Slashdot Mirror
MIT Professor Fired over Fabricated Data
karvind writes "CNN is running a story where MIT has fired an associate professor of biology for fabricating data in a published scientific paper, in unpublished manuscripts, and in grant applications. Luk Van Parijs, 35, who was considered a rising star in the field of immunology research, admitted to the wrongdoing. The revelations are a serious blow to MIT, which prides itself on its reputation as a scientific powerhouse. The announcement also serves to answer the rumors that have been swirling on the campus since Van Parijs vanished from the campus more than a year ago and had his lab disbanded without any comment from the university. Readers may remember the infamous Jan Hendrik Schön from Bell labs."
They fabricate data all the time. We should fire them. :)
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
The revelations are a serious blow to MIT, which prides itself on its reputation as a scientific powerhouse.
Revealing a case of fraud strengthens their reputation. If they had let the case die in the darkness after dismissing him--that would lessen their reputation. But admitting that fraud has happened and that the school will not stand for it--that can only gain respect.
I quit my PhD aged 26 after being asked to make up my results.
The university I was at was extremely poor and had hardly enough
to teach undergrads. For years I thought that I was some kind of special
over-ethical person, that anybody else would have have said "sure, I'll
make make up my results". Then I got talking to other ex academics
and what I discovered was like hidden child abuse, people were comming
out everywhere and saying Yeah me too, I was cooerced into publishing
rubbish or asked to just falsify results too.
what's gonna happen to them? i'd imagine that's something you wouldn't put on a resume
"And I wouldn't have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those meddling kids!" Scoooby-Dooby-Doooo!
Here's my take. Copyrights combined with government funding distort the intellectual enviroment so that those who love science for the sake of the sience and the persuit of knowledge are punished, while those who are paper pushers for R&D grants and getting published in journals are rewarded.
To take it on faith that knowledge and sience would never be persued or never be rewarding enough without them is ignorance.
I seem to recall an article on Slashdot yesterday about the death of science in America. This does not help, particularly from a notorious research facility like MIT. This gives the gives the creationists more fire for their faux-arguments about how science is unbelievable and other garbage relating to Intelligent Design.
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
while it's rather alarming to see that the "best and brightest" can be a bunch of cheating bastards, it's good to see that the necessary controls are in place to find them out. unfortunately, i don't think this would ever work in my field (computer vision) because people tend to be very selective about the results they publish (i.e. they won't often show you what happens when things go wrong), choose poor test sequences (or fail to explicitly state the simplifying assumptions that made their choice of test sequence appropriate), and so on. if someone were to use sufficiently intimidating / esoteric math (especially if it were reasonably plausible math), they could probably fake a paper in some of the top journals and get away with it for several years.
84.2% of all college level professors fabricate data. I have a source for this -- I just can't find it right now.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I know for a fact that many scientists slightly modify their results to make them look better all the time. Now, they probably don't blatantly fabricate data like this guy, but they sometimes tweak a number here or there so on initial deposition for publication every thing looks good to the reviewers (closes holes in their findings). This gives the researcher time to fix problems in their work while knowing that it will be published in the future with minor modifications.
What incentive would a researcher have to fix minor problems if he/she knew that their findings would not be published anyways? They either try another journal or go onto another experiment. Why waste time, when time is grant money that is running out?
What do copyrights have to do with anything? If you want to read the article, your university probably paid the (all things considered) small fee to get the journal, or it's available online. It's really a tiny cost. Fair use permits citation and excerpt quotes.
And if you got rid of government funding, you wouldn't have much left (or so the conventional knowlege goes). I'd actually agree that gov. funding should be eliminated, but I don't see how it "distorts the intellectual environment". If you're claiming that "money" in general is corrupting, I don't know what to say. People who reserach for the hell of it do it either way; money convinces the greedy bastards to start contributing. It seems you're more blaming shortsightedness than money itself.
