Research Fraud Costs Hundreds-of-Millions-of-Dollars

A lot of that fraud is paid for by tax dollars, though not all. Research fraud, Alzheimer's, and Mortality trends

This is a podcast episode by Mary Pat Campbell that covers a bit of fraud. There are also a bunch of links to other articles, one of which has the $247 million dollar number, that was the amount spent on a particular branch of Alzheimer's research, all of which was kicked off by a single paper, that was eventually was retracted due to falsification of research data.

That was one branch of research. The whole problem may be close to $1 billion in scope.

Prominent research in Alzheimer’s disease going back for decades has been found to be fraudulent, which has effects. Alzheimer’s disease has been a cause of death with an increasing age-adjusted death rate, and it’s one of the very few causes of death with a rate that’s higher for females than males (at all ages). How has this come about? And what should be done?

It took 22 years to have some of the bogus research retracted. 22 years during which the fraud stood, and grew.

There is more, and I can recommend clicking thru and listen to the 30 minute audio. (I listened at 1.25X and for a time at 1.5X normal speed.)

This is not new, and not restricted to medical research, but it is a problem. The image below is an excerpt from the 2023 Nobel laureate Katalin Kariko's book, Breaking Through.