February 17th, 2024
‘Dr. Yoon, who has said his research could lead to better cancer treatments, did not answer repeated questions. Attempts to speak to the other researcher, Changhwan Yoon, an associate research scientist at Columbia, were also unsuccessful… Eleven of the scientists’ co-authors, including researchers at Harvard, Duke and Georgetown, did not answer emailed inquiries.’

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!

February 16th, 2024
Honoré de Ballsack, as he is known by the wags at Xi’an Jiaotong University …

… makes his debut.

February 10th, 2024
The Lower Depths

UN Reno’s new engineering dean owns a business – a bogus journal that for a couple hundred bucks a pop from its, er, contributors, will pump out, say, a seven-sentence article with five authors.

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.”).

Nosy Andrew Gelman, hailing from a respectable university, brought the whole We Are Family thing to the attention of UNR’s student paper, which, as it takes down a dean, should be a contender for the same Pulitzer as that kid at Stanford.

*************

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 …

Gets better and better.

February 6th, 2024
Research Fraud: A Garden of Delights

 [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.

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February 1st, 2024
UD’s been feeling nostalgic for good old stem cell fraud…

… 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??

January 24th, 2024
‘[F]our former members of [Berislav] Zlokovic’s lab say the anomalies the whistleblowers found [in published research] are no accident. They describe a culture of intimidation, in which he regularly pushed them and others in the lab to adjust data. Two of them said he sometimes had people change lab notebooks after experiments were completed to ensure they only contained the desired results. “There were clear examples of him instructing people to manipulate data to fit the hypothesis,” one of the lab members says.’

SO reminds UD of an earlier tinpot dictator, Harvard’s disgraced Marc Hauser:

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.

January 23rd, 2024
The heavy in Harvard’s latest research hoax makes four million dollars a year in compensation.

Sing it.

Four million dollars, Laurie Glimcher

Plus corporate boards O greedy Glimcher

Rich and important, research dimmer,

No time at all for thoughts to simmer


Shine little fraud-worm, glimmer glimmer

While Harvard’s rep gets dimmer, dimmer

Look out!  The software’s gotcha, folks.

It’s coming for your hoax.

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[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.

January 22nd, 2024
‘Even if they know a colleague is a fraudster, they will continue citing their papers, and get cited back[.] [T]hey will positively peer review each other’s grants, papers and even award applications; they will … invite each other to conferences, and if despite all that precaution [the outing of research misconduct] arises, they will sit on each other’s research misconduct investigative committees. And of course they will continue setting up biotech companies together, and they will continue bullshitting the patients about their new breakthrough miracle cures for Alzheimer’s or other diseases.’

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.

January 22nd, 2024
The fog of PR wars

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.”

January 20th, 2024
“When a woman is tired of research misconduct allegations,” Samuel Johnson famously said, “she is tired of life.”

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 all Harvardy 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 forgeryAnd (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!!

September 28th, 2023
“Noctalgia” means “night grief”…

… and wants to capture humanity’s sadness at losing its dark skies.

UD thought of some other words:

UMBRALGIA

MELANOPENIA

DARKOLEPSY

July 22nd, 2023
Science Alert reports the real story.

It’s right there in their headline:

18-Year-Old’s Science Reporting Leads Stanford President to Quit

It takes a child to point out to the world that the emperor has no standards.

Everyone else – especially at places like Stanford, which make scientific entrepreneurs like Stanford’s president billionaires – plays the games, the insider trading, irreproducible results, conflict of interest, ghost writing, pharmawhore games.

And everyone’s making so much money playing the games that no one’s going to make a peep.

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So making noise about it takes some snot-nosed self-righteous little person at the student newspaper who thinks exposing corruption is more important than being able to stash billions away in your tax haven.

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July 19th, 2023
Bravo, Stanford Daily.

They’ve been hammering away at the research misconduct at some of the president’s neuroscience labs, and he has been as high-handed and obnoxious with the little buggers as you’d imagine. But the school journalists were right on the money. They persisted, and they brought the dude down. The school’s investigation found “repeated instances of manipulation of research data and/or subpar scientific practices from different people and in labs run by Dr. Tessier-Lavigne at different institutions.”

[Stanford’s] investigation [of Marc Tessier-Lavigne] took eight months, with one member stepping off after The Daily revealed that he maintained an $18 million investment in a biotech company Tessier-Lavigne cofounded. Reporting by The Daily this week shows that some witnesses to an alleged incident of fraud during Tessier-Lavigne’s time at the biotechnology company Genentech refused to cooperate because investigators would not guarantee them anonymity, even though they were bound by nondisclosure agreements.

Of course some sleuthing would turn up a financial conflict of interest on the committee: that’s SOOOO Stanford. And as to the skeeziness on protecting the identity of sources — why wouldn’t the committee guarantee anonymity, given the Genentech people’s legal vulnerability?

Much of the writing and reporting for the Daily has come from the genetically overdetermined Theo Baker.

This page has links to Baker’s reporting on Tessier-Lavigne.

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A comment in response to an article in the NYT:

In three successive labs headed by this man, data was manipulated (ie, fraudulent). The connecting link is Lavigne, who apparently rewarded post-docs who produced findings that advanced his career, and penalized those who couldn’t do so. The obvious conclusion is that he consistently cut corners and closed his eyes to what his behavior led underlings to do. And when the misconduct began to surface, he simply refused to issue the necessary corrections. He is not a victim or some innocent party here. His research was shabby and he has now got what he deserves: loss of his primary job and his reputation.

July 18th, 2023
‘[O]ne-quarter of [scientific] trials being untrustworthy might be an underestimate. “If you search for all randomized trials on a topic, about a third of the trials will be fabricated,” asserts Ian Roberts, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.’

We focus, at University Diaries, on the notoriously stinky field of psychology; what a comfort to know that dangerous fraud runs rampant in many fields of scientific research.

April 2nd, 2023
‘Students at a St. Louis medical school are questioning why they were never informed that their medical ethics professor had a felony conviction for … Medicare fraud.’

LOL. For-profit Ponce med school isn’t at all into full disclosure. Its CEO boasts of his Cambridge U. MBA, but what he got was one of those flimsy dippy give us all your money Executive MBAs where you show up once a month for a couple of years and then get to put Cambridge on your resume.

Guy says Ponce is all about social justice – helping non-traditional students get into medicine – but hello it’s for profit and charges big bucks…

At least Ponce has a sense of humor, what with choosing a woman convicted of Medicare fraud to teach its students medical ethics. She’s on probation at the moment, and has been barred forever from practicing in Illinois.

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