Fraud, bias, negligence, weaknesses, and hype in science
So much relies on science. But what if science itself can’t be relied on?
The scientific method involves a process of trial-and-error until hypotheses are demonstrated and proven by transparent and verifiable means. Flawed hypotheses become junk science when flaws are ignored or when cosmetically enhanced results are promoted as fact.
Of scientific consensus, Michael Crichton said: “The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.”
Murderous curves and models of hell: the numbers kill more than the Covid (1/5-21): All this would be laughing if these projections of hell did not transform our lives into (inter) pathetic remake of One Day Without End, and if they did not continue to be relayed and validated by politicians and the media. Those responsible (or dare we say the culprits): epidemiologists, modelers, bio-statiticians may be wrong and still be wrong, not only do they not recognize their mistakes, but they persist in producing new ones. A real passion. Knowing that a broken pendulum gives the right time twice a day, they surely hope to end up being right on something. Maybe around the "twelfth wave"? Or after the discovery of a variant from space?
In a rational world, dangerous incompetents would be removed from their posts. In ours, they squat the media and torture freedoms.
Junk Science is a term used to describe the deliberate publication and promotion of flawed research, data, and claims that are generated and promoted – usually for financial or political gain. Examples:
The healthcare industry uses junk science to market and sell expensive tests and procedures that have little or no value in the diagnosis or treatment of disease.
Attorneys use junk science to prosecute the innocent and defend the guilty.
Doctors use junk science to convince healthy people they are sick.
Politicians, university professors and teachers use junk science to promote political agendas.
The media use junk science to generate hysteria to market fake diseases, tests and treatments for their pharmaceutical and healthcare advertisers. Media hysteria increases readership and viewership, sells advertising, and advances personal, organizational, social, and political agendas.
“Risk assessment” experts and lobbyists use junk science to defend their corporate clients.
Activists use junk science to support and promote their social and political agendas.
Government officials use junk science to expand their authority, increase budgets and advance political agendas.
Politicians use junk science to gain support from special interest groups, to be politically correct or to advance their own personal political beliefs.
Scientists and universities use junk science to achieve fame and generate revenue.
Science Fictions (2020) is the new popular-science book by Stuart Ritchie. It presents an insider’s view on how fraud, bias, negligence, and hype affect scientific research, and undermine the search for truth.
“A timely, hair-raising must-read.” An unnerving yet much-needed analysis of why so many scientists publish nonsense:
“A lecturer in social, genetic, and development psychiatry, Ritchie begins with an account of a respected Cornell psychology professor asking subjects to guess an object concealed behind one of two screens. As expected, they succeeded about half the time—unless the object was lurid, such as a pornographic picture. Then the success rate was over 53%, which, according to his 2011 paper, was “statistically significant” and evidence for extrasensory perception. The media trumpeted the study, and the professor appeared on talk shows. Good studies are repeatable, but when researchers tried it again, they found nothing. Subjects guessed correctly about half the time, pornography or not. The researcher remains a respected Cornell professor. What happened? Ritchie answers with a frighteningly well-documented follow-up to a 2005 article entitled “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” He makes it clear that fraud happens regularly. Asked anonymously, 2% of scientists admit to faking data, so the true incidence is undoubtedly higher. Far more disturbing is the massaging of data. As one wit said, “if you torture the data enough, it will confess to almost anything.” Thirteen percent of papers contain serious errors, and most favor the author’s conclusion. Bias distorts research, and serious, well-meaning scientists offend regularly. Everyone deplores media hype, but scientists increasingly litter papers with exuberant adjectives like “innovative,” “unique,” and “groundbreaking.” Ritchie admits that editors, academics, and foundations are growing less tolerant of scientists who game the system, but the difficulty is that scientists, being human, pursue rewards: jobs, promotions, research grants, fame. These follow dramatic announcements and media attention. Career advancement depends on sheer number of publications, and quality becomes irrelevant. Reform requires that scientists search for nature’s secrets purely for the joy of discovery. Some already follow this ideal, but readers may wonder if it will catch on.”
1/1-21: Blowing the Whistle on Research Grant Fraud: Reporting cases of misconduct in the context of federal science funding can be a daunting task. But mechanisms to support whistleblowers do exist.
30/12-20: List of retracted COVID-19 papers grows past 70 — «As Retraction Watch readers may know, as part of keeping our database of retractions up to date, we’ve been publishing a running list of COVID-19 papers that have been retracted. That list has been steadily growing since the end of April, but yesterday the number jumped from 45 to 72, so we thought we’d walk through where the additional retractions came from.»
A look back at retraction news in 2020 — and ahead to 2021: «Like everyone else, it seems, we here at Retraction Watch are more than ready to put 2020 to bed. It was a bittersweet year to celebrate our tenth anniversary and reflect on what we’ve learned. But the work never stops, so as we’ve done every year since 2010, we’ll take a look at the most notable retractions of the last 12 months, and review some important milestones and events.«
28/10-20: Research fraud: a long-term problem exacerbated by the clamour for research grants — Scientific fraud takes many forms from the spectacular deception of fabricated artefacts to unnoticed and extensive plagiarism. Whether it is on the increase as Bavley (2012) claimed, is a moot point because there has surely always been more fraud perpetuated than exposed (Fanelli, 2009). Exposing research is not easy and, despite the review process for journal articles and the possibility of replication, most exposure of dubious practices is the result of revelations by whistleblowers (Stroebe et al., 2012).
