Here's the article: https://www.science.org/content/article/research-misconduct-...
These sorts of articles raise so many thoughts and emotions in me. I was trained as a computational biologist with a little lab work and ran gels from time to time. Personally, I hated gels- they're finicky, messy, ugly, and don't really tell you very much. But molecular biology as a field runs on gels- it's the priimary source of results for almost everything in molbio. I have seen more talks and papers that rested entirely a single image of a gel which is really just some dark bands.
At the same time, I was a failed scientist: my gels weren't as interesting, or convincing compared to the ones done by the folks who went on to be more successful. At the time (20+ years ago) it didn't occur to me that anybody would intentionally modify images of gels to promote the results they claimed, although I did assume that folks didn't do a good job of organizing their data, and occasionally published papers that were wrong simply because they confused two images.
Would I have been more successful if fewer people (and I now believe this is a common occurrence) published fraudulent images of gels? Maybe, maybe not. But the more important thing is that everybody just went along with this. I participated in many journal clubs where folks would just flip to Figure 3, assume the gel was what the authors claimed, and proceed to agree with (or disagree with) the results and conclusions uncritically. Whereas I would spend a lot of time trying to understand what experiment was actually run, and what th e data showed.
Similar - when I was younger, I would never have suspected that a scientist was committing fraud.
As I've gotten older, I understand that Charlie Munger's observation "“Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.” is applicable everywhere - including science.
Academic scientists' careers are driven by publishing, citations and impact. Arguably some have figured how to game the system to advance their careers. Science be damned.
If humanity is to mature, we should be an open book when it comes to incentives and build a world purposefully with all incentives aligned to the outcomes we collectively agree upon.
https://fs.blog/great-talks/psychology-human-misjudgment/
Charlie Munger's Misjudgment #1: Incentive-caused Bias https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-2yIO8cnvw
>outcomes we collectively agree upon.
lol, what are the chances?
The average Joe is interested in Dem vs Rep or what the latest show on Netflix.
The average researcher is worried about his livelihood, tenure etc.
Lots of people doing research find this depressing to the point of quitting. Many of my peers left research as they couldn't stomach all this nonsense. In experimental fields, the current academic system rewards dishonesty so much that ugly things have become really common.
In my relatively short career, I have been asked to manipulate results several times. I refused, but this took an immense toll, especially on two occasions. Some people working with me wanted to support me fighting dishonesty. But guess what, they all had families and careers and were ultimately not willing to do anything as this could jeopardize their position.
I've also witnessed first-hand how people that manage to publish well adopt monopolistic strategies, sabotaging interesting grant proposals from other groups or stalling their article submissions while they copy them. This is a problem that seldomly gets discussed. The current review system favors mono-cultures and winner-takes-it-all scenarios.
For these reasons, I think industrial labs will be doing much better. Incentives there are not that perverse.
> Similar - when I was younger, I would never have suspected that a scientist was committing fraud.
Unfortunately many less bright people seem to interpret this as "never trust science", when in reality science is still the best way to push humanity forward and alleviate human suffering, _despite_ all the fraud and misaligned incentives that may influence it.
Agree. The fact that we are seeing this kind of discourse within the scientific community is in my opinion a great argument for the scientific method.
The Manhattan project was a government project that was run like a startup.
If such a project happened today, academic scientists would be trying to figure out ways to bend their existing research to match the grants. Then it would take another 30 years before people started to ask why nothing has been delivered yet.
Nuclear physics had just "cracked open" and there were lots of highly promising prospects to pursue. You can't recreate that historical situation by switching from agile to scrum, or from scrum to agile.
Sounds like Eric Weinstein'a take (which I appreciate) on theoretical physics research.
It becomes a survival bias: if people can cheat at a competitive game (or research field) and get away with it, then at the end you'll wind up with only cheaters left (everyone else stops playing).
Similar story: computational biologist, my presentations involved statistics so people would come to me for help, and it often ended in the disappointing news of a null result. I noticed that it always got published anyway at whichever stage of analysis showed "promise." The day I saw someone P-hack their way to the front page of Nature was the day I decided to quit biology.
I still feel that my bio work was far more important than anything I've done since, but over here the work is easier, the wages are much better, and fraud isn't table stakes. Frankly in exchange for those things I'm OK with the work being less important (EDIT: that's not a swipe at software engineering or my niche in it, it's a swipe at a system that is bad at incentives).
Oh, and it turns out that software orgs have exactly the same problem, but they know that the solution is to pay for verification work. Science has to move through a few more stages of grief before it accepts this.
> Would I have been more successful
What are you talking about? You _are_ successful. You're not a fraud like all those other tossers.
To me, at the time, successful would have been getting a tenure-track position at a Tier 1 university, discovering something important, and never publishing anything that was intentional fraud (I'm OK with making some level of legitimate errors that could need to be retracted).
Of those three, I certainly didn't achieve #1 or #2, but did achieve #3, mainly because I didn't write very much and obsessed over what was sent to the editor. Merely being a non-fraud is only part of success.
(note: I've changed my definition of success, I now realize that I never ever really wanted to be a tenured professor at a Tier 1 university, because that role is far less fulfilling that I thought it would be).
Most often #1 is sought after as the prerequisite for achieving #2. And due to the structural factors on the number of positions available, funding available, and supply of new PhDs and postdocs, it's most often a really good idea to avoid #1 these days.
Indeed! You would also been more "successful" selling drugs to teens, or trafficking with human organs. But you did not and that's a good thing.
That is not enough to most people. And if it is enough for others, then it is probably because they were fortunate enough to fall back on something better.
Don't hate the player hate the game. Governments made scientist only survive if they show results and specifically the results they want to see. Otherwise no anymore grants and you are done. Whether the results are fake or true does not matter
"Science" nowadays is mostly BS, while the scientific method (hardly ever used in "science" nowadays) is still gold.
Do hate the player. People are taught ethics for a reason: no set of rules and laws are sufficient to ensure integrity of the system. We rely on personal integrity. This is why we teach it to our children.
When everything is a commodity (nothing runs outside of the market economy), the incentives are skewed to this type of behavior.
'Hate' the player' and 'hate' the game.
Some things shouldn't be part of the market economy - education, health and food.
If people can get away with it, they will do it. Rules and punishments for breaking them exist for a reason.
> If people can get away with it, they will do it.
This is not universally true and individuals and societies don't have to be organized this way.
Why are streets in some countries filled with trash when others are clean? My community does not have anyone policing littering - yet our streets, parks and public areas are litter free.
> If people can get away with it, they will do it.
This isn't true of everyone, but assuming it is increases the likelihood that it will become so. Because if everyone is trying to get away with it, why shouldn't I? That sort of breakdown in trust is high up on my list of worrying societal failure modes.
If they can get away with it, some people will do it.
My sole rational argument for Christianity is that it has made the societies that it is, or was, infused with, more honest than the ones that were not.
People doing bad things, including Christians, is completely in line with the Christian teachings of original sin, the fall and concupiscence. It is human nature to do bad things and it is very difficult to over come this behavior.
That sounds like it is loaded with a lot of "no true Scotsman" caveats including, perhaps, Scotland, which has crime like any other country.
