Believe the Science? Not With This Much Fraud

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.