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.
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.
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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.