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Many Scientists Admit Unethical Practices
jangobongo writes "A surprising number of scientists engage in questionable research practices says a story at the Washington Post. According to a large-scale survey of scientific misbehavior, 15% admit to changing a study under pressure from a funding source. Other reasons for altering data include dropping data from a study based on a gut feeling and failing to include data that contradicts one's own research. This chart gives a quick rundown of the percentage of U.S. based scientists who reported having engaged in questionable research practices according to the survey."
If you leave out the plagiarism and resume builders then the numbers don't look so bad!
I'm thinking about it, therefore I might be.
This sort of behavior is encouraged by the Bush Administration if results are fudged to favor its position on the environment. Anybody catch this story in the NY Times about the White House doctoring reports on climate change? Here's an interview with Warren Olney about the incident. It seems to me that if we can't trust scientists to tell us the truth regardless of the political implications or of pressure from outside sources, we're really fucked.
I used to be a sys-admin at an University. I was in the computer lab when a grad student started cussing and screaming. I walked over and asked him what was going on. It turned out he was complaining about the data coming out of his model. It "Didn't make sense!!" I suggested that the input data might be wrong, he replied that was impossible because he created the input set and all the numbers "made sense"
Maybe they work at the White House, funded by the oil industry to select "winning" research.
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make install -not war
I posted that story twelve hours ago and it was rejected. Maybe because the link was in the Baltimore Sun (only link I found with Google, I read the story in a French webnewspaper) and not in Yahoo News / Washington Post ?..
</rant>
here is a additional link from the Baltimore Sun.
The full original article is in Nature.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Certain types of research have bias built-in. If BigDrugCo wants research results on NewExpensiveDrug they aren't going to farm the research to the people who told them their last drugs were worthless. Therefore, if I want BigDrugCo's $$$ in the future I'll try to design the study and present the results in the most positive way. Whether or not I'm aware of it there will be some underlying pressure.
As such, I feel that this type of study needs what I've coined a "triple-blind study" in which a neutral party is placed between the funder and the researcher.
This neutral party would then choose researcher(s) at random from a pool of candidates qualified to do the research and frame the question in a neutral way. The funding source and desired outcome would be withheld from the researcher.
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"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
Here's a Catch-22: this study was a study that might have been rigged to make sensationalist claims for the Post, right?
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
National Public Radio in the U.S. ran a story about how Merck ran a campaign to pressure M.D.s who were doing research showing Vioxx was a problem in patients, causing damage to the heart.
The story is right here and it outlines a major problem with all scientific research, but most acutely in the pharmaceutical industry, where the Bush administration has gutted the FDA and made them the lapdog of the drug companies. Capital markets use science and statistics as weapons, and objective evidence of problems exists only when other drug companies that compete fund research to show problems.
Bush said last week that he still wasn't interested in a Kyoto like treaty, because global warming needed more "research" and study. And, of course, the report that shows that an employee of the American Petroleum Council was sitting inside the EPA censoring reports that showed any causality between burning fossil fuels and global warming. Can't have that.
Corrupt scientists. No objective sources of information. And people wonder why there is a skyrocketing reliance on religion by our political leaders, who pander and are willing to teach nonsense like "Intelligent Creation" alongside scientific evidence of darwinism and natural selection. Divinity sells. And a assailable scientific community only makes it easier.
We seem to be leaving an age of reason, and entering a new Dark age. Instead of Thomas Aquinas we have Dr. Phil.
the reason I think this stuff happens is that the "publish or perish" pressure is just too insane at top universities. It's not just publishing in any archival journal; to maintain funding, to get tenured, high quality publications in high profile journals are a must. I can't speak for other fields, but in the biological sciences, not only is the pressure to publish in quality AND quantity getting greater each year, the field has exploded to such a degree that the burden of proof for one's hypotheses is increasingly heavier. Exploratory studies cannot be carried out; the emphasis is almost entirely on what can be completed and published in a reasonably short period of time. Experiments are hard to do. If a grant deadline/tenure review is coming up and the data is not quite what it needs to be, people might be tempted to fudge it a tiny bit.
