From Joe Nocera by way of RUTHFULLY YOURS: Science Has a Major Fraud Problem
For decades, scientists were above reproach. Not any more. Joe Nocera investigates the murky world of fraudulent research, and the sleuths exposing dishonest science.
As these things often do, it starts with a single instance.
Theo Baker was the son of two journalists, so when he enrolled in Stanford, he joined The Stanford Daily. He began an investigation of neuroscientist Marc Tessier-Lavigne.
Tessier-Lavigne had become rich based on some research into Alzheimer’s disease.
Except that, as Baker was discovering, the supposed breakthrough was nothing of the sort. Inside Genentech, he discovered, some of the company’s top executives believed “that the research had been based on falsified data.” At least one believed the problems were serious enough that Tessier-Lavigne should retract the paper. He refused. It also turned out that Genentech had been unable to replicate Tessier-Lavigne’s results, casting further doubt on their veracity. But this fact was never disclosed to shareholders or the general public. By 2012, a year after Tessier-Lavigne left the company, Genentech quietly abandoned its research effort based on the 2009 paper.
Click thru for those details.
Science has a fraud problem. Scientific progress requires experiments that rigorously and objectively test hypotheses. Yet a surprising number of experiments conducted today are neither rigorous nor objective. Science is now rife with retracted papers, doctored images, and hyped results. Scientists have sometimes replaced the images from one experiment with images from a different one to make the results look better. They have made claims unjustified by the underlying research. And far too often, they’ve designed experiments that aren’t really experiments at all because the results are preordained.
There is more.
Hat tip to both Maggie's Farm and William Teach at Pirate's Cove.
There has been documented fraud in hard science since Charley Darwin. Certainly before that time, but right now I'm not of a mind to recall examples.
ReplyDeleteEver more over time it has become easier to publish. Given the psuedo religosity of clannish researchers, it has become ever more likely to surpass the guardrails which were intended to prevent fraud.
I respected my dad for two main reasons. One, he was my dad. Two, what he had lived through while growing up and in combat, yet thrived.
After he had seperated from a career in the USMC, he had a sign on his desk. QUESTION AUTHORITY.
That threw me for a loop. I kept quiet, I didn't even know how to form the questions I had. I disagreed yet did not know why exactly.
I found out in college and afterward. I studied in chemistry with an eye for research. After years in labs I moved on to geology. Holy cow! the warring factions in research, heck, even among college professors. You had to pick a side. Neutral was not an option. It truly was 'with us or against us'. One side of any particular subject being perhaps a bit more congenial than the other. I had been warned. But I had not imagine such ferocity. I left and never looked back.
Question authority, indeed. It is that the more one calls up their authority -always highly esteemed doncha know-, the more that they are cloaking something.