Nicely buttoned up and a med school prof at CUNY but for almost ten years he’s reportedly gotten multiple millions in NIH grants by the simple expediency of making shit up. I’m curing Alzheimer’s! Look at these results!
Happens a lot. The rewards are for results, so you produce results.
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Here’s another result. Stock in the company pushing this guy’s drug just plummeted.
Here’s another. The guy could go to prison for 55 years.
But he won’t. Too buttoned down. CUNY will dump him and he’ll have to pay some of the money back. He’ll leave the States for a job in Saudi Arabia. End of story.
15 percent fewer U.S. medical-school graduates applied to Kentucky residency programs in the 2023-24 academic year, part of a trend related to states’ strong anti-abortion laws enacted after the federal right to abortion was abolished… In OB-GYN programs, there was an even sharper 23% decline… Kentucky hospitals are already dealing with an “acute shortage” of health care workers, with nearly 13,000 job vacancies in hospitals at the end of 2022… [M]ore than half of Kentucky’s 120 counties didn’t have a single OB-GYN specialist in 2022-23…
“You wouldn’t come if you’re a young woman and know that if something happens to you, you might die because they aren’t gonna let you get the health care you need,” [explained one local pediatrician.]
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It’s already one of our very worst states, without adding a health system composed of the dumbest, most desperate MDs in America… or forget MDs… Kentucky will offer its populace their pick of degree mill grads from Dagestan and Irkutsk.
Our mentally retarded, dog-gunning states are now out of the closet – they’re the states with humongoid abortion bans. Turns out new MDs of all kindsdon’t want to start their careers there, while significant numbers of established ob/gyns can’t get out fast enough.
UD sees this as a win-win. Kristi Noem’s rabid pack doesn’t believe in science, anyway; they’re happy to pray to the lord for healing. Physicians want to help people who want to be helped. It all works out.
Next to go – medical schools in the earth is six thousand years old states?
Fine list of schools there, and who knew they all house mouse-killing factories? Who knew all of these fine schools host entire departments that acquire animals, give them cancer, write pretend articles about them, and then kill them? Cue Lenny, Of Mice and Men …
It seems a demoralizing sort of thing to do with the tax money you and I fork over… Makes us feel like idiots to know that for sixteen years we’ve been subsidizing bigtime a pointless bloody charade, a riot of animal torture in the name of careerism.
But at least the research fraud at Columbia University has seriously set back progress toward a cure for cancer! That much at least we can take pride in!
No questions asked. Publication faster than you can say No peer review.
Many of the articles were authored by said dean, his son, and his son’s wife – the sort of family affair that puts UD in mind of Italian university departments where much of the faculty shares the same last name (“The University of Bari, in the southern region of Puglia, springs to mind. The economics faculty must seem like a home from home for Professor Lanfranco Massari as he bumps into sons Lanfranco Jr, Gilberto and Giansiro, or his five grandchildren who work in the same department.”).
You know what’s gonna happen, right? After an indignant defense of the miscreant, the school takes forever to investigate. Eventually it issues a statement downplaying it all (“… made some mistakes…”), and then in a year or so it ever so quietly removes the dude from the deanship but keeps him in the engineering dept at the same salary (close to $400,000) he made as dean. Ta da!
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UPDATE: Students who spend $1,499 for Jones’s three-hour RFID certification course receive a free copy of his [self-published] book …
[S]teroid injections [are sometimes] given to women undergoing elective Caesarean sections to deliver their babies. These injections are intended to prevent breathing problems in newborns. There is a worry that they might cause damage to a baby’s brain, but the practice was supported by a review, published in 2018… However, when [a group of scientific sleuths] looked at this review, they found it included three studies that they had noted as unreliable. A revised review, published in 2021, which excluded these three, found the benefits of the drugs for such cases to be uncertain.
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[C]ritically ill patients undergoing surgery were once sometimes given starch infusions to boost their blood pressure. This was based in part on seven now discredited studies by Joachim Boldt, a German anaesthesiologist. A revised round-up of the evidence published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, in 2013, after his fabrications were discovered, concluded that giving starch infusions in these circumstances caused kidney damage and sometimes killed people.
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[F]or more than a decade cardiac patients in Europe were given beta-blockers before surgery, with the intention of reducing heart attacks and strokes—a practice that rested on a study from 2009 which was eventually determined to have been based, at least in part, on fabricated data. By one estimate, this approach may have caused 10,000 deaths a year in Britain alone. And a systematic review showing that infusion of a high-dose sugar solution reduces mortality after head injury was retracted after an investigation failed to find evidence that any of the trials included in it, which were all ascribed to the same researcher, had actually taken place.
… amid all the plagiarism misconduct, so Harvard’s Khalid Shah has arrived not a moment too soon.
