“Trust the Science” They Say

As if Scientists weren't people, with all of the many problems that people in any endeavor have. The Problem with Science.

Fraud. Bias. Rivalry. Politics. Pressure to publish. All of these things plague science in the 21st century.

In June, The Lancet retracted a major study based on a massive data set.

The study suggested that the drug hydroxychloroquine actively harms COVID-19 patients. But critics highlighted irregularities in the numbers, some of the study’s own authors were unable to audit the data to investigate the concerns, the company that claimed to have collected the information from thousands of hospitals did not appear to have the infrastructure and resources necessary to have done so, and several major hospitals in Australia whose participation would have been needed to make the numbers work told the Guardian they had not been involved. The New England Journal of Medicine had to pull a different study based on the same data.

That result is clearly politically driven. Trump, and others on the right, say something is good, therefore we have to do everything in our power to "prove" that they wrong, even if we have to lie to do it. You will not be allowed to resist the Science Dictates. (It's for your own good!) "We know better than you, and if we don't know, we will lie, and you will accept the lie as Truth!" Or something along those lines.

What is a primary reason to lie? If you don't publish, then you don't get funding.

And if you conduct a study and don't discover anything after months of effort, journals won't publish a null result either. If you want more funding, you lie, and publish the lie.

Other times, scientists are driven to make null results disappear, rather than just giving up and moving to the next project. There are plenty of techniques for doing so. They can separate the data into a bunch of subgroups and check each one separately. They can try different statistical methods. They can use the data to answer questions they didn’t plan on answering. If they run enough different analyses, they’ll find something that hits that magical threshold of statistical significance — even if just by luck.

Some scientists have even “hacked” their data this way without, apparently, realizing they’re doing anything wrong. In 2016, the prominent nutrition researcher Brian Wansink published a blog post in which he described a project that appeared to have “failed” until he told the graduate student analyzing the data to keep trying different approaches to find something to “salvage.” This set critics on Wansink’s trail, and it turned out to be part of a much broader pattern of sloppy work.

Then there are the people who want to be famous, even if that means killing patients.

The chapter on fraud is easily the most harrowing, because it involves scientists who deliberately mislead their peers and the public. Here we meet Paolo Macchiarini, who claimed to be able to transplant tracheas, including artificial tracheas, by “seeding” them with some of the recipient’s stem cells so the recipient’s body wouldn’t later reject them. Macchiarini published several papers touting his successes. It later turned out that his patients were dying, but it took years for the scandal to come to light and for the institutions involved to admit their mistakes.

All these doctors, and scientists, and more, were not blindly seeking truth. The were seeking money, more money, and fame. No matter the cost. As we see, some people would do anything to get that fame, even if it means stepping over dead bodies to achieve it.

Where is the "self-correcting" mechanism? Where are the people duplicating, or at least trying to duplicate, results? Where is the integrity? Where is a shred of humanity?