something like bug bounties, to incentivise scrutiny; (2) the normalisation of replication; and (3) publication of negative results, so the community can quicky identify if something is not replicating.
- dyauspitr 2y ago
  If you take prestige and personal gain out of the equation, nothing gets done. This has borne out in history over and over again.
- kortilla 2y ago
  This doesn’t solve anything. As long as there is a board made of people making decisions about which projects to fund, egos and jobs are on the line and fraud will be a thing.
- PeterStuer 2y ago
  I understand the sentiment, but I fear the cure might be worse than the disease. Science being restricted and totally controled by a new world order totalitarian club? What could possibly go wrong?
Animats 2y ago
Has this fraud kept useful work from happening while research went in the wrong direction?
- kortilla 2y ago
  Very likely. Any student that helped with this wasn’t searching for something that works. These people are disgusting. This doesn’t feel much different than pretending to be a charity funding Alzheimer’s research and just taking the money to buy cocaine. In fact it’s probably worse because it distracted the people doing real work.
lionradio 2y ago
We will not forget this.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mike_hearn 2y ago
This stuff has been going on for decades, as can be seen by the frequency with which people at the top of the institutions are found to have engaged in it. What's new is that in recent years the spread of social media (especially X/Twitter), and the creation of sites like PubPeer, has given people who always knew about it a way to get the word out to communities who will believe them. Up until now unfortunately the average person still doesn't believe any claims of academic fraud, and the institutions always sweep it under the rug, so until enough whistleblowers were able to find each other online they were just systematically screwed. The usual proposed solution is more replication. Every HN thread on scientific fraud has people proposing this fix. Unfortunately, replication studies can't fix science and can in some situations make things worse. I wrote about why not here: https://blog.plan99.net/replication-studies-cant-fix-science-0e195234a280 https://blog.plan99.net/replication-studies-cant-fix-science...
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Is this news or a listicle mentioning a number of cases over a decade? Many if not all discussed at the time on here
ElectronBadger 2y ago
(active researcher in schizophrenia here) I don't think we have a better, readily available solution to the problem than a public peer network (such as https://pubpeer.com/ https://pubpeer.com/) monitoring the published papers, especially those "groundbreaking breakthroughs". Also, AI algorithms should be applied for the purpose. Every research funded from public funds should be freely available, together with datasets and auxiliary data (scripts, etc). Study preregistration should be obligatory. Coordination of the scientific project is also very important, but that's out of my competence.
relaxing 2y ago
Tweetstorm is a terrible medium for these allegations. What’s the context of this investigation? Why are some of the figures so vague? Papers and authorship is trivially countable. Why the focus on tax dollars? Seems designed to appeal to emotion (or politics?)

65 points by apsec112 2y ago

7thpower 2y ago

Interesting. So assuming these allegations are true, is this lack of employment consequences common across academia?

JPLeRouzic 2y ago
I am highly interested in ALS research (retired engineer, not a scientist), once I found that in the same lab of a star scientists of the ALS domain, two papers were published in the same year that contradicted each other. The name of the star scientist was listed as author in both papers. He probably never read any of these papers. I have read also PR by a university that claimed about breakthrough because one guy in a phase III clinical trial have reacted extremely well to the drug. The trial was globally a success, but no other of the ~400 patients reacted so well, for most of them the disease progression was more or less stopped but not cured. In 2023 alone, more than 17,000 papers were published on Alzheimer's disease. The immense majority of these publications are about (complex) factoids that are useless to humanity. Yet their university will claim that each of them is a breakthrough. Most authors will publish only one paper on this subject and jump to an unrelated subject in the next paper. A shred of evidence is the ratio of proposed drugs by academics and the drugs that can enter a phase III clinical trial as they have shown some efficacy. It's something like 1000 to 1. The largest problem for leaders is how to organize research. There is a consensus that goals-oriented research is not the most efficient way to achieve great results. Instead, we have a free market and a star system. Most academics are free to work on whatever they want. I can't think of a solution out of those two obviously broken policies.
- roflmaostc 2y ago
  > I am highly interested in ALS research (retired engineer, not a scientist), once I found that in the same lab of a star scientists of the ALS domain, two papers were published in the same year that contradicted each other. The name of the star scientist was listed as author in both papers. He probably never read any of these papers. could you please share the two papers?
- relaxing 2y ago
  > A shred of evidence is the ratio of proposed drugs by academics and the drugs that can enter a phase III clinical trial as they have shown some efficacy. It's something like 1000 to 1. A shred of evidence of what? It sounds like the output of an extremely large effort that hasn’t panned out yet, which is obviously true.