None of what I just said excuses scientific misconduct. But I think why it happens is just a symptom of a bigger problem (at least in biology). There are too many Ph.D. level scientists! The incessant cranking out of these highly educated people is creating an oversupply of researchers. Every Ph.D. who gets a tenure-track research position (these positions are highly competitive; typically 50-100 highly qualified individuals who have equally impressive CVs compete for one spot) has to stake out their little project and protect it like a lioness protects her cubs. If they're not careful and blink the wrong way, they could be scooped by competitors (i.e. beaten to publication); a good chunk of their career just went down the drain. This after a completely unreasonable length of postgraduate training (6-7 years for a Ph.D. and 4-5 years postdoctoral training after that is quite typical), poor pay and lousy hours. All because IMO there are too many people working on the same shit.
I think that to fix the problem, something fundamental needs to change in the way scientists are produced. I don't pretend to know what the best solution would be, but one idea I've been throwing around is to train more M.S. level people than Ph.D. level people. These would be employed as staff scientists rather than independent principal investigators, such that there would be enough of a labor pool to actually do the work, but without having one's career constantly in jeopardy.
NO CARRIER
When I was an undergrad, I worked at a campus observatory giving tours, since it wasn't a working research site anymore. It did, however, hold offices for two astrophysics grad students. Since I had taken some graduate classes with one of them, they deigned to speak to me.
One of them was doing his dissertation on stellar pressure gradients. He was having this huge block writing his thesis, because his results contradicted a previously published paper's conclusions, and he couldn't figure out where he went wrong. After some digging and calculating, he realized that the prior paper's data contradicted their conclusion as well, and they had just faked the diagrams to match their predicted result.
So much for peer review...
I agree with you in general.
But I think your "don't just blame the Bushies" sounds too much like "accept what the Bush administration does wrong because the democrats do it to." I think when any administration is caught editing scientific reports to support their point of view they should have the crap kicked out of them (metaphorically, that is).
And, for what it's worth, the whistleblower in this case has been in a number of administrations, democratic and republican, and says he's never seen anything like this kind of political manipulation of science before.
color me surprised. There's a reason there's been no "evidence" that medical marijuana works. (never mind that angel reich has an inoperable brain tumor, and was confined to a wheel chair, UNTIL using medical marijuana...) Shrugs, people do what they're told to do. Unfortunately this includes some scientists, mostly scientists on the govt's payroll.
I do question the wisdom of releasing this information at a time when the powers that be are looking for reasons to cut funding for science. (/rant mode off)
Well, that, but I think the biggest reason is that negative results are (almost always) unpublishable.
That's one of the many reasons I find research in industry so much more pleasureable than in academia. I'm given a problem, do the study and get paid whether the result is positive or negative, as long as it's right. There is so much less stress and so much less temptation to cut corners than when a negative result means "Goodbye tenure-track job, hello LSAT!"
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I work in science department at a large university and what srikes me is the degree to which scientists here are ethical about science, but only science. In all other aspects - lying to their employees, misdirecting funding, fudging non-scientific reports- they are devious lying weasels. But they are adamantly against fudging data, I have never seen it or even suspected.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
You have molars, and a digestive tract length/body length ratio that identifies you as an herbivore. An average carnivore (dogs, lions, etc.) have a digestive tract 3 times longer than their body. Herbivores (cows, gorillas, etc) ahve a digestive tract 9-10 times longer than their body. Humans have a 12:1 ratio. As for teeth, chimpanzees have much longer canine teeth than we do, but are certainly not carnivores.
That's true. Not to mention the pressure of not to challenge mainstream ideas. That would be a career suicide. This is why scientists tried to fudge their data / experiments so that it looks like they agree on mainstream ideas and add things a little bit. This is quite common.
When you have something controversial that contradicts mainstream ideas, you will be frowned upon during the peer reviews and most likely will receive really really bad review that your paper get rejected almost immediately without further reconsideration. Things change when you attend prestigious universities such as MIT or Stanford where you do have benefit of doubts. When this is the case, the reviewers will praise you instead.