Time was UD followed bogus stem cell studies constantly, with this almost immediately discontinued 2005 Korean stamp
the high point of the bogosity. But maybe word got around that bogus stem cell results were getting caught and careers ruined, because stem cell naughtiness kind of fell away.
But bogus, brain-related, stem cell research seems to be what has done in the much-laureled, over-extended, madly-publishing Shah, a man unfortunate enough to have been on the receiving end of one of Elisabeth M. Bik’s punishing data analyses.
Though Bik alleged 44 instances of data falsification in papers spanning 2001 to 2023, she said the “most damning” concerns appeared in a 2022 paper by Shah and 32 other authors in Nature Communications, for which Shah was the corresponding author.
Yeah you read dat right. 32 authors coming out of what —- one million thirty two labs, schools, departments, clinics, each location populated by poohbahs professors grad students scoundrels standers-by and why oh why is anyone surprised that research protocols like this generate longterm fraud??
In 2007, a member of the laboratory wanted to recode an experiment involving rhesus monkey behavior, due to “inconsistencies” in the coding.
“I am getting a bit pissed here. There were no inconsistencies!” Hauser responded, explaining how an analysis was done.
Later that day, the person resigned from the lab. “It has been increasingly clear for a long time now that my interests have been diverging sharply from what the lab does, and it seems like an increasingly inappropriate and uncomfortable place for me,” the person wrote.
[T]hese didn’t appear in a bunch of open-access journals that are run out of someone’s van in Samarkand – no, these are scattered across Science, Nature, Cell, and other marquee sites. And I can’t overemphasize just how many examples there are – [the whistle blowing] post just goes on and on, with cut-and-paste jobs in blots, graphs, photomicrographs, you name it.
For more than four years, Leonid Schneider and many other scientists have been screaming about the seemingly rampant fraud in bigshot Temple University brain researcher Domenico Pratico’s taxpayer funded published work.
Finally, this ancient story has hit the big time, and we’re getting from Pratico exactly what we’d expect: All 35 or so apparently fraudulent studies are the work of one evil anonymous grad student.
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Here’s the special current dilemma facing research fraudsters.
Their motives remain the same they’ve always been:
[T]he cutthroat pressures of academic publishing can tempt a person to cut corners. “When the results look better, you’ll have a better chance of getting the next grant or the next scientific award,” [Elisabeth Bik] said. “I think that’s a slippery slope that as a scientist, you need to be careful [about].”
BUT: “[B]etter detection of misconduct and error thanks to technology and a growing army of sleuths” is outing bad actors a mile a minute.
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What’s a cheater to do? The monetary/career incentives are now gargantuan, babe, so you’re not gonna want to stop duplicating images and shit like that. But unless you find some technological upgrade for your MO, you’re heading into a world of pain.
The only answer, far as UD can tell, is consultants. Go to Oracle, or some amazing enterprise like that, and find the world’s specialists in the emergent field of DDD (Deceptive Data Defense), geniuses who can anticipate what the sleuth army’s going to be focusing upon, and, with that knowledge, distort fraudulent results in undetectable ways.
Yeah, yeah, lotsa shit in there and we’re retracting up the wazoo but just as Pres Gay didn’t plagiarize, none of the Harvard scientists who had to retract all those articles committed research fraud. Don’t you worry your pretty little head! Harvard remains an unassailable and unassailed bastion of research integrity cuz the Harvard people didn’t mean to do whatever happened, and cuz some of the naughty bits came out of non-Harvard labs, and years of investigation of these nasty claims coming from some nobody, some GOTCHA, blogger, are obviously warranted before we can draw any conclusions at all about this odd event. You just sit tight and shut up and let us handle it.
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“Everybody — the author, the journal, the institution, everybody — is incentivized to minimize the importance of these things.”
UD nonetheless admits that whether it’s plagiarism, cell line mixups, data fabrication, or ye olde duplication of blots, bands, and plots — and even when it’s allHarvardy and all (UD has never been able to get it up for obscure regional public school research misconduct) — the thrill is gone. En effet, the president of the world’s most over-endowed university can burst plagiarizing out of a cake… four of its senior scientists can collapse drunk from data forgery… And (drum roll…) …
Shrug. All these high-level bogus scientific results! Put four hundred random signatories on your study; stick parts of it in this lab and that one and that one; practically explode under the pressure of the next round of funding, institutional and investor pressure (where the fuck’s the cure for enlarged prostate we’ve been pitching Pfizer), and competition with Luc Montagnier at Institut Pasteur, and whaddaya expect.
It’s the Pharmitary Industrial Complex. Its rewards are too ungraspably large – for you, your lab, your school, your colleagues – to pass up, even if the shit you’re passing off as legit sets back progress on cures. With just ein bisschen alteration of this or that data point… just a touch of treachery… you can set off a super-excited round of Special News Reports that will reach even the grateful ear of a King! The first recipient of the King Charles Enlarged Prostate Grant is … Harvard!!