I’m not sure there are any rational arguments for Christianity. I say that as a practicing Christian. Either it meets a spiritual need in you, or it’s not very valuable. I imagine that belief in a God who punishes evildoers has kept some people honest throughout history, but the value of that is surely outweighed by the evil done in the name of that God.
I also don’t believe Christian societies are more honest than others. Every religion I know of teaches honesty, as does every non-religious ethical framework I can think of.
We should really do some more honest crusades to export our honest values to the non believers to make the world a better, more honest place.
How did those teachings work out for the fraudsters?
Their parents taught them different ethics.
Most of them become distinguished in academia, and only a few get punished if they are too blatant or piss off too many people (see recent ivys losing their presidents over academic fraud).
A true scientist never says, "trust me" or even worse, "trust the science."
You have agency. Yes - the system provides incentives. However, you are not some pass-through nothingness to just accept any incentives. You can chose to not accept the incentives. You can leave the system. You're lucky - it's not a totalitarian system. There will be another area of life and work where the incentives align with your personal morals.
Once you bend your spine and kneel to bad incentives - you can never walk completely upright again. You may think and convince yourself that you can stay in the system with bad incentives, play the game, but still somehow you the player remain platonically unaffected. This is a delusion, and at some level you know it too.
Who knows? If everyone left the system with bad incentives, it maybe that the bad system collapses even. It's a problem of collective action. The chances are against a collapse, that it will continue to go on for some time. So don't count on collapse. And even if one was to happen in your time, it will be scorched earth post collapse for some time. Think as an individual - it's best to leave if you possibly can.
"Nobody is ever responsible for their own actions. Economics predicting the existence of bad actors makes them not actually bad."
You are clearly deeply disconnected from the actual practice of research.
The best you can really say is that the statistics chops of most researchers is lacking and that someone researching say caterpillars is likely to not really understand the maths behind the tests they're performing. It's not an ideal solution by any means but universities are starting to hire stats and cs department grads to handle that part.
> At the time (20+ years ago) it didn't occur to me that anybody would intentionally modify images of gels to promote the results they claimed
Fraud I suspect is only tip of the iceberg, worse still is delusion that what is taught is factually correct. A large portion of mainstream knowledge that we call 'science' is incorrect.
While fraudulent claims are relatively easy to detect, claims that are backed up by ignorance/delusion are harder to detect and challenge because often there is collective ignorance.
Quote 1: "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence"
Quote 2:"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts"
Side note: I will not offer to back up my above statements, since these are things that an individual has to learn it on their own, through healthy skepticism, intellectual integrity and inquiry.
> A large portion of mainstream knowledge that we call 'science' is incorrect.
How do you know that? Can you prove it scientifically?
> claims that are backed up by ignorance/delusion
In that case, they are not "backed up"
> I will not offer to back up my above statements
> an individual has to learn it on their own, through ... inquiry
May I "inquire" about your reasoning?
I'm the furthest thing from a scientist unless you count 3,000 hours of PBS spacetime, but I love science and so science/academia fraud to me, feels kinda like the worst kinda fraud you can commit. Financial fraud can cause suicides and ruin in lives, sure, but I feel like academic fraud just sets the whole of humanity back? I also feel that through my life I've (maybe wrongly) placed a great deal of respect and trust in scientists, mostly that they understand that their work is of the upmost importance and so the downstream consequences of mucking around are just too grave. Stuff like this seems to bother me more than it rationally should. Are people who commit this type of science fraud just really evil humans? Am I over thinking this? Do scientists go to jail for academic fraud?
Pick up an old engineering book at some point, something from mid 1800's or early 1900's and you'll quickly realize that the trust people put on science isn't what it should be. The scientific method works over a long period of time, but to blindly trust a peer review study that just came out, any study, is almost as much faith as religion, specially if you're not a high level researcher in the same field and have spent a good amount of time reading their methodology yourself. If you go to the social sciences then the amount of crock that gets published is incredible.
As a quick example, any book about electricity from the early 1900's will include quite serious sections about the positive effects of electromagnetic radiation (or "EM field therapies"), teach you about different frequencies and modulations for different illnesses and how doctors are applying them. Today these devices are peddled by scammers of the same ilk as the ones that align your shakras with the right stone on your forehead.
Going to need some citations here since the texts that I'm familiar with from that time period are "A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism" by Maxwell (mid-late 1800s) and "A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity" by E. T. Whittaker, neither of which mentions anything of the sort. I suspect you are choosing from texts that at the time likely would not have been considered academic or standard.
Your points of memory are not counterpoints. Those are the ones that lived - and are not indicative of the general quality of science during those times. Obvious survivor bias.
The fact that you can recall those reinforces the point that the value is determined by how long it is useful and remembered, not the fact that it was published.
Indeed, but you are clearly missing the historical context as these were two highly celebrated and referenced texts of the time period by leading scientists. However, it appears that the leading scientific minds (of which Maxwell and Whittaker are) did not include these uses in their texts. I do not dispute that science can be wrong (in fact it is almost always 'wrong' in the end) nor do I dispute that there could have been published research in those applications. I would argue that these applications were likely fringe at best within the scientific community by the mid 1800s.
There are of course incredible scientists that went down disappointing paths (eg Shockley, Dyson, Pauling) in terms of their research output later on, though one must remember that typically this occurs outside their original field of expertise.
If you read my comment you will see that I am asking for the references to the claims the previous author made. I simply provided my own references which werew written at the time and are representative of the times that do not corroborate the tall tale of the previous author. If you have any references to support their claim I would be interested in perusing them.
Because those two texts are the two among literally thousands of scientific publications that have survived the test of time, which is exactly the point being made.
This might seem crazy to hear now, but when Maxwell first published A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field in 1865, no one cared, it received very little attention at the time.
It was decades later in 1888 with the work of Hertz that Maxwell's equations started to gain significance within the scientific community.
It seems convenient that the evidence to corroborate the claim can't be found yes?
I think you will also find that the publications of the 1800-1900s are quite well preserved.
Is absolutely as much faith as religion. Just the basic assumption that the universe didn't come from anything is as baseless as that it does.
the best example is psychology. the entire field needs to be scrapped and started over, nothing you read on any of those papers can be trusted, it's just heaping piles of bad research dressed with a thin veil of statistical respectability.
We use EM radiation for illnesses and doctors apply them. It's one of the most important diagnostic and treatment options we have. I think what you're referring to is invalid therapies ("woo" or snake oil or just plain ignorance/greed) but it's hard to distinguish those from legitimate therapies at times.
> We use EM radiation for illnesses and doctors apply them.
Do you have examples of usage as a treatment? I can only think of rTMS (whose effectiveness is contentious).
The most boring example is x-rays. Slightly less boring are the radiation therapies for cancer.
What is maybe the most applicable that is widely accepted is electric therapy for people recovering from ACL surgeries.
Jaundice in babies is treated with EM radiation in the 420–470 nm range.
Gamma knife? Basically the entire field of radiotherapy? TMS is magnetic, not EM (the coil generates a magnetic field, which induces localized currents in the body being treated)
>TMS is magnetic, not EM (the coil generates a magnetic field, which induces localized currents in the body
ME? the coil generates an M which induces localized E in the body as shown by localized currents? (which produce some more M, but only just enough)
I can't parse what you are saying, but there's a difference between EM radiation and a magnetic field (and the resulting locally induced currents). Think in terms of an MRI machine: it puts you in a giant magnet (causing the various nuclear spins to align with the field) and then sends a bunch of EM radiation (radiofrequency). The former is a magnetic field, not EM radiation.
