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.
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.
Someone snooped a half-finished draft of mine off GitHub and...actually got it published in a real journal: https://forbetterscience.com/2024/05/29/who-are-you-matthew-...
In spite of having a full commit log (with GitHub verified commits!!!) of both the code AND the paper, both arxiv and the journal didn't seem to care or bother at all.
Anyhow, I highly recommend reading the for better science blog. It's incredible how rampant fraud truly is. This applies to multiple nobel prize winners as well. It's nuts.
That includes people who consider themselves professional scientists, PhD‘s authors, leaders etc.
The only people I know who live “scientifically” consistently are people considered “neurodivergent”, along the autism-adhd-odd spectrum, which forces them into creating the type of mechanisms that are actually scientific and as required by their conditions.
Nevertheless, we should expect better from people; and on average need to do better in aligning how they think to how science, when robustly demonstrated, demonstrates with staggering predictability how the world works, compared to all other methods of understanding the universe.
The fact that the people carrying the torch of science don’t live up to the standard is expected - hence peer review.
This is an indictment of the incentives and pace at which bad science is revealed (like in this case) is always too slow, but science is the one place where eventually you’re going to either get exposed as a fraud or never followed in the first place.
There’s no other philosophy that has a higher bar of having to conform with all versions of reality forever.
Basically a wrong study results over the years may ended up affecting millions (if not billions) of people. Someone(at every level of the chain) should pay a compounding punishment for a verified fraud.
At the same time, this shouldn't prevent a Nobel upcoming scientist being bold. After all, science is all about pushing the boundaries of understanding or doing.
The expose article writes:
> "UCSD neuroscientist Edward Rockenstein, who worked under Masliah for years, co-authored 91 papers that contain questioned images, including 11 as first author. He died in 2022 at age 57."
They say nothing else about this. But looking at Rockenstein's obituary, indications are that it was suicide. (It was apparently sudden, at quite a young age, and there are many commenters on his memorial page "hoping that his soul finds peace," and expressing similar sentiments.)
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.
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.
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.
This is absolutely something that we should routinely be doing, though.
Prediction: papers stop using pictures entirely
I can't imagine any other vocation where you can take public and private money, then cheat the stakeholders into thinking they got what they payed for, only to just walk away from it all when you are found out. Picture a contractor claiming to have build a high-rise for a developer, doctored photos of it, and then just go oops moneys all gone with no consequences when the empty lot is discovered years later.
I really feel stupid asking experienced developers to do FizzBuzz. Not one has ever failed. But I have heard tons of anecdotes of utterly incompetent developers being weeded out by it.
In my last workplace, self-evaluation (and, therefore, self-promotion) was mandatory on a semi-annual cycle and heavily tied to compensation. It's not surprising that it became a breeding ground for fraud. Outside of a strong moral conviction (which I would argue is in declining), these sorts of systems will likely always be targets for fraudulent behavior.
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.
Edit: found this article which says everything I wanted to say but couldn’t put into words. https://slate.com/technology/2017/04/we-need-a-github-for-ac...
Add another aspect here that LaTeX is a bit outdated in 2024 (I know that’s controversial! Sorry) and that we can do a lot better for digesting and displaying information than A4 sheets of paper, for example responsiveness, audit/comment logs/references to individual paragraphs/revision logs, and the ability to click figures and see underlying data or high resolution copies. This would be great in a web-based editor medium. Also the ability to “fork” a paper would be fantastic. And to automatically track and generate references, then roll it up as back/forward reference analytics for the authors so they can see impact.
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.
I got a taste of this in my high school honors biology class. I decided to do a survey of redwing blackbirds in my town. I had a great time, there was a cemetery across the street from my house with a big pond, where 6-8 males hung out. I was excited when later in the season several females also arrived and took up residence.
I eagerly wrote up my results in a paper. I thought I did "A" level work but was distressed when the teacher gave me B- or C+. She said "My husband and I are birdwatchers who have published papers on redwing mating habits in the area, and we haven't seen any females this year. Neither did one of your classmates who watched redwings in her neighborhood." While she did not directly in writing accuse me of fraud, she strongly implied it.
I told her to grab her binoculars and hang out at the cemetery one morning. She declined, as she was a published authority and didn't need to actually observe with her own eyes. IIRC I had photos but they were from faraway with a Kodak Instamatic (this was the mid-'80s), so she didn't accept those as evidence.
I often wonder if my life would have gone in a different direction if I had a science teacher who actually followed the scientific method of direct observation! It didn't come easy to me, but I was very interested in science before this showed me clearly that science is just another human endeavor, replete with bias, ego, horseshit, perverse incentives, and gatekeeping.
That is assume that person publishes results that: "factor X seems to lead to outcome Y". Many other scientists will then start trying to establish the low-hanging fruit result: "something that looks like factor X seems to lead something that looks like outcome Y". In other words they will be performing a sort of replication but in a novel way. If the result is fraudulent, then none of these results will materialise. In other words I don't get how a paper can be fraudulent AND highly-cited without escaping scrutiny, unless we are talking of a fraud mafia.
