UD‘s buddy Peter Galbraith strolls in a Mughal garden. Peter lived in India as a young boy, when his father was the American ambassador.

Palace musicians.

Sarah Peck tells a cow to smile for my camera.

Birds, breakfast, fort.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

HAMM (exasperated):
Have you not finished? Will you never finish?
(With sudden fury.)
Will this never finish?
(Nagg disappears into his bin, closes the lid behind
him. Nell does not move. Frenziedly.)
My kingdom for a nightman!
(He whistles. Enter Clov.)
Clear away this muck! Chuck it in the sea!
(Clov goes to bins, halts.)
NELL:
So white.
HAMM:
What? What’s she blathering about?
(Clov stoops, takes Nell’s hand, feels her pulse.)
NELL (to Clov):
Desert!
(Clov lets go her hand, pushes her back in the bin,
closes the lid.)
CLOV (returning to his place beside the chair):
She has no pulse.
HAMM:
What was she drivelling about?
CLOV:
She told me to go away, into the desert.
HAMM:
Damn busybody! Is that all?
CLOV:
No.
HAMM:
What else?
CLOV:
I didn’t understand.
HAMM:
Have you bottled her?
CLOV:
Yes.
HAMM:
Are they both bottled?
CLOV:
Yes.

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.

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

“Everybody — the author, the journal, the institution, everybody — is incentivized to minimize the importance of these things.”

… Haile Selassie.’

Clap, clap.

Could have used one of her smaller handguns.

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 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!!

The flight home began in Delhi, continued through Rome, staggered on through NYC, and then finally ended in DC — hours and hours of flying, security, customs, security again, security again, passport control, long, luggage-laden terminal hikes, etc.

On the plane to NY, UD admitted that her feet (never her best feature) were giving out, and Mr UD ordered the chair.

Although certifiably old, UD ain’t the wheelchair type, has never been pushed around in one… I mean, after all, she had just done a creditable job (though only creditable) of maintaining a relentless month-long physical pace in Venice, Florence, and Rajesthan.

But ok all of that took a toll and as she exited the plane she was happy to see the chair, along with the nice woman in charge of (who knew?) wheeling her to the very front of every single hellish airport line. Although fundamentally since birth insanely privileged (visit India if you want to know how global inequality goes), UD has never occupied the First Class, Business Lounge, Priority Seating, Preferred Client world at all, so being whisked ahead of the crowd felt weird, wonderful, and guilt-generating (do my feet really hurt so much that… ?).

Au fond, it was obvious to your blogeuse, in the event, that she did need this help, and though the general solicitude (“Anything else? Can I check your blood pressure?” asked a Rome-JFK crew member. “Are you comfortable?” asked the woman pushing me.) made her feel uncomfortable, she also began to glimpse a world in which people don’t idiotically, stoically, refuse various forms of assistance.

At Samode Palace, as an absolutely insane Indian wedding gears up.

There’s so much, and I know so little.

Even if I knew somewhat more, I’d venture little, because there’s so much to know.

The main impression is the impossible city streets, whose cows motorbikes kiosks trucks pedestrians ruts and speedbumps our driver honks/slices through at an impossible speed. There are no traffic lights, no stop or speed signs. Small children on bikes carry in one hand whirls of cotton candy for sale. The other hand steers through the chaos. Piles of old tires, and piles of old garbage, line the road; half-built houses and mounds of stone lie with them. Everyone seems to be trying to mend the world one burdensome inch at a time – transferring this stone to that place, herding three goats some steps along the road, flicking a shop’s scarves to make them a little more noticeable. The view is at once frenzied and sisyphean.

… at our hotel in Fort Nagaur.

[New French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal] started [as Education Minister] last summer by declaring that “the abaya can no longer be worn in schools.”

His order, which applies to public middle and high schools, banished the loosefitting full-length robe worn by some Muslim students and ignited another storm over French identity. In line with the French commitment to “laïcité,” or roughly secularism, “You should not be able to distinguish or identify the students’ religion by looking at them,” Mr. Attal said.

I told this crowd of Indian students to flash the peace sign. They did that AND gave out a big group cheer.

In Jaisalmer. India continues making me love her.

… a swimming hole.