Science and Falsification of Data

[Stuart]

In the latest email copy of The Scientist, a question is posed. Does a researcher found guilty of fraud and falsification of data still have a place in science. The article relates to two other articles, THIS ONE that describes the incident in question and THIS ONE -REGISTRATION REQUIRED that argues such people still have a valuable place in science.

My personal opinion is that falsification of data is not a forgivable offense; it betrays the position of trust science has to hold if it is to be effective. The integrity of the scientific process can only be maintained if those who abuse it are removed from it. Being wrong is what science is all about; we prove this theory was wrong and create a better one. Fraud and misrepresentation is what science is inherently opposed to.

[Darmalus]

I do not think they have a place in science, for the same reasons you stated, Stuart. Also, the willingness to commit fraud indicates they are not interested in truth or facts, and that is flat out unscientific.

Also, having read the free article, I am flabbergasted as to WHY Radhakrishnan did it. This is medical science, you will have tens of thousands of eyes looking at your work eventually, how could this possibly look like a good idea?

[Temujin]

I'll add a third yeah to the pile for the aforementioned reasons. Crap like this aids those opposing science (like global warming deniers) by either making the scientific community look like frauds or because the fucktards who falsify data are the ones most likely to sell out and go work some group like big oil and give their bullshit a whiff of credibility with John Q. Public.

[Kanastrous]

And a fourth. Falsifying research sounds to me (a non-scientist) like just about the worst offense and breach of trust that a researcher can commit, and undercuts my ability to trust the conclusions of any program with which he's involved, in the future.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Falsifying research can kill people. Lots of them. If you want my take, look at Searle in the '70s and the formation of the doctrine I work to (the laboratory, clinical and manufacturing GxPs). If you're found screwing around with medical studies, you go to jail and your employer gets a fat fine and a massive knock to their reputation.

[Zixinus]

Those falsifying data should go to jail. Because if you make their data up, you can safely throw away their entire research as useless. That is, such people have done no work and have violated their contract to do work.

Their work can be compared to an architect or construction engineer that did not make or even check the foundation for their buildings. Or a blacksmith that did not heat-treat the tools they produce (knives come particularly in mind).

Hiring such a scientist would be like hiring a surgeon who can't hold a glass in the air without spilling it due to shaking it or a butcher that refuses to sterilize his tools and wash his hands.

Even I, with only more surface scientific understanding, know well the foundation of the modern scientific process: data before hypothesis and experiments before theory.

It may seen a bit extreme or insane to an outside, but anyone who understands anything about scientific works should nod to the above (I think). The essential philosophy behind modern science is not to pull ideas out of our ass but to accept the reality that is around us.

And the only way to not allow such dishonest people from damaging society further, is to put them in jail. Look at the anti-vaccination guy, Andrew Wakefield. His articles were retracted and he was essentially bared from further practise. Yet he is still a danger to the public in the USA, where he is threated as a hero for people who are chewing the most pure, boiled-in-fear stupidity-weed. The only way that Wakefield's damage could be stopped is by putting him in prison, where he would have a more difficult time spreading nonsense.

Then again, I often daydream of one-shot ban from any public office combined with capital punishment for corrupt politicians (though, the former alone would make me happy) .

[Anguirus]

I've never heard a scientist defend falsifying data or cheating. Indeed, my undergraduate advisor used to give a little speech about a woman he knew who lost her career just by the accusation of same, and contrasting her with a professionally well-regarded scientist who murdered his wife and walked on a technicality.

Anecdotal, and I've never verified it independently, but falsifying data has always been a big screaming deal in any scientific culture I've experienced.

[Morilore]

Also, having read the free article, I am flabbergasted as to WHY Radhakrishnan did it. This is medical science, you will have tens of thousands of eyes looking at your work eventually, how could this possibly look like a good idea?

