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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."
does this mean pigs can fly? have we had the cure for cancer all along??
I want my mommie.
Beat the computer, program your life.
Next they'll be telling us that politicians aren't ethical either. :)
People are always tempted to take the easy route...
When I did my last research project, I had no clue what my results meant and made that clear in my paper!
This was an undergraduate ornithology project that was supposed to take six weeks, according to my advisor. Every professor I've told about it since then has said, that's graduate level at least...
Uh, "if it looks roughly mouse-shaped according to my infra-red sensitive pit, eat it"? --Chris Burke 09-08-10
Don't trust the science behind this story!
My other sig is extremely clever...
unlike religion, science is self-correcting over the long term. If someone fudges the data and comes up with a wrong conclusion eventually someone else will discover that and get it right.
This is why we have peer review, independant repetition of studies, randomised double blind trials etc. It all comes out in the wash.
Deleted
It had to be the Professor of Gilligan's Island fame. If he could come up with a car, fix the radio, etc. don't you think he could have come up with a way to fix the boat.
In truth he just liked the attention of hanging out with Ginger, the movie star and Maryanne, the girl next door.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
That's why the Scientific Method requires reproducibility. It's not just to weed out confirmation bias or experimental error, but to double check against fraud.
Is there any way to say that this isn't surprising without being considered a troll?
The person who wrote conducted this research lied about the results. There are actually no researches whatsoever who falsify data.
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 saw this earlier in the print edition, and it's not really what it sounds like. The question to which 15% said yes was whether you'd ever changed the procedure, methodology, or results of an experiment in response to pressure from a funding source. Well, changing the results would be very, very bad, but they actually asked a separate question on that one and only 0.3% (a statistically insignificant number) said yes. Changing methodology is not necessarily illegitimate; if your funding source says "give me X precision", or "measure Y too while you're at it", then the procedure's going to change to reflect that. It doesn't mean there's bias, it means the question was asked incorrectly.
Maybe they work at the White House, funded by the oil industry to select "winning" research.
--
make install -not war
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.
Also, if graders at university level care more about how a paper is formatted and (nicely) written, than if the experiments were properly conducted, bad behaviour is encouraged.
I know people who made one good measurement, made up the rest and spend the remaining part of the time on the paper due at the end of the day. While others spend their time on the experiments and had to write their papers quickly and hasty, forgoing a nice layout.
You didn't had time to do both.
Guess who had the better grade?
Sure, measuring the period of a swinging pendulum may not be groundbreaking, but it's all about instilling the correct work habit.
Perhaps what they did was good for getting a good grade, and they were the smarter of the rest of us. But it was damned lousy science.
Yes, after all these years, I am still "upset" about it.
As someone who does scientific research for a living, I have to point out that changing a study because of pressure from a funding source is not necessarily unethical. It's very common for a scientist to say "I want money to study X, Y, and Z" and have a funding source respond "We only really care about X, Y and Q. How about studying those? We'll pay for that." Our the source might say half-way through the study "We've heard that one of our competitors is researching W. Will you look into that instead of Y?" Remember, 'changing a study' is not necessarily unethical. Studies change all the time even without pressure from a funding source, often simply because the researcher comes up with a more interesting or effective way to conduct the study.
Reached for comment, the researchers admitted that the actual number was 9%, but they felt some scientists were not willing to admit their wrong-doing, and their editor wasn't going to publish the story unless the number was at least 15%.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
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
If you want to see the biggest coverup in science it has to be the rising incidence of cancer and noone knows why.
Maybe this article would shed some light on how the plastics and pesticide industry owns the media and covers it up. They actually control the American Cancer Society which they use skillfully use to control anything that might hurt business.
We know the cause of cancer. More here on cause of breast cancer and organochlorides. We just can't stop the industry that owns our government.
One more link on the frontline investigation that industry tried to stop on pestcide effects on children.
