[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 And a systematic review showing that infusion of a high-dose sugar solution reduces mortality after head injury was retracted after an investigation failed to find evidence that any of the trials included in it, which were all ascribed to the same researcher, had actually taken place.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!!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Early studies of Non-Specific Characterological Assholism (N-S CA), originally denominated the AH-Factor, focused on its chromosomal provenance. Later studies have tended to examine particular sociocultural applications, as in the question posed here: How long, and to what effect, do specific instances of N-S CA linger? If, for example, a subject is a notorious asshole in 2014, will he suffer measurable consequences roughly a decade later?
II
A recent tenure denial at Harvard University offers a suggestive case.
In 2014 Benjamin Edelman, an untenured Harvard prof
ordered take-out from Sichuan Garden, a family-run restaurant in Brookline…
[Edelman] also has a consulting business, for which Bloomberg Business reports [he] charges clients $800 an hour.
The food cost $4 more than he had calculated, because prices on the website had not been updated. The professor complained in an email. Ran Duan, whose family owns the restaurant, apologized and ultimately offered to return $4.
Widely reported at the time, the incident generated strikingly negative attention, and two limericks.
III
Professor Edelman, in suing Harvard for the tenure denial, identifies as root cause the 2014 incident.
In a civil lawsuit against Harvard filed Tuesday in the Suffolk County Superior Court, Edelman alleges that the 2014 email correspondence — for which he later apologized at the Business School’s request — resurfaced when he was being evaluated for tenure, among other concerns of misconduct…
Edelman said he believes the negative publicity from the Sichuan Garden incident was a key reason for his tenure denial, adding there is “some fundamental truth to the centrality of that media disaster.”
“Had it not been for those stupid restaurant emails, I would have been just fine,” he said.
IV CONCLUSION
Evidence here points to the possibility that, in particular institutional settings, and under particular rule-bound circumstances, fulminating N-S CA may indeed impede personal advancement over the course of a lifetime. These results however are very preliminary and somewhat vitiated by their association with Harvard, unusually sensitive to being perceived as full of assholes.
Pool stammered and said he disagreed with the implication that Jews control the media.
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[Alex Jones] … seemed uncharacteristically rattled as Ye began talking favorably about Hitler.
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Physicians are starting to see a subvariant of aphasia which they are calling afascia: The sudden inability to articulate your fascism, typically occurring when publicly confronted by a more vehement fascist speaker.
In two recent cases, recounted here, fascist adherents “stammered,” and were “rattled,” in the face of a fellow fascist who failed to disguise – as both of the adherents have learned to do – his murderous antisemitism.
Afascia robs its victims of the capacity to speak their fascism only in the specific circumstance of overpowering homicidal verbal challenge; so the good news is that it is highly treatable by the simple expedient of avoiding the most blatant and articulate fascists. Researchers are also looking into identifying fascists of this sort and subjecting them to The Soros Method: a short course of treatment during which they learn to reference the name George Soros whenever they want to say We need to bring back Hitler to kill all the Jews.
Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam. New York Times
George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days. The Electron Pencil
It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading. Professor Mondo
There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life. AcademicPub
You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics. truffula, commenting at Historiann
Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption. Dagblog
University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings. Dissent: The Blog
[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho... The Wall Street Journal
Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo. Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education
[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile. Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University
Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure. Roland Greene, Stanford University
The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan... Carlat Psychiatry Blog
Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant... Perplexed with Narrow Passages
Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here... Outside the Beltway
From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip... Money Law
University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it. Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association
The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ... Medical Humanities Blog
I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic... Ducks and Drakes
As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ... The Bitch Girls
Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard. Tenured Radical
University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know. Mary Beard, A Don's Life
[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter. More magazine, Canada
If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot. Notes of a Neophyte
