So the magic trick seems to be: You agree to be snowed by my impressive advanced degrees, and I spend decades signing off on/taking part in research fraud.
There’s too much grant money and associated professional advancement and oh yeah investor money at stake for anyone to care too awfully much about whether images or data emanating from top of the heap sites like Dana Farber is – you know … I mean – impeccably accurate … And as long as loser assholes like Sholto David don’t actually subject our work to close analysis it’s a win-win situation for everyone!
I mean except for sick and dying people. But we’re running a business here.
Will Dana-Farber include in its brag sheet that she left in disgrace, trailed by now-confirmed research misconduct charges? Her West Coast equivalent, busy-bee billionaire Marc Tessier-Lavigne, stepped down in identical disgrace, brought low by a determined student journalist.
The departed CEO of Dana-Farber, and her co-authors, were exposed by some random guy in Wales (now enjoying his 2.63 million dollar award), and I’m sure they felt the same confident contempt for him that Stanford’s prez felt for the student journalist. What can these nothings do to us? We represent (and, with their scuzzy vieux Larry Summers, do they ever) the American elite.
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.
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 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!!