I don't wanna start a political tussle, but harping on the Bush administration for this leaves out the fact that liberals do this kind of thing, too.
Take a look at the various reactions to studies that show different ethnic groups, nationalities, and other genetically-similar categories of people (including men vs. women) have different intelligence distributions. The less-controversial results are the ones that say "Men are better at this type of abstract task, women are better at this other type of brain use," and even these get attacked by people who simply don't want to believe that their could be built-in differences.
And then you have "The Bell Curve" and similar studies. That specific study is questionable (not wrong, but it has issues), but other studies have repeatedly confirmed that different ethnicities can have markedly differing average IQs. The differences are statistically significant (meaning that they're not attributable to mere chance), though they're probably not practically all that significant. And it's not like saying "I'm Chinese, you're African, therefore I'm smarter than you," it's just saying that Chinese people tend to be smarter.
Strangely enough, the Left attacks these results bulldog-style. And most of the attacks aren't about the methodology, or the validity of the results. Most of the attacks seem to be "How could you possibly say such a thing?" It's like the reactions to Kinsey's sexuality studies: people base their values on assumed truths about the world, and when careful study reveals that the assumptions are false, people don't want to discard the basis of their value systems.
The point is, ANYbody, regardless of politics, can fall victim to resisting the truth because it's intellectually convenient to do so. Don't just blame the Bushies.
A century ago, virtually all christian sects had no problem with the scientific conclusion that the Earth is several billion years old.
Starting in the 1960s, and just reaching a fever pitch, we have millions of christians who swear that their bible/religion/church says that the Earth is only 6000 years old.
Wow. You never heard of the Scopes Monkey Trials, huh?
(Hint: That was back in 1925, and along with the failure of prohibition signaled the winding down of a "revivalist" period which goes back to the 1890s, and the radical abolitionist movements several decades before that. Fundamentalism in America is a lot older than you seem to think it is.)
Didn't your High School force you to sit through the movie versionof that shitty play?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I'd like to point out that this is a survey only of scientists funded by the NIH (National Institutes of Health). It has no bearing on conduct of scientists in other life sciences or in the physical sciences. I would imagine that given the closer industry ties of human health-related research, there would be different, and perhaps greater, pressure to falsify data. There is also clearly no opportunity to violate human subject research standards when you're studying subatomic particles.
Physics Today has a good story on ethics issues in physics. It seems that data falsification is relatively rare (the few high-profile cases demonstrate that it is generally a career-ending move), but other ethical problems certainly do occur. In particular, Physics Today talks about the abuse of graduate students (a problem that's probably not limited to physics).
As a graduate student myself, I've got things pretty good, but some of my friends are definitely being mistreated. One guy is working 70-hour weeks and is still getting told by his supervisor that he's not working hard enough. I'm sure that if he protested he'd quickly find himself tossed out of the group and having to start his thesis research again from scratch.
Sorry. I should have been a bit less broad in using the term "creationism". The actual "man didn't evolve from monkeys" debate of course started right around Mr. Darwin's time. However, by the middle of the 19th century pretty much everyone agreed that the Earth was at least several million years old thanks to geology.
:)
The recent "Earth is only 6000 years old" movement really needs a better name, because while it's tied to creationism, it isn't exactly the same thing. The fundies started up with the insistence on 6000 years simply because it pretty much dismisses the possibility of any evolutionary processes. By the 60s, with the overwhelming majority of science pointing to evolutionary theory as correct, they needed *something* as evidence against it.
But you're right, by the proper definition of the word, creationism has been around for a long, long time. We really need a term to separate the two. Ussherism, named for the bishop who originally calculated the 6000 years back in the 17th century?
(And no, I didn't see the movie. Maybe it's an American thing only? Got a link?
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
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.
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+
As the other poster tried to point out to you, fundamentalism is *much* older than you seem to think. It's influence has waxed and waned over the centuries, but it's never been absent and rarely insignificant.