When I came to the U of I, as part of our orientation we talked about Rusi Taleyarkhan and the bubble fusion Charlie Foxtrot. Basically, the guy originally submitted a paper containing shabby science and outlandish claims to, um, Science, and instead of laughing at him like he should have, the editor overrode the reviewer's concerns to publish it. It made him famous and got him a chaired professorship at Purdue. Now all of a sudden he was under enormous pressure to back up his shabby science with first-rate science in order to justify his position, and from Purdue in order to maintain its reputation.

But he couldn't, so he cheated. He kept his own name off a paper and added someone else's name who had little to do with it in order to pretend he had independent verification of his results. Now in addition to ruining his credibility, he's damaged Purdue's reputation, damaged Science's reputation, and impoverished the scientific discourse because no one trusts AICF anymore.

That, to me, is another reason why fraud of any kind is intolerable. Ideas which might be worth pursuing can be abandoned because they have the mark of impropriety upon them.

Now, the interesting thing is that if Science had rejected his original paper like they should have, he might never have ended up where he did. There's nothing wrong with doing less-than-stellar science, as long as you don't lie about it. But they accepted it, and everyone started to need him to be right.

Another interesting thing is that he's still employed by Purdue, despite being found to have committed research misconduct and having been debarred from receiving federal funding for a couple of years. I would think this is hurting everyone around him.

[Admiral Valdemar]

As if on cue, BP is now being attacked over apparently attempting to buy out University of Alabama scientists regarding their little oil slick issue.

[Kanastrous]

I wonder if a clever lawyer could work out a civil case against fraudsters whose frauds cost their employers academic and commercial prestige, and the loss of $$$ that go with it.

[Alyrium Denryle]

The only possible place for them [fraudsters] is reviewing data and papers looking for fraud. Other than that, they need to be purged from the universe. This is prevalent in many fields. The government for example hires convicted hackers to test their security systems. It is the only way someone who has once cheated can regain even a tiny portion of their humanity in my eyes.

[K. A. Pital]

There is an anti-fraud commission in the Russian Academy of Science, but thanks to the ruling party ("United Russia") goons being financially involved in a scientific fraud ("magic" water filters made by a known fraudster), the RAS is hard pressed to do shit. Russian fascists (the Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia) and the oligarchs seem to be displeased because the anti-fraud commitee is coming hard on fraudlent "innovations".

In my view fraud should be punished, and the scientist commiting it banned from getting published in journals. A little stigma? So be it. Better than giving credency to fraudsters.

[madd0ct0r]

Similar to capital punishment for corruption, raising the stakes on scientific fraud does make other people slightly less likely to call it out.

ie: "I think he's made that bit up, but if I say so loudly, he'll be ruined. And if I'm wrong, there's a serious blow to my own rep, especially as I put his entire career and portfolio at risk."

[Mayabird]

Oh really? Do you have any actual evidence for your statement or are you just talking 'theoretically' i.e. out of your ass based on gut feelings? Academia is brutal and people don't just make accusations on a lark. Someone says "oh hey my data says this" and then dozens of people end up checking it to see if it's so, and if none of them replicate it they all start calling bullshit. They have the evidence, so why would they worry about some asshat liar being ruined?

[Temujin]

Similar to capital punishment for corruption, raising the stakes on scientific fraud does make other people slightly less likely to call it out.

ie: "I think he's made that bit up, but if I say so loudly, he'll be ruined. And if I'm wrong, there's a serious blow to my own rep, especially as I put his entire career and portfolio at risk."

Actually I think the reverse would be true. The process of scientific peer review is designed to weed out incorrect and bad ideas, and can also weed out fraud.

Now, you don't just call him a fraud, you question his ideas, methods, experiments, etc. as any good scientist would. Once scrutinized, the truth will come out, probably just sooner then would normally be the case. Right or wrong, you're going to be seen as doing your duty to uphold science. As part of the scientific community he should understand and accept that as being part of the process, and that he would be expected to do the same thing if the roles were reversed.