Rank my idea: http://www.sinceslicedbread.com/node/531
Huh? It is a "blow" to their reputation iff they knew about the misconduct and did nothing about it. In this case it is clear that they took swift action. I would give kudos to MIT for reacting swiftly. Recall the conduct of other organizations like NYT in such instances.
Indeed, the main problem is money. They're not doing science for the sake of good science. They're doing science so they can make money (to live and to continue to do science to make money), and sometimes that may necessitate the modification of results and data.
Just think about what could be done without the monetary restrictions, or even if they could be significantly reduced. If the US had instead used for scientific research the $200 billion they wasted on Iraq, who knows how far ahead of the world they could be. Investing that much money in something constructive, like scientific research, would reap tremendous benefits. Even half of that dollar figure could fund a lot of cutting-edge research.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Welcome to Science!
For going to the trouble of turning in the fraudulent research the tech had their phone tapped (which the lab later denied), was transferred out to a dingy little building in the middle of the desert to do menial tasks and just generally harassed until they eventually got another job.
There's so much pressure for getting grant money that producing the results that will get more grant money is pretty much the norm, espeically in contract research. Everyone likes to think science is pure, but you're deluded if you think that. It's all about making sure you've got enough charge codes to bill your time and supporting that 200% overhead rate.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Noam Chomsky's been fabricating fakeries and un-truths for years now and nobody cares as long as his fakeries and un-truths serve their political agendas.
My physics professor said something like that. To very loosely quote (and accordingly, I only use single marks): 'You have to understand the concepts, not memorize them. If you understand them, you do not forget them. It's hard to fudge the results; this is physics, not philosophy.' (After which, I, with 40 or so people in attendance, laughed in agreement.)
(Damn, I almost put a semicolon at the end; I gotta lay off the C# a tad...it's like crack...)
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
can't believe this.. a Harvard graduate fired from MIT omg!
Science is based on the belief that experimental results can be replicated in repeated experiments. I've always wondered why the global scientific community doesn't do more replication of data as part of peer review. A formal procedure for extracting the experimental specification so the experiment is performed without the prior data included in the knowledge of the experimenter. Then a comparison by another party not performing either experiment, so the data comparison is "clean". That seems a very valuable process, in validating the original, finding differences still covered by the same theory, but available for more precision, as well as training scientists - both new and old. It seem replication for the purpose of disproving flawed theories would be the most important, and most common, scientific activity. Is the relative lack of it due to the "efficiency" of the corporate science business? Shouldn't academics be spending more time replicating?
--
make install -not war
I truly hope the creationists go insane about this. I hope they scrutinize every piece of scientific data they can find. Why is that? Because that'll make the data that much stronger. Indeed, it will help greatly if they can also help the scientists weed out false or incorrect results.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
..he was caught out fabricating data, rather than letting the data the "didn't fit the curve" go unreported. Check out any medical research you like, you don't need to fabricate, just obscure...
I love the research that shows a certain food additive killed mice who were predisposed to cancer (the cancer went wild) BUT didn't harm healthy mice.
Simple logic thus tells us it is safe to eat. And we do.
I will remember what the additive is.. I think you can put it with mashed up meat and the meat "gels together" to form nice steaks...
They removed his faculty page from mit.edu but it is still avaiable at archive.org.
Seastead this.
I've always wondered why the global scientific community doesn't do more replication of data as part of peer review.
Just try getting a grant for "Doing exactly what this other guy already did, just to make sure."
Yeah, it actually is important, but try explaining that to the bean counters. The best you can do is propose some sort of "continuation" and include the original experiment as a control group, and hope to verify it that way.
I worked in the Biology department at MIT when this happened. While Van Parijs' lab was under renovations, he took up space on my floor. After that, our department(mini-department? sub-department?, whatever) provided some computing resources for their lab. I was the network/systems guy, so I took care of our machines in their lab.