I think the error is putting trust in scientists as people, instead of putting trust in science as a methodology. The methodology is designed to rely on trusting a process, not trusting individuals, to arrive at the truth.
I guess it also reinforces the supreme importance of reproducibility. Seems like no research result should be taken seriously until at least one other scientist or group of scientists are able to reproduce the result.
And if the work isn't sufficiently defined to the point of being reproducible, it should be considered a garbage study.
The way I sum it up is: science is a method, which is not equivalent to the institution of science, and because that institution is run by humans it will contain and perpetrate all the ills of any human group.
This error really went viral during the pandemic and continues to this day. We're in for an Orwellian future if the public does not cultivate some skeptic impulse.
I'd say the public needs to develop some rational impulse, it already has plenty of skepitism to the point where people no longer trust science the methodology. Instead, they genuinely believe there is some alternative to finding the truth, and now simply believe the same old superstitions and bunk that people have prior to the scientific revolution.
Speaking of Orwell, I don't think science comes into it. Rather, when people stop believing in democracy, things will degenerate into authoritarianism. It's generally pretty hard to use science the methodology to implement an authoritarian government as the scientific method by definition will follow the evidence, not the will of a dictator.
However, something that looks like science but isn't could be used, especially if the public doesn't understand science and thus can't spot things that claim to be science but don't actually follow the scientific method.
There is no way to do any kind of science without putting trust in people. Science is not the universe as it is presented. Science is the human interpretation of observation. People are who carry out and interpret experiments. There is no set of methodology you can adopt that will ever change that. "Reproducibility" is important, but it is not a silver bullet. You cannot run any experiment exactly in the same way ever.
If you have independent measurements you cannot rule out bias from prior results. Look at the error bars here on published values of the electron charge and tell me that methodology or reproducibility shored up the result. https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/264/timeline-of-meas...
How does this work for things like COVID vaccines, where waiting for a reproduction study would leave hundreds of thousands dead? Ultimately there needs to be some level of trust in scientific institutions as well. I do think placing higher value on reproducibility studies might help the issue somewhat, but I think there also needs to be a larger culture shift of accountability and a higher purpose than profit.
You're far from a scientist, so it's easy for you to put scientists/academia on a pedestal.
For most of the people who end up in these scandals, this is just the day job that their various choices and random chance led up to. they're just ordinary humans responding to ordinary incentives in light of whatever consequences and risks they may or may not have considered.
Other careers, like teaching, medicine, and engineering have similar problems.
In my view, prosecuting the bad actors alone will not fix science. Science is by its own nature a community because only a small number of people have the expertise (and university positions) to participate. A healthy scientific discipline and a healthy community are the same thing. Just like the "tough on crime" initiative alone often does not help a problematic community, just punish scientific fraud harshly will not fix the problem. Because the community is small, to catch the bad actors, you will either have insiders policing themselves, or have an non-expert outsiders rendering judgements. It's easy for well-intention-ed policing effort to turn into power struggles.
This is why I think the most effective way is to empower good actors. Ensure open debate, limit the power of individuals, and prevent over concentration of power in a small group. These efforts are harder to implement than you think because they run against our desire to have scientific superstars and celebrities, but I think they will go a long way towards building a healthy community.
There was a period of time when science was advanced by the aristocrats who were self funded and self motivated.
Once it became a distinguished profession the incentives changed.
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
> There was a period of time when science was advanced by the aristocrats who were self funded and self motivated.
From a distance the practice of science in early modern and Enlightenment times might look like the disinterested pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. If you read the detailed history of the times you'll see that the reality was much more messy.
Do you have any examples you know of or can share? I am curious this
Today we only remember the great thinkers of these times, and tend to see a linear accumulation of knowledge. If you look at the history of the times you realise that at the time there was a vast and confusing babble, it was very hard at the time to distinguish the valid science from the superstition, the blind regurgitation of classical authority, the soothsayers and yes, the fraudsters.
For example Kepler considered his work on the Music of the Spheres (google it) to be more important than, and the ultimate goal of, his research on the mechanics of planetary motion. Newton dabbled in alchemy, and his dispute with Leibnitz was very very bitchy with some dubious jostling for priority. And there was no end of dubious research and outright fraud going on at the time. So no, it was not a golden era of disinterested research.
See for example the wikipedia articles on Phlogiston, The Music of the Spheres, the long and hard fought battle over Epicycles etc
Goodhart's Law!
It seems like this could ultimately fall under the category of financial fraud, since the allegations are that he may have favorably misrepresented the results of drug trials where he was credited as an inventor of the drug that's now worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
I agree with you, science fraud is terrible. It pollutes and breaks the scientific method. Enormous resources are wasted, not just by the fraudster but also by all the other well meaning scientists who base their work on that.
In my experience no, most fraudsters are not evil people, they just follow the incentives and almost non-existent disincentives. Scientist has become just a job, you find all kinds of people there.
As far as I know no-one goes to jail, worst thing possible (and very rare) is losing the job, most likely just the reputation.
"most fraudsters are not evil people, they just follow the incentives and almost non-existent disincentives"
Maybe I'm too idealistic but why does following incentives with no regard for secondary consequences not evil?
IMO “evil” is a misconception. People have different beliefs and psychological needs, and placed in certain incentive structures that has the outcomes that we see. You can call certain behaviors “evil”, but that doesn’t explain anything about why the behaviors occur.
If someone raped your wife and set your children on fire, you would probably rethink your stance on evil.
Nope. “Evil” still provides no explanation and no understanding of why and how things happen there. It’s the same thing as believing in miracles created by a god.
Physical pain is objective. Someone inflecting physical pain is evil unless it’s in self defense or common sense situations like a doctor performing surgery.
As a collective endeavor to seek out higher truth, maybe some amount of fraud is necessary to train the immune system of the collective body, so to speak, so that it's more resilient in the long-term. But too much fraud, I agree, could tip into mistrust of the entire system. My fear is that AI further exacerbates this problem, and only AI itself can handle wading through the resulting volume of junk science output.
It is the same flavor of fraud as financial fraud. It is about personal gain, and avoiding loss.
This kind of fraud happens because scientists are rewarded greatly for coming up with new, publishable, interesting results. They are punished severely for failing to do that.
You could be the department's best professor in terms of teaching, but if you aren't publishing, your job is at risk at many universities.
Scientists in Academia are incentivized to publish papers. If they can take shortcuts, and get away with it, they will. That's the whole problem, that's human nature.
This is why you don't nearly as many industry scientists coming out with fraudulent papers. If Shell's scientists publish a paper, they aren't rewarded for that, if they come up with some efficient new way to refine oil they are rewarded, and they also might publish a paper if they feel like it.
> If Shell's scientists publish a paper
A lot of companies reward employees for publications. Mine certainly does. Also an oil company may not be such a great example since they directly and covertly rewarded scientists for publishing papers undermining climate change research.
Ok. Bad example using Shell, but the point is that Industry scientists do not have publication in journals as a primary incentive.