Here I am using the field of pure mathematics as a mental model. Assume a person publishes a mathematical result with a flawed proof that escapes scrutiny. If this result is used by sufficient number of mathematicians (especially the lemmas used to prove the theorem) then fairly quickly it will end up generating self contradictory results.
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.
>After finishing my PhD I went to a university-led session on ‘What Comes Next.’ What I heard sounded a lot like “now, you beg for money.” It was so depressing to think about all the very clever people in that room who had worked so very hard only to find out they had no financial security and would be spending most of their days asking for money. I realised that even what I thought of as the ‘safe path’ was uncertain so I may as well go after what I truly want. That led me here.
EDIT: Typos
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.
> cerebrolysin
This was discussed here recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41239161
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.
People are not outraged in academia that the primary goal is fame/popularity (rather than knowledge, technical ability), they're outraged that someone is cheating in this game to get ahead.
This is happening across the spectrum tbh, as the world becomes increasingly monocultural and winner-takes-it-all social schema. People talk about anthopocene, but look at human social cultures : the millions of ways of living (with dignity mind you) sustained by < 1B population from as late as a 100 years back is now down to 1 or 2 at best.
In such a vast pool, this kind of stuff is not only bound to happen, but is the optimal way forward (okay, may be not such blatant stuff). Honor-code etc. are BS unenforceable measures that are game-theoretically unstable (and kill-off populations that stick to it). See what the finance industry does for instance.
All of them
Or, in the other hand, now you don't have to manipulate images, you can just generate the ones you need.
I am conforted that there are still real journalists such as those at science, doing fantastic work and pulling on a thread, wherever it may lead , reputations be damned.
Kudos to the PubPeer scientists for spotting the problem. Hat tip to you.
Last but not least, never forget that the free flow of information allowed this fraud to be uncovered. Truth and "moderation" (of the censorship/disinformation kind) cannot simultaneously exist.
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.
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
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.
Science is the best way we have of understanding reality, but sadly it is mediated by humans. Just because a human is a scientist, it doesn't make them infallible.
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.
“I hate AI, I don’t know what’s real anymore”
I think we’re about to see something much more extreme than the early ‘net days of “photoshop!” rage at clever fakes
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.
Why? The misaligned incentives that drive (in my opinion) otherwise-well-meaning human beings to fraud in the biomedical sciences stem from competition for increasingly-scarce resources, and the deeply and fundamentally-broken culture that develops as a result. The only thing that will propel the needed culture shift is for the people who provide the money to see, from the visibility provided by such scandals, just how bad the problem is, and to basically withdraw funding unless and until the changes happen.
Some of those changes include:
1. Reducing competition for funds by reducing the number of research-focused faculty positions (a.k.a. principal investigators, or PIs) across the board. When people's livelihoods depend on the ridiculous 5% odds of winning an important grant competition, they WILL cheat. As it stands, 20 well-funded scientists are probably more productive than 100 modestly-to poorly-funded, most of whom will do nothing meaningful or useful while trying to show "productivity" until the next funding cycle.
2. Reducing competition for funds by providing reasonably-assured research funding, tied to a diversity of indices of productivity, NOT just publications. As an example, a PI should be hired with the understanding that they'll need `x` dollars over the next 10 years to do their work. If those dollars aren't available, the person shouldn't be hired.
3. Reducing the number of PhD- and post-doctoral trainees across the board. These folks are mostly used as cheap labor by people who are well-aware, and don't care, that there will likely be no jobs for them.
4. Turning those PhD and post-doctoral positions into staff scientist positions, for people who want to do the research, but don't want the hassle of lab management. Staff scientist positions already exist, but in the current environment, when a PI can pay a postdoc $40k a year to work 80 - 100 hours a week, versus a staff scientist $80k a year to work 40 hours a week, guess which they pick.
5. Professionalizing the PhD stream. A person with a PhD in the biomedical sciences should be a broadly-capable individual able to be dropped, after graduation, into an assortment of roles, either academic or industrial. Right now, the incentive to produce publications tends to create people who are highly expert in a tiny, niche area, while having variable to nil competencies in anything else. Professionalization increases the range of post-PhD options for these folks, only one of which is academia. As it stands now, there's the tendency to feel that one has nothing if one doesn't have publications -- which increases the tendency towards fraud.
This really is quite unfortunate.
The solution starts when you say, 'we committed fraud - our field, our publication, the scientific enterprise. What are we going to do?'
Does the author really have no idea about these things? That they occur?
It's hard to tell at this point if it's just selection bias or if the scientific fraud problem has outgrown the scope of self-correction.
To selfishly discard the collective attention of scientific experts for undue gain is despicable and should disqualify a person from all professional status indefinitely in addition to any legal charges.
I deeply respect anyone whose desires align with winning the collective game of understanding that science should be. I respect even more those folks who speak up when their colleagues or even friends seek to hack academia like this guy did.
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.
There were, and currently are, people suffering from Parkinsons disease whom are being subjected to greater suffering, knowingly, to further this person's career.
This is Nazi and Tuskegee experiment level evil. This person should go to jail. Not US jail, international jail. These are crimes against humanity.
https://youtu.be/PbAVTEbGF3c?si=nAivVaZEI0gMRzX9
(Such a good discussion!)