[Kanastrous]

Sounds good and is probably true so far as it goes, but my folks are retired medical researchers and their descriptions of the infighting, malice, back-stabbing petty rivalries, turf-protecting and all manner of behavior most un-scientific can bear unpleasantly, on the process.

YMMV.

[Temujin]

I wonder how much of that kind of adversarial behavior behavior is due to being in a system where scientists have to continually fight for funding, and aren't paid or appreciated what they're worth compared to say, businessmen, sports stars and entertainers.

[Alyrium Denryle]

I wonder how much of that kind of adversarial behavior behavior is due to being in a system where scientists have to continually fight for funding, and aren't paid or appreciated what they're worth compared to say, businessmen, sports stars and entertainers.

Yes.

Publish or Perish... There is also the issue of being very competitive with one's ideas. Also partially due to funding-for two reasons. First is the scarcity of funding. It is damn hard to even get a small internal grant within a university or department. The second is funding source. This is particularly true in biology-ecology especially. Independently funded scientists tend to get vastly different results than privately funded. You can actually do Fisher's Exact Tests to show this within ecotoxicology. As a result, you get a lot of infighting between the non-corrupt ecologists and the ones who are in Monsanto's and Sygentia's pocket.

[Admiral Valdemar]

The publish or perish way of life needs to be addressed. On top of that, the funding issue and general image problem with science. In the world, less than 0.1% of spending is spent on science and engineering, or so I recall Dyson's founder express many a time. Considering the bulk of society runs off the advances we make in these realms, it's unforgivable that we see finance, say, or sport, of being worth more. Sure, we get the human genome project and LHC still, but these are crowd pleasers and they're the first to be looked at for the chop when things get hairy, just as with Apollo. You beat the Soviets to the Moon. Mission accomplished, now piss off back to the dank lab and look at rocks or whatever it is you do.

[Gil Hamilton]

Fraud in science is unforgivable because of the nature of our scientific method. The basic premise of research is that it must be peer reviewed and reproducible. If no one can reproduce your results, it is not science. More over, science works as layers. If you commit fraud, then anyone who builds on your work or cites it has just been screwed over. The whole system falls apart unless everyone is honest.

There are compelling reasons why people commit fraud. A common one is something like this. Imagine you've been working on a project for years. You've got grants supporting your research, you've published, people come to your seminars and don't fall asleep. Around year four, you've build your instrument and have finally run the experiment and have collected a fat pile of data. There is a problem; you've got a null result. Your operating theory didn't pan out. This happens, the most famous and beautiful experiment in history, the Michelson-Morley Experiment, which was an attempt to detect the luminiferous aether with respect to the motion of the Earth was a null result in that they found absolutely no evidence that the aether exists at all, despite some damn brilliant instrument design and years of work* before they published that they couldn't even find the damn thing, let alone measure it. The honest thing to do at this point is suck it up and publish your data, saying that that line of research proved fruitless in the end and you are going to try something else out. Where people slip up there is that they've invested so much of themselves in the project that they can't admit that their baby is dead. So they fudge things and try to carry on. It's tragic, but their career MUST die then and there because throwing out the actual results of an experiment (possibly valuable in and of itself) because of emotional attachment to a theory poisons everything else anyone does with that work. Unfortunately, it happens and usually is caught.

The other common one is fraud based on politics or money. There was a drug in the Fifties called thalidomide that was used in Europe to treat morning sickness in pregnant women and it worked. However, there is a funny thing in organic chemistry called chiral isomers, where you've got structurally similar molecules that due to their arrangement are non-superimposable mirror images of each other. Thalidomide happens to have two enantiomers. One treats women's morning sickness. The other is a potent teratogen (in this case, gives babies deformed flippers for limbs). Thalidomide also racemizes in the body such that even if you at great expense isolated the one enantiomer (difficult and costly, but doable), there is still a good chance you are going to mess up your fetus. Drug companies are well aware of this effect, so they do something called a Placental Barrier Test, where you give the drug to a bunch of pregnant rabbits and see what it does to the fetus compared to a sample group that didn't take the drug. There is compelling evidence that the company simply didn't bother doing the Placental Barrier Test because there was a profit to be had in going ahead with the drug, which they planned to market as a miracle drug that treated all sorts of things. This fraud lead to several thousand women in Europe having babies with severe birth defects though it didn't really affect the United States since it was rejected by the FDA due to a very smart pharmacologist and President Kennedy going on the air to tell women to give back all the clinical trial drugs that had been distributed. It should be obvious why this sort of fraud is unacceptable.