A scientist can work in industry research and NEVER publish, and still have a career where they make money, and don't worry about losing their job.
Evil is a much simpler explanation than recognizing that if you were in the same position with the same incentives, you would do the same thing. It's not just one event, it's a whole career of normalizing deviation from your values. Maybe you think you'd have morals that would have stopped you, maybe those same morals would have ensured you were never in a position to PI research like that.
I also watched almost all episodes of PBS Spacetime. Some of them multiple times. I'm so happy that Spacetime exists and also that Matt was recruited as a host (in place of Gabe). Highly recommended channel, superb content!
It's complicated. Historically scientific fraud could be construed as 'good-intentioned' - typically a researcher in a cutting edge field might think they understood how a system worked, and wanting to be first to publish for reasons of career advancement, would cook up data so they could get their paper into print before anyone else.
Indeed, I believe many academic careers were kicked off in this manner. Where it all goes wrong is when other more diligent researchers fail to reproduce said fraudulent research - this is what brought down famous fraudster Jan Hendrik Schön in the field of plastic-based organic electronics, which involved something like 9 papers in Science and Nature. There are good books and documentaries on that one. This will only be getting worse with AI data generation, as most of those frauds were detected by banal data replication, obvious cuts and pastes, etc.
However, when you add a big financial driver, things really go off the rails. A new pharmaceutical brings investors sniffing for a big payout, and cooking data to make the patentable 'discovery' look better than it is is a strong incentive to commit egregious fraud. Bug-eyed greed makes people do foolish things.
This sort of behavior is only going to worsen in the coming decades as academics become more desperate. It's a prisoner's dilemma: if everyone is exaggerating their results you have to as well or you will be fired. It's even more dire for the thousands of visa students.
The situation is similar to the "Market for lemons" in cars: if the market is polluted with lemons (fake papers), you are disincentivized to publish a plum (real results), since no one can tell it's not faked. You are instead incentivized to take a plum straight to industry and not disseminate it at all. Pharma companies are already known to closely guard their most promising data/results.
Similar to the lemon market in cars, I think the only solution is government regulation. In fact, it would be a lot easier than passing lemon laws since most labs already get their funding from the government! Prior retractions should have significant negative impact on grant scores. This would not only incentivize labs, but would also incentivize institutions to hire clean scientists since they have higher grant earning potential.
My recommendation is for journals to place at least equal importance to publishing replications as for the original studies.
Studies that have not been replicated should be published clearly marked as preliminary results. And then other scientists can pick those up and try to replicate them.
And institutions need to give near equal weight to replications as to original research when deciding on promotions. Should be considered every researchers responsibility to contribute to the overall field.
We can solve this at the grant level. Stipulate that for every new paper a group publishes from a grant, that group must also publish a replication of an existing finding. Publication would happen in pairs, so that every novel thing would be matched with a replication.
Replications could be matched with grants: if you receive $100,000 grant, you'd get the $100,000 you need, plus another $100,000 which you could use to publish a replication of a previous $100,000 grant. Researchers can choose which findings they replicate, but with restrictions, e.g. you can't just choose your group's previous thing.
I think if we did this, researchers would naturally be incentivized to publish experiments that are easier to replicate and of course fraud like this would be caught eventually.
I bet we could throw away half of publications tomorrow and see no effect on the actual pace of progress in science.
There would still be incentives for collusion (I "reproduce" your research, you "reproduce" mine), and researchers pretending to reproduce papers but actually not bothering (especially if they believe that the original research was done properly).
Ultimately, I'm not sure how to incentivize reproduction of research: it's very easy to fake a successful reproduction (you already know the results, and the original researcher will not challenge you), so you don't want to reward that too much. Whereas incentivizing failed reproductions might lead some scientists to sabotage their own reproduction efforts in ways that are subtle enough to have plausible deniability.
Proceeding by pairs is probably not enough. You probably need 5-6 replications per paper to make sure that at least one attempt is honest and competent, and make the others afraid to do the wrong thing and stand out.
> I bet we could throw away half of publications tomorrow and see no effect on the actual pace of progress in science.
It might actually improve the pace of science, if the half eliminated were not replicable and the remaining half were written by researchers knowing that they would likely face a replication attempt.
This stuff happens in Computer Science too. Back around 2018 or so I was working on a problem that required graph matching (a relaxed/fuzzy version of the graph isomorphism problem) and was trying algorithms from many different papers.
Many of the algorithms I tried to implement didn't work at all, despite considerable effort to get them to behave. In one particularly egregious (and highly cited) example, the algorithm in the paper differed from the provided code on GitHub. I emailed the authors trying to figure out what was going wrong, and they tried to get funding from me for support.
My manager wanted me to right a literature review paper which skewered all of these bad papers, but I refused since I thought it would hurt my career. Ironically the algorithm that ended up working the best was from one of the more unknown papers, with few citations.
The problem with putting the onus on the journals is there is no incentive for them to reward replications. Journals don't make money on replicated results. Customers don't buy the replication paper they just read the abstract to see if it worked or not.
I do like the idea of institutions giving tenure to people with results that have stood the test of time, but again, there is no incentive to do so. Institutions want superstar faculty, they care less about whether the results are true.
The only real incentive that I think can be targeted is still grant money, but I would love to be proved wrong.
You should be able to build an entire career out of replications: hired at the best universities, published in the top journals, social prestige and respect. To the point where every novel study is replicated and published at least once. Until we get to that point, there will be far fewer replications than needed for a healthy scientific system.
Similarly, ambitious and difficult experiments that don’t pan out should also be richly rewarded. You just did all of science the service of clearly marking that tempting path with a big “don’t bother” sign, thus saving resources and pointing the ship a little closer to the direction of truth.
> social prestige and respect
This one is the showstopper. No matter what you do with rules and regulations, if people aren't impressed by it at a watercooler conversation, or when chatting at a cocktail party at a conference, or when showing a politician around in your lab then nothing else matters.
How prestigious something is is not a lever you control.
There absolutely exist skilled scientists that would happily make a living unglamorously replicating studies, if the money was there.
Prestige is a nice motivator, but making a living at all is always the baseline, and is often sufficient.
I think it’s a great idea. It would also give the army of phds an endless stream of real tangible work and a way to quickly make a name for themselves by disproving results.
journals have zero incentives to care about any of this.
I wonder if there are any studies on whether fraud increased after the Bayh-Dole Act. There's certainly fraud for prestige, that's pretty expected. But mixing in financial benefits increases the reward and brings administrators into play.
> ... as academics become more desperate.
Yes and ... we're already there.
It could also have a chilling effect on a lot of breakthrough research. If people are willing to put out what they mostly think is right, it might set back progress decades as well.
you don't need regulation for a stable durable goods market. income and credit shocks cause turnover of good quality stock in the secondary market.
BS governmental desperation to show any "result" (even if it is fake) is what brought us here. As scientist have to show more fake results to get more grants.
Removing the government from science could help, not the other way around.
I am thinking if some type bounty program which would take sufficient proof on fraud would work. Sadly I don't think anyone will fund it. And those participating likely won't be taken well in the circles...
I shared this article with an MD/PhD friend who has done research at two of the three most famous science universities in America ... and she said "this [not this guy, this phenomenon] is why I left science."