ainiriand 2y ago

Maybe scientific progress shouldn't be driven by money, personal ego (fame, honors, etc.), or as part of a university’s strategy to attract funding or prestige. I think an international organization should collect funds from all UN member countries and pool them together. These resources could then support global labs where scientists work for a fair salary. A senior board (or boards per field) would decide which projects to pursue and which patents to develop. Participating countries would get free access to these patents, while others would pay royalties that feed back into the fund. Science should be globally coordinated, well-funded, and focused on advancing humanity, not driven by institutional agendas.

biofox 2y ago
I believe this approaches some of the ideas put forward for the forerunner of UNESCO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Committee_on_Intellectual_Cooperation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Committee_on_Int... Personally, I dislike idea, as competition can be a powerful motivator in science. I think three things would go a long way to improving the current situation: (1) more rigorous peer review, perhaps even paid reviews or something like bug bounties, to incentivise scrutiny; (2) the normalisation of replication; and (3) publication of negative results, so the community can quicky identify if something is not replicating.
dyauspitr 2y ago
If you take prestige and personal gain out of the equation, nothing gets done. This has borne out in history over and over again.
kortilla 2y ago
This doesn’t solve anything. As long as there is a board made of people making decisions about which projects to fund, egos and jobs are on the line and fraud will be a thing.
PeterStuer 2y ago
I understand the sentiment, but I fear the cure might be worse than the disease. Science being restricted and totally controled by a new world order totalitarian club? What could possibly go wrong?

Animats 2y ago

Has this fraud kept useful work from happening while research went in the wrong direction?

kortilla 2y ago
Very likely. Any student that helped with this wasn’t searching for something that works. These people are disgusting. This doesn’t feel much different than pretending to be a charity funding Alzheimer’s research and just taking the money to buy cocaine. In fact it’s probably worse because it distracted the people doing real work.

lionradio 2y ago

We will not forget this.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

mike_hearn 2y ago

This stuff has been going on for decades, as can be seen by the frequency with which people at the top of the institutions are found to have engaged in it. What's new is that in recent years the spread of social media (especially X/Twitter), and the creation of sites like PubPeer, has given people who always knew about it a way to get the word out to communities who will believe them. Up until now unfortunately the average person still doesn't believe any claims of academic fraud, and the institutions always sweep it under the rug, so until enough whistleblowers were able to find each other online they were just systematically screwed. The usual proposed solution is more replication. Every HN thread on scientific fraud has people proposing this fix. Unfortunately, replication studies can't fix science and can in some situations make things worse. I wrote about why not here: https://blog.plan99.net/replication-studies-cant-fix-science-0e195234a280 https://blog.plan99.net/replication-studies-cant-fix-science...

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Is this news or a listicle mentioning a number of cases over a decade? Many if not all discussed at the time on here

ElectronBadger 2y ago

(active researcher in schizophrenia here) I don't think we have a better, readily available solution to the problem than a public peer network (such as https://pubpeer.com/ https://pubpeer.com/) monitoring the published papers, especially those "groundbreaking breakthroughs". Also, AI algorithms should be applied for the purpose. Every research funded from public funds should be freely available, together with datasets and auxiliary data (scripts, etc). Study preregistration should be obligatory. Coordination of the scientific project is also very important, but that's out of my competence.

relaxing 2y ago

Tweetstorm is a terrible medium for these allegations. What’s the context of this investigation? Why are some of the figures so vague? Papers and authorship is trivially countable. Why the focus on tax dollars? Seems designed to appeal to emotion (or politics?)