One day, I noticed that the Windows box in their lab wasn't responding and had been reported as haven been taken by the Cancer Center's sysadmin guy. I talked to a buddy of mine who sits across from me and did lab work for the Van Parijs. He called and asked about the machine. A couple of minutes later, the head of the Cancer Center called him and firmly told him to drop all inquries into said machine. He said it felt like the part of The Matrix where Neo gets the 'How are you going to talk without a mouth, Mr Anderson' line.
That's when the shit hit the fan. I was a weekly regular at the Plough and Stars in Cambridge on Wednesdays, and the Van Parijs members made it out there every other week or so. After six weeks or so, the guys who confronted Luk finally started talking about it.
It was quite the news in the department. I don't know about the rest of MIT, but all of Biology, and the CCR, Whitehead, and surrounding buildings knew about it since day one. It worked out well for the members of the lab. Everybody joined up with a different lab, except for one guy. He pretty much started working for himself. He's doing some post-doc work, and in light of what happened, the department just let him start doing his own thing until he finishes up.
What I remember about Luk Van Parijs(other than that he had the most gorgeous Russian administrative assistant. I could write for hours about her. I mean, she was hot and she said things like 'I think my phone just did a core dump' Hi Masha!) was that he was pretty much a jerk. Not that remarkable being that for MIT professors this is the rule and not the exception, but a jerk nonetheless.
Anyways, everybody thinks the New Scientist article was pretty scathing.
Do you see the sig? Do you have it in your sights? Why yes, Miss Moneypenny...
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8230
Here is how they noticed a pattern:
Michael Borowitz, at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, says: "The shapes of the major clusters are often similar but in any system there is noise, and those noisy dots are in the same place too. That's hard to explain by biology. It is very difficult for me to believe that these were independent experiments." Borowitz is an expert in interpreting flow cytometry graphs, which he regularly uses to identity abnormal populations of cells in the blood and bone marrow of leukaemia patients.
Three other experts contacted, including Paul Robinson, a professor of immunopharmacology and biomedical engineering and Director of the Flow Cytometry Labs at Purdue University in West Lafayette, say that the graphs appear concerningly alike.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
With my copies of the GIMP and the Impact font, I'd put a red PWN3D!!1 on his face in no time.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Noonian....Didn't he fabricate Data?
hahahahahhahha
Obscure Sci-Fi reference
People who lose sight of that, and who make stuff up to submit, are not only disrespecting their peers, they are stealing time and effort from them. For example, I lost about six months of my life because a senior colleague falsified data that I needed in graduate school. We were in the business of flying a rocket payload to look at the Sun in extreme ultraviolet light. We calibrated the photographic film at a synchrotron facility at Stanford. Our senior colleague (who later went on to become a bigwig at SPIE and in NASA's Astrobiology program) was in charge of developing the film that we exposed, at great effort, to calibrated amounts of ultraviolet light emitted by the synchrotoron. He forgot (or something) to write down which process he used on which piece of film. As a result, a year later when we were analysing our images of the Sun we couldn't make any sense of them. It took a good six months of concentrated effort to eliminate all reasonable hypotheses about what had happened, and to conclude that the film processing notes from that calibration run were simply made up. Once we knew that, we could get reasonable (if not-as-good-as-we-hoped) results from the rocket flight, using earlier calibrations. If my colleague had fessed up immediately we would have lost a few days' work rather than six months.
In the short term, the scientific refereeing process keeps out many honest mistakes or omissions, but anyone determined to deliberately slip fake results into a paper can probably get away with it. In the long term, though, there's no escape: anything made up will either be buried (because it turns out to be uninteresting or because no-one trusts it), or found out (because, if it is interesting, others will try to use or reproduce the result, and will niggle at it until the truth comes out).
Oh come on, you think this guy is the only one who did it? Let me ask you this: you have a hypothesis. You spend a ton of money from your grants and have your grad students spend a lot of their time trying to prove their hypothesis. The data you get is basically useless since it doesn't prove or disprove anything. Do you just say "New research into immunology finds nothing?" Of course not.