Maybe it's like elite running - everyone who stays competitive above a certain level is cheating, and if you want to enjoy watching the sport, you just learn to look the other way. Except that the stakes for humanity are much higher in science than in sport.
The Retraction Watch website does a good job of reporting on various cases of retractions and scientific misconduct [1].
Like many others, I hope that a greater focus on reproducibility in academic journals and conferences will help reduce the spread of scientific misconduct and inaccuracy.
> It seems like a strange thing to take someone with a long and respected career and subject them to what would essentially be a Western blot and photomicrograph audit before offering them a big position.
This is absolutely something that we should routinely be doing, though.
It's pretty similar to the level of distrust in the software engineering job interview process.
Pick your poison, to some extent. Better would be to not have to do it after-the-fact, but to vet better at every intermediate step, but it's hard. Just a very difficult people problem.
The amazing part about this to me is that the only reason the authors were caught is image manipulation. The fraud in numbers and text? Not so easy to uncover.
Prediction: papers stop using pictures entirely
GenAI will make faking western blots fantastically easy
Many journals now require all versions of a gel image that is used in a figure. So, you’d have to fake the full image that is cropped down to the lanes used in the figure. I think there aren’t as many of those raw images around to train AI on… yet.
I predict it will get even worse than that, in the next couple of decades I expect any document or work that has a substantial reward associated with it, either financially or in terms of career advancement or a grade for critical course work in one's major, or penalty such as indictment or conviction, to be backed by a time stamped stack of developing documentation, drafts, revisions, with these time stamp validated against a trusted custodial clock and a seed random string marking the start of work, recorded in some immutable public form.
Accompanying to finish document will be a hash of all of these works along with their associated timestamps, originals of can be verified if necessary to prove a custodial chain of development over a plausible period of time and across multiple iterations of the development of the work - a kind of signed time-lapse slideshow of its genesis from blank page to finished product as if it had a mandatory and global "track changes" flag enabled from the very beginning - by which the entire process can be proved an original human-collaborated work and not an insta-generated AI fiction.
I actually thought that digital timestamps would have been a great use-case for blockchains. They are publicly available and auditable. If you're working from hashes, you don't necessarily need to make the raw data public, just the hash. It is a use-case that has an intrinsic value to the data generator and the future auditor (so you could charge something for it). I know there was some work done on this, but I think it lost momentum due to trying to generate crypto as a value storage medium.
Eventually AI will also be able to reliably audit papers and report on fraud.
There may be newer AI methods of fraud, but it will only buy you time. As both progress, committing to record a fraud generated by technology will almost certainly be detected by a later technology.
I would guess that we're within 10 years of being able to automatically audit the majority of papers currently published. That thought must give the authors of fraudulent papers the heebee jeebies.
The YC company that wanted to sell fake survey results (yes they really had a launch HN with that idea) will surely be the first to sell fake science results next. YC disrupting sciences
I'm not a researcher or academic, but when I think of roughly how long it takes me to do meaningful deep work and produce a project of any significance, I'm struck by the fact that his 800 papers isn't a red flag? Even if you allocate ~3 months per paper, that's over 200 years of work. Is it common for academics to produce research papers in a matter of days?
From the article: Masliah appeared an ideal selection. The physician and neuropathologist conducted research at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) for decades, and his drive, curiosity, and productivity propelled him into the top ranks of scholars on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. His roughly 800 research papers, many on how those conditions damage synapses, the junctions between neurons, have made him one of the most cited scientists in his field.
People are listed as authors if they advised or contributed to the papers of their grad students or other people in their lab.
Perhaps the root of all evil is "publish or perish". I am long out of research, working at a teaching college, and yet I am still expected to publish. Idiocy.
Academic fraud is also enabled by lack of replication. No one gets published by replicating someone else's work. If one could incentivize quality replication, that could help.
Is there no liability for the author? There are billions of dollars wasted in drug trials and research that can be tied to this fraud. Surely they can face some legal issues due to this?
I was thinking about it: If I come across someone seriously injured, try to help them, and accidentally hurt them, I'm protected (in many places) by Good Samaritan laws.
But if a health care professional does the same thing, and does something negligent, then they are usually liable. They are professionals and are held to a different standard. Similarly, that's why lawyers keep writing: this is not legal advice and you are not my client.
Perhaps a professional in science should have higher standards. Obviously they shouldn't be sued for being wrong - that would destroy science, disregard the scientific method's means to address inaccuracy, and go against science's nature as the means to develop new knowledge. But intentionally deceiving people perhaps should be illegal and/or create liability: When you publish something, people depend on its fundamental honesty and will act on it.
Not only are there billions of dollars wasted, there are many, many lives wasted. If the billions had gone in a direction that was actually promising, maybe there would be treatments that would have saved millions of person-years of quality lifetime. This person is basically a mass-murderer.
Like all things in life that have risks of fraud, negligence or potential failure, insurance could be the answer.
Want to publish in a peer reviewed paper? Well then your institution or you should take out a bond or insurance policy that guarantees your work is accurate. The insurance amount would fluctuate based on how big of impact this study could have. Is it a drug that will be consumed by millions? Big insurance policy. Is it a behavioral study without much risk... small insurance policy.
Is a a person in an institution found caught committing fraud, well now then all papers from that institution now have higher premiums.
Did you sign off on a peer reviewed paper that was fraud? Well now your premiums are going up also.
Insurance costs too high to publish? Well then keep doing research until the underwriters are satisfied that your work isn't fraud and adjust the premiums down.
It adds a direct near-term economic incentive to publish honestly and punishes those that abuse the system.
In other words, you are suggesting more stringent peer review conducted by insurance companies. And because insurance companies are too small to have sufficient in-house expertise on every topic, the reviews will be usually done by external consultants. The costs might be from $10k for simple papers to hundreds of thousands for large complex papers.
The insurance model does not really work when the cost of evaluating the risks far outweighs the expected risks.
Here’s a deterrent:
1) revoke all of their academic accreditations and degrees
2) put them on a public “do not publish” list permanently banning them from being named on any paper in a journal
any lawyers know if it's wire fraud to get paid to do academic research and lie about the results?
There are unfortunately very rarely consequences for academic fraud. It's not just that we only catch a small fraction — mostly the most brazen image manipulation — but these cases of blatant fraud happen again and again, to resounding silence.
Ever so rarely, there may be an opaque, internal investigation. Mostly, it seems that academia has a desire to not make any waves, keep up appearances, and let the problem quiet down on its own.
And occasionally a grad student who discovers academic dishonesty, and complains internally (naively trusting administrators to have humility and integrity), has their career ended.
I suppose a silver lining to all the academic fraud exposés of the last few years is that more grad students and faculty now know that this is a thing, and one that many will try to cover up, so trust no one.
Another silver lining might be that fellow faculty are more likely to believe an accusation, and (if they are one of the awful people) less likely to think they can save funding/embarrassment/friend by neutralizing the witness.
(ProTip: If the success of your dishonesty-reporting approach is predicated on an internal administrator having humility and integrity, realize that those qualities are the opposite of what has advanced a lot of academic careers.)
The people doing the investigation have a vested interest in keeping it quiet.