25/10-18: What a massive database of retracted papers reveals about science publishing’s ‘death penalty’ — «Nearly a decade ago, headlines highlighted a disturbing trend in science: The number of articles retracted by journals had increased 10-fold during the previous 10 years. Fraud accounted for some 60% of those retractions; one offender, anesthesiologist Joachim Boldt, had racked up almost 90 retractions after investigators concluded he had fabricated data and committed other ethical violations. Boldt may have even harmed patients by encouraging the adoption of an unproven surgical treatment. Science, it seemed, faced a mushrooming crisis.»
20/9-2018: This research group seeks to expose weaknesses in science — and they’ll step on some toes if they have to: In August 2011, Diederik Stapel, a prominent psychologist and a dean at Tilburg University here, confessed to faking data for dozens of papers over 15 years. As part of an internal investigation, Marcel van Assen, a psychologist in the university's Department of Methodology and Statistics, spent months looking into Stapel's data, methods, and results. The scope of the fraud was staggering, but just as alarming as the fabricated data, Van Assen says, were the flawed analyses, rife with statistical problems, that Stapel had performed. The fact that all his papers had been approved by co-authors and published in respectable journals meant psychology had a larger problem, Van Assen says. "I thought, holy shit, this is not a characteristic just of Stapel or Tilburg."
Offline: What is medicine's 5 sigma? (11/04-2015): The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. As one participant put it, “poor methods get results”.
The Office of Medical & Scientific Justice (OMSJ) was a private investigation agency which has ended all operations after six successful years of operations between July 2009 — May 2015.
The Politics of Medicine Pt 3 Scientific Studies: Clinical Evidence or a License to Kill? — The published results of clinical studies are so far removed from the actual data that it is a crapshoot whether or not the conclusions have any purpose other than marketing. It is a forgone conclusion that the published results will be favorable to the drug because the company wouldn’t go to all the expense for an article that would not translate into sales. And while the FDA usually has all the data available to them, their policy is to make no comment to the public if results show a negative outcome in order to protect their customer – the drug company.
The issue of funding bias in research results has been addressed by many epidemiologists as well as the venerable independent research group, The Cochrane Collaboration, and the consensus is always the same: the more financial conflict of interest, the more likely the findings will support the product being studied. Dr. John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist based both in Greece and at Tufts University Medical School, has stated that not only do most findings simply repeat the prevailing bias without objectively examining the issue, but, in fact,most research findings are false.
Official Stories: Counter-Arguments for a Culture in Need — "Official stories exist to protect officials." With the opening line as our guide, we're going to pry open the vault of "official-dom" and see what lies beneath. Drawing information from 10 years of investigative journalism, Liam invites you to join the hunt for the details that lie just beneath the surface. In this heavily-researched but irreverent book, we'll look under the rocks and stones of our culture: From CIA and JFK, to 9/11 and Shakespeare; from Vaccination to HIV to Big Bang theory, Darwinism, Plate Tectonics and more. Think of it as a corrective textbook to all the tales we were taught in school. Why do we accept some stories as true when the details so obviously contradict the headlines? We’re going to find out what’s real, what’s true, and what’s just an “official story.”
Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers: The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense.
Investigating journals: The dark side of publishing - The explosion in open-access publishing has fuelled the rise of questionable operators.
Science Fictions (2008): A quarter-century after the discovery of HIV and the invention of the HIV blood test at the Pasteur Institut in Paris, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to Pasteur researchers Francoise Barre and Luc Montagnier. Not included in that award was Robert Gallo, who for many of those 25 years had attempted to claim credit as the discoverer, and later the co-discoverer, of HIV. With that verdict, science at last accepted what the evidence had long shown, that the fundamental discoveries leading to the recognition of HIV as the cause of AIDS had occurred in France, and not in Gallo’s laboratory at the U.S. National Cancer Institute. One of the most divisive and destructive disputes in modern scientific history had at last been laid to rest.
Who pays for the pizza? Redefining the relationships between doctors and drug companies. 1: Entanglement (May 2003): Twisted together like the snake and the staff, doctors and drug companies have become entangled in a web of interactions as controversial as they are ubiquitous. As national drug bills rise at rates that vastly exceed those of inflation, this entanglement and the subsequent flows of money and influence are attracting increasing public and academic scrutiny.
“The medical profession is being bought by the pharmaceutical industry, not only in terms of the practice of medicine, but also in terms of teaching and research,” says Arnold Relman, a Harvard professor and former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, whose recent critique of the industry's influence in health care, published in the New Republic, won him and his co-author one of the top awards for magazine journalism in the United States. “The academic institutions of this country are allowing themselves to be the paid agents of the pharmaceutical industry. I think it's disgraceful.”
Who pays for the pizza? Redefining the relationships between doctors and drug companies. 2: Disentanglement (May 2003): If the American Medical Student Association has anything to do with it, relations between doctors and the pharmaceutical industry will soon look considerably different. Representing 30 000 students, interns, and residents throughout the United States, the association is running a campaign—PharmFree—calling for an end to gift giving, free lunches, sponsored education, and paid speaking.
How much modern biology is a fraud? The revolutionary work of Harold Hillman MB, BSc, MRCS, PhD, and others.
Who was Harold Hillman?
Useful sites and publications:
Retraction Watch: Tracking retractions as a window into the scientific process