We VERY rarely hear of research actually failing, when in fact we should be hearing it ALL THE TIME since taking stabs at new ideas shouldn't be successful all the time. Failure should be a natural part of research, and there really shouldn't be an urge to have to make your research fruitful everytime. Unfortunately, no one would actually do this even if they agreed with the thought - people would only expect other people to follow the rule.
It's not like it matters too much regardless - 90% of research papers are bullshit wrapped in a myriad of technical jargon which makes it seem like they achieved something ridiculously important.
My 2 cents.
The CNN article says that the fired researcher had worked at CalTech for three years and that some of his collaborative work with former MIT professor and outgoing Caltech president David Baltimore, is being examined for fraud.
Baltimore has previously been caught, at a minimum, refusing to take scientific misconduct seriously.
Even if no wrongdoing is found on David Baltimore's part (as I think is likely) this incident will still be taken as further evidence that when strong action is not taken against an environment that is permissive of misconduct, the misconduct is likely to grow.
Basically, the underlying philosophy of Free/Open Source Software is that it is alright to copy someone else's work, as long as you make your changes public.
Kind of a negative phrasing of it, but yes. That's the idea.
This inevitably encourages people to take the 'path of least resistance', completing their project in less time but only contributing a fraction of the total work.
Yes, we usually refer to it as "standing on the shoulders of giants." But this is in no way limited to FOSS. When I worked at a large IT company the chief software architect's mantra was "it is cheaper to buy than to build!" He wasn't real particular about FOSS, his point was if we could buy something off the shelf, we should always do that instead of making it ourselves. Putting something in the development pipeline was a slow, expensive process: Gather requirements, write up the use cases, design the software, review, do the actual coding, do code reviews, write up a test plan, send it through QA.
This laxity, or laziness, is soon seen as the norm.
This laxity or laziness most major corporations would call "efficient." Seriously, software development is expensive.
Lo and behold, when someone at a F/OSS software-heavy campus like MIT starts a project and finds that no-one has done the heavy lifting for him already, he still sees it as his right to get full reward with fractional work.
I don't follow exactly what you're saying. If someone uses Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP to make a piece of weblog software, do they deserve no credit because LAMP provides for 99% of all the code?
It really is too bad - given all the real advantages of F/OSS, like the Open Source - but I think F/OSS should be curtailed, or even counter-legalized, in order to stop the decline in American work ethic and scientific rigour.
This is a fantastic jump of logic. From not having to pay money for a software license to falsifying data? Wow! How does paying money for a software license somehow make scientists more honest?
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
they just call it statistics.
In all seriousness the fabrication of data is not as much of a problem in academia as improper use of statistical methods, poor coding procedures, and poor data collection are.
Serves that Professor right for belonging to the wrong party. The proper handling for leftist frauds (aka originalist thinkers) is to give them pay raises.
The University of Colorado at Boulder decided to give Professor Ward Churchill a raise, recognizing his creativity in falsely claiming to be a native american, fabricating a special ops military career, stealing other people's art and claiming it as his own, "borrowing" others written works and in general, being an intellectual fraud. Investigations into his education have raised questions about the legitimacy of his degrees.
Unfortunately, the year-long "investigation" by his peers down here has mostly been an attempt to placate critics until the complaints die down (actually some have suggested it's more about telling the governor and the state to stay out of how UCB runs their university). Apparently it is acceptable to be a white man who steals from native american peoples and cheats students, universities and society in general as long as one is a politically correct "progressive" person.
We here at MIT find it quite humorous when someone suggests that this reflects badly on the Institute, given that the person in question was educated at Harvard and Caltech.
This space intentionally left blank.