It's like the old quote... "If you commit fraud as an RA that's your problem. If you commit fraud as the head of department that's the university's problem."
Everyone seems to acknowledge this is a problem, but refuse to believe it actually affects anything when it comes time to "trust the science". Yes, science is corrupted, but all the results can be trusted, and the correct answer is always reached in the end. So, is it really a problem? Or not?
A key skill for any scientist is to differentiate quality work and science that can be easily faked.
The Alzheimer's and Parkinson's fields are too easy to fake, and too difficult to replicate. The new ideas are only ~20 years old. Big pharma companies are understandably wary of published papers.
When people say "trust the science", they often refer to things like masks, and antibiotics, and vaccines. That science is hundreds of years old and have been replicated thousands of times.
TL;DR: Some science should absolutely be trusted, some shouldn't. It's not surprising that you can't make blanket statements on a superfield ranging from germ theory to cold fusion.
> When people say "trust the science", they often refer to things like masks, and antibiotics, and vaccines. That science is hundreds of years old and have been replicated thousands of times.
When people say "trust the science" they're usually referring to fairly recent developments. Covid vaccines were in development and testing for just over 18 months before being mandated and were certainly not replicated on a large scale by disinterested 3rd parties before being mandated. The idea that we can have effective scientific policy without trust in scientific institutions is just... not accurate.
Duplication of the same image with different captions about armed conflicts is a technique mainstream news likes too.
> But at the same time I have a lot of sympathy for the honest scientists who have worked with Masliah over the years and who now have to deal with this explosion of mud over parts of their records.
This really is quite unfortunate.
Is it? Is it possible that none of them knew? Should they have responsibilities to go with the benefits of putting their names on major discoveries?
When I was in my doctoral program I had some pretty promising early results applying network analysis to metabolic networks. My lab boss/PI was happy to advertise my work and scheduled a cross-departmental talk to present my research in front of ~100 professors or so. While I was making a last-minute slide for my presentation I realized one chart looked a little off and I started looking into the raw data. I soon realized that I had a bug in my code that invalidated the last 12 months of calculations run on our HPC cluster. My conclusions were flat out wrong and there was nothing to salvage from the data. I went to my lab boss the night before the talk and told him to cancel it and he just told me to lie and present it anyways. I didn't think that was moral or scientifically sound and I refused. It permanently damaged my professional relationship with him.
No one else I talked to seemed particularly concerned about this, and I realized that a lot of people around me were bowing to pressure to fudge results here and there to keep up the cycle of publicity, results, and funding that the entire academic enterprise relied upon. It broke a lot of the faith I had been carrying in science as an institution, at least as far as it is practiced in major American research universities.
Seems to be censored from the NIH staff directory now https://www.nia.nih.gov/about/staff/masliah-eliezer
Most recent working archive.org snapshot:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240303093209/https://www.nia.n...
woopsies
In the future those who commit fraud are not likely leave trace in Western blot and photomicrograph audit.
When the experiments are significant, double blind is not enough. You need external auditors when conducting experiments. Preferably separate team making experiments from those who design them.
I've said so many times, but we need to go back to a system where it is possible to make a career in science and get funding for replicating other people's work to verify the results.
This leads to a tragedy of the commons. Say a random nation, say, Sweden, devotes 100% of their governmental and university research budgets toward replication.
70% of the studies they attempt are successfully replicated. 20% are inconclusive or equivocal. 10% are clearly debunked.
Now the world is richer, but Sweden? No return on investment for the Swedes, other than perhaps a little advanced notice on what hot new technologies their sovereign funds and investors ought not to invest in.
A bloc of nations, say NAFTA/CAFTA-DR, or the European Union, might be more practical.
That's the carrot. As for the stick, bad lawyers can get disbarred, bad doctors can get "unboarded". Some similar sort of international funding ban/blacklist for bad researchers would be useful.
Could it be part of the training for young researchers - replicate existing experiments?
I can't manage to be really surprised. We already know many people will cheat when the incentives are right. And when the law of the land is “publish or perish”, then some will publish by any means necessary. Thinking “this subsegment of society is so honorable, they won't cheat” would be incredibly naive.
While I agree this is a big problem, science should never be defined by a single article.
I was always taught that science is a tree of knowledge where you build off previous positive results, all of which collapse when an ancestor turns out to be false.
In this particular case, the person of interest published 800 widely cited papers. That seems like a considerable collapse.
I see this as a pruning process and an inevitable part of science.
But I would further argue against what others were saying about personal ethics. Science must remove the human as much as possible from the process.
> But if the NIH had done that in 2016, they wouldn't be in the position they're in now, would they? How many people do we need to check? How many figures do we have to scrutinize?
All of them
For all the complaints about AI generated content showing up in scientific journals, I'm exited for the flip side, where an LLM can review massive quantities of scientific publications for inaccuracies/fraud.
Ex: Finding when the exact same image appears in multiple publications, but with different captions/conclusions.
The evidence in this case came from one individual willing to volunteer hundreds of hours producing a side by side of all the reports. But clearly that doesn't scale.
I'm hoping it won't have the same results as AI Detectors for schoolwork, which have marked many legitimate papers as fraud, ruining several students' lives in the process. One even marked the U.S. Constitution as written by AI [1].
It's fraud all the way down, where even the fraud detectors are fraudulent. Similar story to the anti-malware industry, where software bugs in security software like CrowdStrike, Sophos, or Norton cause more damage than the threats they prevent against.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/11ha4qo/gptzero_an...
> For all the complaints about AI generated content showing up in scientific journals, I'm exited for the flip side, where an LLM can review massive quantities of scientific publications for inaccuracies/fraud.
How would this work? AI can't even detect AI generated content reliably.
Not in a zero shot approach. But LLMs are more than capable of solving a similar scenario to the one presented:
- Parse all papers you want to audit
- Extract images (non AI)
- Diff images (non AI)
- Pull captions / related text near each image (LLM)
- For each image > 99% similarity, use LLM to classify if conclusions are different (i.e. highly_similar, similar, highly_dissimilar).
Then aggregate the results. It wouldn't prove fraud, but could definitely highlight areas for review. i.e. "This chart was used in 5 different papers with dissimilar conclusions"
How would that be possible? Novelty is a known weakness of the LLMs and ideally the only things published in peer-reviewed journals are novel.
Wouldn’t it be cool if people got credit for reproducing other people’s work instead of only novel things. It’s like having someone on your team that loves maintaining but not feature building.
Detecting images and data that's reused in different places has nothing to do with novelty.
LLMs might find some specific indications of possible fraud, but then fraudsters would just learn to avoid those. LLMs won’t be able to detect when a study or experiment isn’t reproducible.
Of course, but increasing the difficulty of committing fraud is still good. Fraudsters learn to bypass captchas as well, but they still block a ton of bad traffic.
But if the NIH had done that in 2016, they wouldn't be in the position they're in now, would they? How many people do we need to check? How many figures do we have to scrutinize? What a mess.
This is the core problem with science today. Everyone is trying desperately to publish as much, and as fast, as they can. Quantity over quality. That quantity dictates jobs, fellowships, grants, and careers. Dare I saw we have a "doping" problem in science and not enough controls. Especially when it comes to "some" countries feverish output of papers that have little to no scientific value, cannot be replicated, full of errors, but at least it's published and they can get a job.
