Stanford President resigns -- biomedical research fraud (vs. negligence); thoughts?

[mark-ER]

NYT article:

Opinion | The Research Scandal at Stanford Is More Common Than You Think (Published 2023)

Scientific journals need to harden their defenses against research manipulation.

www.nytimes.com

and explanation that gets a bit into the details:



Thoughts. I will be sure to share my opinion when I see a few replies and I have a bit of time on my hands (ha ha, if that ever happens).

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[ProReduction]

If you are the PI and anyone under you commits outright fraud, whether a post-doc, grad student, research scientist or whoever, then IMO it is more than negligence on your part because it is the duty of a PI to fully review any submitted work with his/her name as the last author or in theory as any author.

Now back to reality a bit, in the era where big name researchers have their names on work where they had close to zero input. I am personally aware of one well-funded PI at my institution that is a raging alcoholic and who can barely walk due to foot ulcers associated with severe neuropathy / poor wound healing and a likely A1c of 14. I'd bet my year's salary that if you anonymized his last 10 last-author papers and handed them to him he would not be able to tell you that he was an author on the papers.

This is a huge problem. Our goal is not to get tons of research money. It is not to win a Fields or a Nobel. It is not be be a glorified department head or to fly around the world giving talks as "that expert".

To be that naive overly romantic researcher, our sole goal in all of this is to discover truth. That is it. Doing anything other than that might make you rich, famous, and revered. But it will not make you achieve the one goal that is the point of all of this.

 

[SurfingDoctor]

It’s the one advantage of the poor work force in biomedical sciences…

My research assistants have been so clueless as to the desired result, that they are essentially blinded observers.

I literally had them tell me the other day that they thought an assay “worked” and the result was had, simplified for explanation, 100% variance in the replicate samples, and I was like:

So, they didn’t forge the data (good), but they also don’t know how to interpret simple data (also… good? ).

But I also live by the adage: “Trust, but verify”

 

[tr]

I thought the best comment on the NYT article was this one:

"Nikolay Kukushkin
Brooklyn, NY July 30
What gets omitted in the debate on this type of image manipulation is that it’s generally very easy to run a Western blot (the kind of experiment that produced the bands in question) adjusting it in such a way so as to achieve the desired look of the bands — and that way, no images would need to be manipulated, and you would never get caught. Doctoring images post-experiment is not just wrong — it’s also extremely lazy. And to reuse already published images? Why? Everyone who runs blots has hard drives worth of of unpublished images that could have been used as untraceable source material for fake data. What this tells me is that the true extent of data falsification is orders of magnitude greater than those few sloppy cases that get caught. The problem is not a single lab — it’s the general “big-publication-big-grant” incentive structure of world science.
"

 

[SurfingDoctor]

I thought the best comment on the NYT article was this one:

"Nikolay Kukushkin
Brooklyn, NY July 30
What gets omitted in the debate on this type of image manipulation is that it’s generally very easy to run a Western blot (the kind of experiment that produced the bands in question) adjusting it in such a way so as to achieve the desired look of the bands — and that way, no images would need to be manipulated, and you would never get caught. Doctoring images post-experiment is not just wrong — it’s also extremely lazy. And to reuse already published images? Why? Everyone who runs blots has hard drives worth of of unpublished images that could have been used as untraceable source material for fake data. What this tells me is that the true extent of data falsification is orders of magnitude greater than those few sloppy cases that get caught. The problem is not a single lab — it’s the general “big-publication-big-grant” incentive structure of world science.
"

“Did you increase the brightness and contrast?!”

 

[Mr.Smile12]

I look forward to GenAI modifications to Photoshop helping with "data analysis." 🙂

 

[Neuronix]

This is a huge problem. Our goal is not to get tons of research money. It is not to win a Fields or a Nobel. It is not be be a glorified department head or to fly around the world giving talks as "that expert".

To be that naive overly romantic researcher, our sole goal in all of this is to discover truth. That is it. Doing anything other than that might make you rich, famous, and revered. But it will not make you achieve the one goal that is the point of all of this.

I wish I could agree.

The more successful you are by those metrics of research money, papers, awards, titles, presentations, etc, the more resources and commitments you get.

Even someone with an R01 or two nowadays is not guaranteed job stability or the resources necessary to run a successful lab. All of this requires hard negotiating both with your own institution and with outside institutions if you're not getting what you need internally.

People often ask me what my biggest surprise was as a physician-scientist. For me it has been that just doing great work is not enough. I thought people would recognize what I was doing and give me what I needed to be successful. I thought that leadership would be mentors and sponsors who would make sure they gave me what I needed with their experience of what they needed for success.

The truth is that nobody is handing you anything. The institution will try to give you as little as possible. Every little thing has to be negotiated, sometimes as a hard ball negotiation. So if you want to have a lab with all the resources needed to find "truth", you will have to fight both to get it and to sustain it. That's how you stay in a powerful position to negotiate and sustain and grow your career--be recognized, be well funded, publish well and often...

Given this, it's no surprise to me how much of the science is not reproducible or outright fraud.

 

[ProReduction]

I wish I could agree.

The more successful you are by those metrics of research money, papers, awards, titles, presentations, etc, the more resources and commitments you get.

Even someone with an R01 or two nowadays is not guaranteed job stability or the resources necessary to run a successful lab. All of this requires hard negotiating both with your own institution and with outside institutions if you're not getting what you need internally.

People often ask me what my biggest surprise was as a physician-scientist. For me it has been that just doing great work is not enough. I thought people would recognize what I was doing and give me what I needed to be successful. I thought that leadership would be mentors and sponsors who would make sure they gave me what I needed with their experience of what they needed for success.

The truth is that nobody is handing you anything. The institution will try to give you as little as possible. Every little thing has to be negotiated, sometimes as a hard ball negotiation. So if you want to have a lab with all the resources needed to find "truth", you will have to fight both to get it and to sustain it. That's how you stay in a powerful position to negotiate and sustain and grow your career--be recognized, be well funded, publish well and often...

Given this, it's no surprise to me how much of the science is not reproducible or outright fraud.

I don't see us disagreeing at all. Just highlighting how it should be vs how it actually is.

 

[SurfingDoctor]

For those who don't recognize how manipulative people can be with the goal of climbing the academic ladder...

Apparent death hoax rocks Science Twitter

Scholars mourned the COVID-19-related death of a scientist who said she’d been forced to teach during the pandemic. Then they realized she probably wasn’t real.

www.insidehighered.com