What you say is true, however, this isn't really the greatest timing for a story to break on the fact that scientists sometimes fabricate their data. This provides a rather juicy opportunity for the various anti-science forces out there to point to this and say "See, scientists aren't the pristine investigators of truth that they would like us to believe! This one got caught, but how many others are doing the same thing right now? That's why we need to keep an open mind about {intelligent design, alternative medicine, bigfoot, global warming is a myth, etc.}."
You and I may see this story as evidence of the scientific system working the way it is supposed to. I suspect that the public will see this as evidence that science doesn't have a monopoly on the truth and maybe we ought to give those creationists equal time. Like I said, this isn't the greatest time for this story to break.
GMD
watch this
you are qualified to doctor data.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
YHBT. YHL. HAND.
Maybe he could go and work for the Alexis de Toqueville Institution.
I think the setup for the introduction of the material he provided was rather good.
I find this somewhat similar to Manzai
Um, no, sorry, check your facts. "Associate without tenure" has been around for years. Harvard, for example, is famous for this particular "promotion."
I'm Falsifying Data!!!11!1!
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/1 0/1243222&tid=14
Should an individual cases of a stastic be more troublesome than the statistic itself?
The Chinese guy fingers you for where he got his answers, but he scored better than you? So why did your professor believe that he got his answers from you? Are we supposed to believe this stupid story?
Well, it's not clear that it would have been prudent if they had tried to hush it up--someone would have found out sooner or later.
In any case, these things do happen, and a single incidence doesn't tell you much about the culture of an institution. However, the recent blatant incidences of scientific fraud are perhaps suggestive of cut-throat competition for funding and publications in science as a whole.
Taco, you might want to get that fixed. It's embarrassing that you haven't noticed after all these years of using that icon.
At least the professor had the balls to admit his wrong-doing and MIT the balls to fire him. No such fortitude exists in CU Boulder. Ward Churchill is a complete piece of shit.
Very right. Academics tend to be kind of nodal... there's the lab group, who influence eachothers work (and results) from square one, and the people who do similar research who you're either trying to work together with or (unfortunately) against, and the people who read your niche journals who have a pretty good idea what you're talking about but aren't necessarily that involved, and you don't usually become visible to the whole network unless your results are really turning alot of heads.
The unfortunate side effect of this is that the people who can invest enough time/money into reproducing results usually do so because they have some vested interested in seeing some particular result.
The fortunate side effect, I think, is that the structure kind of keeps a check on things. Since it's such a close-knit community, you have to either be making really subtle falsifications that the people in your group won't see through, or you have to be duping a whole bunch of people into playing along.
m0nstr42.blogspot.com
And if you got rid of government funding, you wouldn't have much left (or so the conventional knowlege goes). I'd actually agree that gov. funding should be eliminated,
Government funding mechanisms suck and a market solution would be great; trouble is: there is no market solution. Research is a public good; the attempts at establishing a market in it, like the patent system, have failed miserably.
Most scientific and technological breakthroughs have been government funded; of the remaining ones that were privately funded, most of them were funded by big monopolies like AT&T and IBM.
Until someone actually figures out a way of making it work, government funding must continue.
I wonder if this guy was one of the MIT scientists The SCO group claimed found all of their precious code in Linux. Ahahahahahaha.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
False information! That link points to a professor who is much older than Parijs not to mention she never even attended MIT. Just look at her CV on the site.
In fact, This one is very timely and informative. Horace Feeland Judson demonstrated in this book that fraud in science is nothing new. Even "great" and classic experiments have been the subject of fraud.
What is new here are the pressures since WWII in the academic world to get results. Some major cases of fraud were so egregious that these people would have to have been writing papers every two or three days on average --for periods of years. Nobody is that productive.