Alzheimer’s research has been a mess for 30 years as Karl Herrup argues persuasively in How Not to Study a Disease:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262546010/how-not-to-study-a-di...
Big results are rewarded, the process is considered worthless?
Both perspectives are required to understand reality. [1]
It's time to update science.
[1] "Systems Engineering: A systemic and systematic methodology for solving complex problems." Joseph Kasser, 2019. p. 17
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.
Good luck convincing an anti-vaxer now.
It was already hard before, but now they have plenty of amunition.
You get what you incentivize.
Same as white collar crime, except in academia.
> Splicing, cloning, overlaying, copy-and-pasting
Is there no 3nd-party verification?
no requirement to send original blot-papers somewhere?
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.
In cases like this where the fraud is so blatant and solely done for the purposes of aggrandizing Masliah's reputation (and getting more money), and where it caused real harm, we need to treat these as the serious crimes that they are.
I spent almost 10 years of my life as a founder of a mental health technology startup and the day we got acquired was a huge relief — I could finally get out of that industry — an industry that is much more about academic politics than actually solving anything. Seeing the maneuverings behind the scenes of the DSM-V, diagnostic codes, etc., was profound enough to destroy any idealism I might have felt towards that industry. (And yes, it’s an industry.)
Luckily in fields such as climate science or virology, there is never fraud. Good thing too since a lot of our governmental policies result from those fields. (And yes, that is sarcasm.)
“Science” feels very much like the Catholic Church — many people with good intentions, but there have been enough people participating in bad things that it poisons the entire institution and degrades whatever little faith people might have had remaining.
Follow the science indeed.
I wonder if a market-driven approach could work here, where hedge funds hire external labs to attempt to reproduce the research underlying new pharmaceutical companies or trials and then short the companies whose results they can’t replicate before results get reported.
> Indeed, NIH told Science it does not routinely conduct such reviews, because of the difficulty of the process. “There is no evidence that such proactive screening would improve, or is necessary to improve, the research integrity environment at NIH,” the agency added.
LOL. Here are your tax dollars at work, Americans.
https://hub.scroll.pub/?template=paper
Happy to provide personal help onboarding those who want to use this to publish their scientific work. [email protected]
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.
Remember things like this the next time you try to mandate injections with no long term research.
We need to seriously rethink our approaching to stewarding these institutions and ideas, public trust is rightfully plummeting.
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?
I've done Biology and CS for almost 20 years now, I've worked at four of the top ten research institutions in the world. The ratio of honest to bullshit academics is alarmingly low.
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" in these institutions. Sexual harassment and sexual abuse is through the roof.
I am very glad that, slowly, these things are starting to vent out. This is one real swamp that needs to be drained.
Some smartass could come up and say "where is your evidence for this?". This is what allows this abhorrent behavior to thrive. Do you think these people are not smart enough to commit these crimes in covert ways? The reason why they do it is because they know no one will find out and they will get away with it.
What's the solution? I've thought about this a lot, a lot. I think a combination of policies and transparency could go a long way.
Because of what they did to me, I am fully committed to completely destroy and expunge people who do these things from academia. If you, for whatever reason, would like to help me on this mission, shoot me an email, there's a few ideas already taking shape towards that goal.
"The crises that face science are not limited to jobs and research funds. Those are bad enough, but they are just the beginning. Under stress from those problems, other parts of the scientific enterprise have started showing signs of distress. One of the most essential is the matter of honesty and ethical behavior among scientists.
The public and the scientific community have both been shocked in recent years by an increasing number of cases of fraud committed by scientists. There is little doubt that the perpetrators in these cases felt themselves under intense pressure to compete for scarce resources, even by cheating if necessary. As the pressure increases, this kind of dishonesty is almost sure to become more common.
Other kinds of dishonesty will also become more common. For example, peer review, one of the crucial pillars of the whole edifice, is in critical danger. Peer review is used by scientific journals to decide what papers to publish, and by granting agencies such as the National Science Foundation to decide what research to support. Journals in most cases, and agencies in some cases operate by sending manuscripts or research proposals to referees who are recognized experts on the scientific issues in question, and whose identity will not be revealed to the authors of the papers or proposals. Obviously, good decisions on what research should be supported and what results should be published are crucial to the proper functioning of science.
Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face.
We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch. That is not meant to be an exhortation. It is meant simply to be a statement of a fact known to be true with mathematical certainty, if science is to survive at all. The new structure will come about by evolution rather than design, because, for one thing, neither I nor anyone else has the faintest idea of what it will turn out to be, and for another, even if we did know where we are going to end up, we scientists have never been very good at guiding our own destiny. Only this much is sure: the era of exponential expansion will be replaced by an era of constraint. Because it will be unplanned, the transition is likely to be messy and painful for the participants. In fact, as we have seen, it already is. ..."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.
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.
It would be something you could offer to journals perhaps as a business. Sort of "peer reviewed and fraud analyzed" kinda service.
What is truly sad for me is the 'wrong paths' many hard working and well meaning scientists get deflected down while someone cheats to get more 'impact' points.