People may think that the review process is double-blind. Yes, that's true. However, that simply doesn't stop the reviewer to guess who is the author or which research group they belong to. The simplest way to guess it is just to see the papers they cited. Typically, scientists build upon their previous similar works. On the top of that, scientists have quirks on their diction and choice of greek letters or formula representations, too. This way, we can guess the authors most of the time. So, erasing the names of the authors is not quite as useful.
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Error 500: Internal sig error
I'll ignore the anti-religious flamebait and move on to point out that the same pressures which cause one group of scientists to fudge data may exist across an entire field.
Read this Slashdot article. In the second linked article, on the forth page, the scientist who initially got a furor started about the effects of cell phones on DNA states:
The problem may be that many people reproduce the results but many other people don't. Sometimes a powerful moneyed interest throws up all sorts of funding into research with strings attached to deliberately muddy the waters. As long as there are contradicting studies, those very people's lobbyists can say, "But look! Scientists can't all come to the same conclusion on the issue! Clearly there's more to it than what your scientists are saying!"
You see this in global warming research. You see this in research on the effects of cell phones and high-tension power lines on people. You see this in research about the toxicity of industrial chemicals. You see this in pharmaceutical research on drugs like Vioxx and Celebrex. We saw this with tobacco's effects on health. As long as tainted money is the only source of money for science, results will be reproduceably deceptive. This is a tool of modern industry to prevent the public from learning facts that would get in the way of their agenda.
This is effecting the people of our nation, and it's helping to shape policy in our government. The EPA has not made coal power plant treat mercury as a pollutant to clean up to meet standards set by the Clean Air Act. A senior White House environment official (and former American Petroleum Institute lobbyist) has been caught deleting findings from environmental science reports. There is a concerted effort right now to hide the truth from the American people to avoid hurting the profits of certain wealthy people in power, and science is losing.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I work near a local Ag. school and a friend of mine did some research (in Ag. Economics) of the effect of having all the meat major packing companies subcontract purchasing to one company. His conclusion was that it was a defacto monopoly. The paper was funded by the Dept. of Agriculture and so prior to publication they reviewed it.
After review he was warned that if he published it he would lose all current and future funding. Apparently the meat packers did not appreciate the information. AFAIK it has never been released toa journal.
In general, Ag. research was subverted long ago, as was probably Economics. What is new is that ideology is now playing a major role, including things such as 'Intelligent design', not just money. In general, it is starting to look more like Germany circa early 30's where only ideologically pure research could be done. If I were a reasearcher I would be looking for a research friendlier country.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
The issue isn't science vs religion. The issue is truth and honesty vs dogma (or political correctness.)
Religious and non-religious groups have been guilty of supressing truth to support their agenda. Ditto for big, wealthy groups and small activists.
Should be pointed out that many famous scientists were Christians. Isaac Newton, Bacon, Galileo, etc. Their stand for truth wasn't against religion, it was against political forces.
Should also be pointed out that those founding fathers of modern science based it on princples taught in the Bible. Check out the introduction of 1 John 1. (It's toward the back.) Look at the intruduction to Luke. Note the scientific method.
I'd say you are correct that science is self-correcting, but unfortunately we're dealing with the corporate/government/[insert corrupt group with private agenda here] scientific establishement here. To me this is just more evidence that the "scientific" establishment has less to do with science and more in common with just another religion.
Many Christian apologists now maintain those chapters as historically accurate, and literal truth.
That doesn't even explain it though. At best you can claim 'civilization' is 6000 years old. Even if you take the Bible literally (which I do) there is a good part of Genesis that doesn't give a timeframe. Adam and Eve were in the Garden, but for how long. Genesis 4:16 - " And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived". If Adam and Eve were the only two people, where the heck did Cain get a Wife??? Obviously, even if it's taken literally, it can't be taken as complete. Who knows, maybe Adam and Eve hung out in the Garden for a million years before the fall.
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