For a long time the numbers have been manipulated and continue to be so, seemingly due to national pride.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...
https://www.science.org/content/article/china-rises-first-pl...
Scholars disagree about the best methodology for measuring publications’ impact, however, and other metrics suggest the United States is still ahead—but barely.
Interestingly this and other cases like it suggest that one of the most valuable skill some scientists have is photoshop.
Reminder that these people are only caught because they photoshopped Western blots.
Even more widespread is when PIs just throw out data that don't agree with their hypothesis, and make you do it again until the numbers start making sense.
It's atrocious, but so common that if you're not doing this, you're considered dumb or weak and not going to make it.
Many PIs end up mentally justify this kind of behavior (need to publish / grant deadline / whatever) — even at the protest of most of the lab members.
Those who refuse to re-roll their results — those who want to be on the right side of science — get fired and black balled from the field.
And this is at the big famous universities you've all heard of
I hate the thought that researchers and drug developers may have wasted their effort and dollars developing drugs based on one extremely selfish person's bogus results.
NIH page for Eliezer Masliah is returning access denied:
Why worry about fraud, deception and misleadings using AI when we have the old kind of fraud?
Or, in the other hand, now you don't have to manipulate images, you can just generate the ones you need.
This stuff just ENRAGES me.
With that off my moobs ... for those interested in the broader topic, I highly recommend Science Fictions, by Stuart Ritchie. The audiobook is also excellent.
I'm not a working scientist, and I found it completely engaging. Worth it just for the explanation of p-hacking.
As a scientist who has published in the neuroscience space, I don’t what to say other than the incentives in academia are all messed up. Back in the late 90s, NIH made a big push on ‘translational research”, that is, researchers were strongly encouraged to demonstrate their research had immediate, real world benefits or applications. Basic research and the careful, plodding research needed to nail down and really answer a narrow question was discouraged as academic navel-gazing.
On one hand, it seems the push for immediate real world relevance is a good thing. We fund research in order that society will benefit, correct? On the other hand, since publications and ultimately funding decisions are based on demonstrating real world relevance, it’s little surprise scientists are now highly incentivized to hype their research, p-hack their results, or in rare cases, commit outright fraud in an attempt to demonstrate this relevance.
Doing research that has immediate translational benefits is a tall order. As a scientist you might accomplish this feat a few times in your career if you’re lucky. The rest of the corpus of your work should consist of the careful, mundane research the actual translational research will be based upon. Unfortunately it’s hard to get that foundational, basic, research published and funded nowadays, hence the messed-up incentives.
I'm a recovering academic, and have not published since not long after defending my dissertation.
I blame this behavior entirely on "publish or perish". The demands for novel, thoughtful and statistically-significant findings is tremendous in academe, and this is the result: cheating.
I left professional academia because I resented the grind, and the push to publish ANYTHING (even reframing and recombining the same data umpteen times in different publications) in an effort to earn grants or attain tenure.
The academia system is broken, and it cannot be repaired with minor edits, in my opinion. This is a tear out and do over scenario for the academic culture, I'm afraid.
Doctored neuroscience papers. I'm shocked.
I've been saying this for years and have been punished for that. Even here.
I've done Biology and CS for 20 years now, I've worked at four of the top 10 research institutions in the world.
The ratio of honest to bullshit academics is 1:10.
Most of these people should be in jail. Not only do they commit academic fraud, many of them commit other types of crimes as well. When I was a PhD student, my 4 year old daughter was kidnapped by staff at KAUST. Mental and physical abuse is quite common and somewhat "accepted". Sexual harrasment and actual sexual abuse, from faculty towards the students, is through the roof!
I'm happy that now (while slowly) all of these things are starting to vent out. This is a real swamp that needs to be drained.
Where is Eliezer Masliah from?
If you are familiar with academia you'll realize the academic dishonesty policy is essentially the playbook by which academics behave. The author is surprised that Eliezer Masliah purportedly had instances of fraud spanning 25 years. I bet the author would be even more surprised to find out that most academics are like that for the entire duration of their career. My favorite instance is Shing-Tung Yau, who is still a Harvard professor, who attempted to steal Grigori Perelman's proof of Poincare's conjecture (a millenium prize problem <https://www.claymath.org/millennium-problems/> that comes with a $1MM prize and $10k/mo for the rest of one's life; Perelman rejected all of it.)
I mean, get this: an extremely gifted Mathematician living on a measly salary in Russia had had his millenium prize almost stolen by a Harvard professor. What more evidence do you need?
You've given two examples. Please explain why you can extrapolate to all of academia.
From personal experience, it is all I've seen. Could anyone be in a position to extrapolate to all of academia without speaking from personal experience? I'm not speaking of all academics (hence 'most'). It's a statement similar to "Hollywood has a drug problem" or something of that sort.
My advice to anyone going into Hollywood would be to stay away from drugs; my advice to anyone going into academia is to treat every interaction as if you've just sat at a poker table in Las Vegas.
I work in Hollywood. I am not sure it has more of a drug problem more than say tech or finance. Maybe it does-- I don't know. The point is when a celebrity is a drug addict you hear about it. When a banker or a lawyer is you don't.
Our experience of things has a lot of bias toward what we want to hear. Generalization plays into sterotypes and ideology.
I believe that tech and finance also have a drug problem. Those that sell expensive drugs like cocaine go after rich clients. You work in Hollywood, but have you been attending wild private parties? I've worked in academia and I was in the thick of it, I've experienced first hand the fraud I'm talking about, and it was a large part of my experience, not some side note. Perhaps it's an uncomfortable truth that academia is in the state it is in, but again, it is of utmost importance to warn younger people to its perils. (Act as if you're at a poker table at all times.) In any case, how do you know that it isn't your biases that prevent you from considering what I describe? What is so surprising with the claim that people who are very incentivized to steal and commit fraud do so if they are not punished for it?
edit: and it's not things I've heard, instead it is direct experiences, i.e. people stole my work, and things like that. As a graduate student to watch professors come to you with problem X, take what you've said (an actual solution) and publish a paper without attribute, that sort of thing; to report it and have nothing be done about it, et cetera, and on it goes, it's just instance after instance of such behavior, or the million ways in which they are careful to trick you into working on their problems without receiving attribute. One such trick for example, that again happened to me, is that after a conference talk I got into an e-mail discussion where I explained my approach; I was told that "they already have these results" (the trick here was to divulge less in the talk than what was currently known in order to be able to avoid "significant progress by another person" in the case another person does share new progress that they have already established, and hence not having to share attribution.) It turned out that our discussion was enough for them to go from n=3,4 to a general formula involving primes, because I pointed out a certain property they had not noticed. This is just a single example of the sorts of tricks, aside from total fraud, that happen, and one of the milder incidents I had happen to me.
Sounds like someone should write a paper that makes fraudulent claims about the extent of fraud in all of academia!
This is terribly terribly frustrating. For every one of these cheats there are hundreds of honest, extremely hard-working ETHICAL scientists who toil 60 hours a week doing the thing they love. It is also terribly frustrating that, being human after all, smooth talkers with a confident stride, an easy smile, eager to shake hands can and do quickly climb the academic ladder, especially the administrative latter. This makes me terribly sad.
