Posted on 11/23/2023 5:00:30 AM PST by karpov
Once a rarity, research fraud is on the rise at some of the nation’s most prestigious universities. What is most disturbing is that the fraud in question too often involves tenured professors with sterling reputations who betray the public’s trust.
Most recently, the venue was Florida State University, where Professor Eric Stewart was terminated for “research misconduct” and for the unprecedented number of his articles that were retracted. Next in line was the City University of New York, which found “egregious misconduct” in data management and recordkeeping on the part of Hoau-Yan Wang, a professor in its School of Medicine who was working on an Alzheimer’s drug.
Earlier this decade, Harvard Business School accused Francesca Gino, a prominent professor, of data fraud in four behavioral-science papers. (Ironically, Gino’s research concerned why people lie.) Acting on a tip from the social-science research blog Data Colada, Harvard placed Gino on unpaid leave and is seeking to revoke her tenure. After Harvard came Stanford, where the president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, resigned after a series of investigations revealed that he had failed to live up to standards “of scientific rigor and process” and had not corrected the record on numerous occasions. The founders of Retraction Watch estimate that “at least 100,000 retractions should occur every year.” When retractions are underperformed or underreported, public confidence in research is severely undermined.
In the past, universities were reluctant to hold their faculty accountable for misconduct because research brought in millions of taxpayer dollars. Schools still want the money, of course, but the fear of exposure on the Internet or consequences in U.S. News & World Report’s annual rankings has left them with little choice but to intervene. That explains what happened at Harvard, Stanford, and CUNY most recently.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
Or incentives are needed in exposure. Sounds like they get discovered but the process either doesn’t get started properly, or takes forever.
When corrupt Democrats seize power they will use ‘science’ for political purposes. So, if your university ever wants to see any more grants, you better ‘get it right’ on Global Warming, Vaccines, etc.
“The relentless pursuit of taxpayer funding has eliminated curiosity, basic competence, and scientific integrity in many fields.”
As I remember, my university took about half of federal research dollars awarded to its researchers for university overhead.
Perhaps research funding means should be shifted from federal agencies to corporations via tax law changes. Perhaps a 10% R&D tax credit is in order.
Part of this is due to an academic culture where truth and facts increasingly don’t matter. If you FEEL you got a specific result, then that’s good enough. And if your feelings results in people dying, then that’s just their tough luck.
How would changing funding from the federal government to private corporations stop fraud?
I could see how shifting the burden of funding to corporations would impact research, but it wouldn’t be good. Corporations are more interested in the end product, not basic research. Universities focus on basic research. (Basic research is the research into how stuff works.) Why would corporations fund that when there is no foreseeable profit in it? If corporations are funding research, then what incentive would they have to fund students going to graduate school? If they did fund graduate education, what kinds of obligations would the corporations require of students? Would they limit them only to certain types of research that the corporation would find valuable? What would the impact be on professors?
My graduate education was paid by a fellowship from an endowment, a fellowship donated by a biotech company, and several researchships funded by Superfund, the government agency which oversees toxic waste cleanup and research into toxic waste. That means my tuition was about 70% paid by the federal government. My research was funded through state and federal grants.
I think the issue is best addressed by focusing on the research fraud. When I was in graduate school, we had to take ethics classes. I’m pretty sure the people who choose to commit fraud took those classes, too. Maybe internal audits at the universities would help to control fraud.
Research which eventually winds up being productive does not proceed according to a timeline.
Lots of tasks academic biomedical research is supposed to be working on involve discovering basic facts underlying diseases where those facts are currently unknown.
Two things have changed the enterprise fundamentally - the drive towards “partnerships” with industry, and the involvement of politicians with goals of their own.
Since industry is frantic for “progress”, and politicians are frantic for power, and since most research scientists’ employment is year-to-year and contingent on providing lots of both to achieve “funding”, the forces which encourage corruption are enormous.
In medical science, the moon landing in 1969 was one of the worst things that could have happened. Every lab I was ever part of, or adjacent to, had to deal with “If we can land a man on the Moon, why can’t we [do XYZ].
Of course, the Moon landing was just an extension of hitting a deer with a rock, needing German engineering to produce an arm powerful enough to throw the “rock” and computational skill (mostly done without computers) to plot trajectories for the various “rocks” involved. The Alzheimer’s disease problem (for example) isn’t like this at all.
This is the cause of all the fraud, and in some ways what’s worse than fraud, which is willingness to express hypotheses or interesting possibilities as “settled science”, to gain power, prestige, money, and to satisfy all the people who “Follow The Science™”.
It’s a big mess and it’s not getting better soon.
Straining out a gnat, swallowing a camel.
This is why nobody cares about your. literature postings on the clot shots.
Dingbat.
.
Great article. Explains lot
Altogether by accident, and right before their departure, SOMEONE took the trouble to audit the budget for this 'research' junket.
We saw photos of the luxurious beachfront property they rented for their stay in Bermuda. Lots of other irregularities as well. So, that means they were used to playing fast and loose with grant funds because there was no proper oversight.
There needs to be a higher level of peer review. Right now it has been degraded to something slightly above a grammar and spelling check, and a look for obvious flaws. That might be enough for a mathematical theorem where the writing is the work rather than a summary or description. Peer review needs to be upgraded to actually replicating the work. That could eliminate outright fraud or statistical anomalies being confused with proof.
Some people have their heads so far inside the corruption they don’t even see the corruption.
But perhaps they do.
“...they will use ‘science’ for political purposes...”
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Ummm...where have you been? Science is already politicized and socialized beyond repair. And it has steadily and relentlessly been moving away from a discipline based upon factual and empirical data to a bureaucratic mechanism for the past 30 years. Climate change, environmentalism, COVID, and on, and on and on.
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