Now that he has ignominiously exited Stanford’s presidency, retracting multiple papers as he goes, we can leave Marc Tessier-Lavigne behind, and take up the even ickier case of Harvard’s Francesca Gino.
Ja, Stanford, Harvard; and these are bigshots, humongous success stories, whose work is cited tens of thousands of times.
Both seem to have arrived at the ability to undermine vast fields of research through the simple expediency of making up their results.
Now Gino, as a social sciency biz school Ted Talk specimen, is no real surprise – probably fifty percent of the people who share her genotype are making shit up. T-L, however, does empirical research, so it’s more amazing when he (or his lab) just goes out and does irreproducible things.
Anyway, looks as though he’s going to fade into nothingness because he’s not going to get all shitty and vindictive and sue the people who outed him for $25 mill.
But that’s exactly what Gino’s up to; her fraudulence seems firmly established, but that doesn’t mean she can’t destroy the people who revealed her misconduct. Expensive lawyers, long horrible litigation… Why the hell shouldn’t they be just as ruined as she’s been.
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One scientist, who has discovered research fraud in another high-profile person, has decided to keep it to himself, because, he explains, he runs “a non-zero risk of financial ruin, and no real personal upside. Probably many researchers are making this same calculation at this moment.”
What’s keeping this latest set of fraud-outers from financial ruin is a GoFundMe page (to which UD has contributed) which has in only a few days amassed $326,000.