Anecdotally, during my (fairly short-lived) academic career, in which I did research with three different groups, 2/3 of them were engaging in fraudulent research practices. Unfortunately the one solid researcher I worked for was in a field I wasn't all that interested in continuing in, and as a naive young person who believed in the myth of academic freedom and didn't really understand the funding issue, I jumped ship to another field, and found myself in a cesspool of data manipulation, inflated claims, and all manner of dishonest skullduggery.
It all comes down to lab notebooks and data policies. If there is no system for archiving detailed records of experimental work, if data is recorded with pencils so it can later be erased and changed, if the PI isn't in the habit of regularly auditing the world of grad students and postdocs with an eye on rigor and reproduciblity, then you should turn around and walk out the door immediately.
As to why this situation has arisen, I think the corporatization of American academics is at fault. If a biomedical researcher can float a false claim for a few years, they can spin their research off to a startup and then sell that startup to a big pharmaceutical conglomerate. If it fails to pan out in further clinical trials, well, that's life. Cooking the data to make it look attractive to an investor - in the almost completely unregulated academic environment - is a game that many bright-eyed eager beavers are currently playing.
As supporting evidence, look at mathematical and astronomical research, the most fraud-free areas of academics. There's no money to be made in studying things like galactic collisions or exoplanets, the data is all in the public domain (eventually), and with mathematics, you can't really cook up fraudulent proofs that will stand the test of time.
Humans being humans
> and others appear to be running for cover.
In every industry right now there appear to be a lot of people running cover. I have a personal belief, with the exception of a few industries, 50% of managers are simply running cover. This is easy to explain:
1/ Nothing follows people
2/ Jobs were easy to get in the last 3 years (this is changing FAST)
3/ Rinse and repeat and stay low until you're caught.
Once, at 3Com, Bob Metcalfe introduced a talk by one of his MIT professors with the little joke, "The reason academic politics is so vicious is that nothing's at stake."
The guy said, "That depends on whether you consider reputation 'nothing.' "
I guess what that shows is, you can always negotiate and compromise over money, but reputation is more of a binary. An academic can fake some work, and as long as he's never called on it, his reputation is set.
So yeah, a little more fear of having one's reputation ruined would go a long way towards fixing science.
But this is really a societal/political issue: since we decided that economic capital is king and symbolic capital not that much… (This is really the story of the last four decades or so.)
There are some people who think everything is "a societal/political issue."
But that one-dimensional view is boring. Life is more than politics.
Well, this is about Pierre Bourdieu, and he had a few things to say about academia, as in Homo Academicus.
And I'm not sure what example could illustrate the problem with the lopsided valuation of economic capital and the general devaluation of symbolic capital (as compared to pre-1980s, we have since undergone a social revolution of considerable dimensions, which is also why there isn't an easy fix) better than this one.
I have always said that while professors get paid less money than in industry, they are compensated in reputation to make up for it. Status and reputation are the currency of academia.
If you're an academic and want to use the fastest publishing stack ever created that also helps guide you to building the most honest, true thing you could create, I have built Scroll and ScrollHub specifically for you.
https://hub.scroll.pub/?template=paper
Happy to provide personal help onboarding those who want to use this to publish their scientific work. breck7@gmail.com
If there's this much overt, deliberate fraud and dishonesty in all of our research institutions, the quantities of soft lying and fudging are inconceivable.
We need to seriously rethink our approaching to stewarding these institutions and ideas, public trust is rightfully plummeting.
This shit should be a crime. Imagine how many person-hours and how much money has been wasted.
Yes, pin it all on Masliah; turn him into a sort of bizzaro-jesus, who takes on the sins of the entire self-seeking, publish-or-perish, p-hacking, pharma-grifting, meta-meta-meta-analyzing, only-verify—at-gunpoint “profession”.
Unfortunately, sometimes someone becomes a bad example. That doesn't make them a "scapegoat", the favored defense of people like that.
A scapegoat is something that takes on all the sins of a lot of others who skate free. If Masliah is the only one who ever suffers, then he IS a scapegoat, but if this article serves to uncover a lot of other bad actors, then he's not. And if his example serves to warn a lot of other scientists to clean up their acts, then his suffering is a benefit.
The language of the article is as low as it is loaded. This is just Derek Lowe covering for the fact that “Science” magazine and the like have let this scoundrel (and many more like him) carry on, without hindrance, for an entire career; pointing the finger anywhere and everywhere but at the journals themselves. None of this is an isolated incident. It is widespread! There is a new scapegoat every month.
I had a feeling academia was just run a ran by people letting blatant fraud, exploitation and abuse of phd students, stealing during peer-review, and just other forms of plagiarism, fraud, and exploitation slide by. They let it slide by because correcting these things would lead to massive changes in academia that might put them out of jobs.
Every year that feeling becomes more certain. Glad I quit the track in grad school.
I feel terribly for all the incredibly smart and hard working academics that remain honest and try to make it work. They do what they love, otherwise they wouldn't do such intensive work with so much sacrifice.
It is really disheartening too because academia only turns on the "honesty filter" when it comes to minor grad students that pissed off the wrong people. But you can do all this fraud constantly and become president of harvard if you know the right politics.
Dishonest lot. I hope karma is real so they get what is coming to them for taking advantage of people that just love to increase humanity's knowledge.
alright, am i being downvoted because of my perniciousness to those leading academia, or because I was too sympathetic to the people being exploited?
They would be out of jobs.
You're being downvoted because you're correct—HN is an eco chamber for zealous regurgitation of opinions of the academy and media—institutions that have decayed. It's been happening slowly for awhile, but now things are starting to come apart at the seams.
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Universities became tax funded and the consequences is warm bodies filling chairs. I have experience with a number of big name unis in the U.S. they are all about office and national politics. It's not about the work and hasn't been for a while now.
Defund universities. No more student loans, make them have to earn their place in the market or we will continue to suffer under the manipulated system that is actually killing students.
> Defund universities. No more student loans, make them have to earn their place in the market or we will continue to suffer under the manipulated system that is actually killing students.
This... it's no longer about value its about optics... Problem exists in most industries now. The pendulum needs to swing back the other way before it's too late to stop the decay...
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It's wrong to think that because there is reports of fraud or systematic error in science you shouldn't trust it. I'm sure all those things exist. But they also exist in every other institution with a lot less self-reflection and self-correction.
Nassim Taleb said that people think weathermen are terrible predictors of the future. He says meteorology is among the most accurate sources of predictions in our lives. But we can easily validate it and we see the mistakes. If we had as much first hand experience with other types of predictions we'd appreciate the accuracy of weatherman. My point is: just because you know the flaws in a system don't assume it isn't better than another.
So one of the things you could do (if you were psychotic) is find poor people and replicate neurodegenerative diseases and then feed them the drug to see if the cure works. And then when they go to take MRIs you smuggle out the imaging from the Sutter Health clinic on Van Ness in San Francisco California.
Is that why my head hurts?
Because then it becomes attempted murder and torture overseas which is all sorts of jail time. Neat.
Why does Peter Teller Weyand at 555 Beule Street have a headache? My head hurts. So I just emailed a couple hundred academics across the country the same question.
I don't like having my head hurt.