*(to this day they are still finding high metal toxicity in the soil at Case Western because to isolate their interferometer from vibration and allow free rotation by building on a marble block and floating the entire thing on a giant pool of mercury).

[adam_grif]

I'm actually surprised by the number of people arguing that anybody who has commit scientific fraud is completely irredeemable.

[Temujin]

The honest thing to do at this point is suck it up and publish your data, saying that that line of research proved fruitless in the end and you are going to try something else out.

I think this would be easier if science was better respected by society at large and the aforementioned problems eliminated. An experiment that fails in proving a theory or inadvertently disproves it is still very important and useful as it adds to our overall knowledge. The problem is too many people just treat it as an unprofitable failure.

[Gil Hamilton]

I think this would be easier if science was better respected by society at large and the aforementioned problems eliminated. An experiment that fails in proving a theory or inadvertently disproves it is still very important and useful as it adds to our overall knowledge. The problem is too many people just treat it as an unprofitable failure.

That's a problem when companies hold the purse strings often on research. However, usually people commit the fraud in that case out of pride or because they've become so attached to the project that they don't want to admit that their line of research turned out fruitless.

The publics love/hate relationship with scientists is a whole nothing matter entirely as are politicians/businessmen who think scientists exist to legitimize their agenda. After seven years of graduate school/post doc (earning maybe a hair above minimum wage during much of it), it becomes awfully tempting when a company offers you large wads of money to prove that their product is a chocolate covered miracle and has no horrifying side effects that have been conclusively linked to it.

[Alyrium Denryle]

The publics love/hate relationship with scientists is a whole nothing matter entirely as are politicians/businessmen who think scientists exist to legitimize their agenda. After seven years of graduate school/post doc (earning maybe a hair above minimum wage during much of it), it becomes awfully tempting when a company offers you large wads of money to prove that their product is a chocolate covered miracle and has no horrifying side effects that have been conclusively linked to it.

Go Go Gadget Tranny Frogs!



See these? You may look at these and think "oh, those are a frog's ovaries and it is about to ovulate! Cool!" No. That is the testicle of a Xenopus laevis that has been exposed to miniscule (.1 ppb) concentration of Atrazine. The second most commonly used pesticide on the planet (Second only to Roundup). One Tyrone Hayes was on a panel paid for by the company that manufactures it (the swiss company Sygentia), tasked with and paid to bring back information on potential ecological impacts of their pesticide.

He was the only one who came back with results unfavorable to the company and they dismissed him from the panel and cut his funding. After a large debate in the literature, he said "fuck it" and did a meta-analysis of the research to date. He did a fishers exact test to show that those funded by Sygentia invariable got null results (that Atrazine does not create tranny frogs).

[Manthor]

Ugh.Well,the shit people do for money tends to leave a bad taste in anyones mouth. It reminds me of the melamine poisoning incident in China were the GM of a dairy company, Sanlu, was sentenced to death after it was found she was responsible for the melamine poisoning. The milk scandal resulted in a whole load of things being banned from Singapore and much of Asia that imports foodstuffs from China. Basically the response nowadays is that if it comes from China, check it three times.And even then you can't be sure. Even now we're still getting eggs tainted with the shit from there.

Scientists have a moral responsibility to report correct and valid data as it affects lives.But the problem is that there is no moral grounding or ethical code involved in the entire capitalist philosophy so...yeah. People are people