It's sad that MIT had to make such a discovery. Worse still is knowing that such fakery exists and doing nothing about it. Judson found more than a few institutions, many in the US, but even more world wide, where such things were covered up instead of dealt with.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
This is exactly the type of thing that I expect from the old institutions these days. They rely on "honor systems" and refuse to police things like plagiarism. What they ACTUALLY teach is "don't get caught and you're fine ... and we won't try to catch you". Until I see these schools implement things like turnitin [turnitin.com] I will continue to disrespect and distrust their grads.
Baltimore was previosuly involved in an alleged case of scientific misconduct (data falsification) in 1986, which caused quite a scandal throughout the scientific community back then.
Read about it here: David Baltimore
Fabricating data? Super, now he can get job in the current government.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Readers may remember the infamous Jan Hendrik Schön from Bell labs.
He's more than famous, he's infamous.
(With apologies to Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, and Martin Short.)
Oh Slashdot, what have you become?
As someone who worked in numerous labs as a researcher, I can attest that "selective data publishing" happens all the time. Although outright fabrication is rare, it nonetheless happens. I believe it stems from the enormous pressure to publish and write grant. That is why a high percentage of the published materials out there is useless (forgot which /. article I read it from).
So Biologists get fired for publishing bad data.
How many physicists have knowingly published work that they found themselves to be wrong, but just didn't include or played dumb about the parts with blatant mistakes or systematic problems, or used a derivation that just doesn't work?
I've seen papers from nobel prize winning physicists that upon actually trying to apply the theory one finds that it's totally inconsistent--almost as if the writers never actually bothered to try to check their work, or did and decided to hide the problem rather than throw it away, fix it, or qualify it as problematic.
I understand that there's a lot of pressure to publish, but unfortunately I can't publish my own work because it deconstructs work of more prominent people--it would literally shift the foundations of the theory. The problem is that if I've made a mistake, it's my reputation that's shot.
It can be really heartbreaking, too: I went over my friend's doctoral thesis just before he was to send it for publication, and verifying it through computational proof I found a small, seemingly insignficant problem about 130 pages into 900 pages of work compiled over years that propagated across the entire edifice he'd costructed, rendering the much of the theory implausible--and since it was group theory, difficult to salvage. He hasn't talked to me since (probably because he's busy trying to fix it).
My point is, if you're going to persecute people for publishing bad data, how about publishing people for bad proofs? Sorry about the AC: this is the first time I've ever felt the need to use it, but I've already received enough flak for my criticism of some very brilliant people.
I think including alternative medicine with the other topics you mention is pretty short sighted. To think that we have all the medical answers, and that there aren't other medications or treatments that western medicine might not know about is ignorant. Take for instance pressure points: no western doctor or treatment explains or addresses them.
This is almost precisely the same argument used by the Intelligent Design folks to get creationism taught in schools! I'm flabergasted that this got modded up. Yes, yes, yes -- neither evolution or western medicine has all the answers. Scientists fully admit this. However, the fact that those fields don't have all the answers doesn't mean that we should start relying on creationism or alternative medicine. You need to provide verifable evidence that sticking needles into people can cure ailments and not rely on "well, you guys don't have all the answers" arguments. Alternative medicine most definitely belongs with the other things I listed. Not because it's all crap. Because all of those things openly (almost pridefully) reject the scientific method.
However, I'll tell you right now that there are a great many instances where accupressure/puncture can make huge differences in a number of maladies.
Oh boy, take a guess what my next question is going to be. Can you provide references to multiple peer-reviewed studies verifying your claim? You "can tell me", huh? And who the hell are you? Some guy on slashdot? I'm going to take medical advice from User 549286?
redfieldp, I think you misunderstood my post. Maybe I should have left UFOs out of the list. My point was that alternative medicine is anti-science. Alternative medicine practitioners apply their techniques to the public at large without scientific evidence that these methods work or are even safe. Having scientists publically outed for falsifing data is only going to provide more ammunition to those who claim they deserve equal status and recognition. Alternative medicine is welcome to use the scientific method to verify their claims. Until that time, it belongs squarely in the "anti-science" camp.
GMD
watch this
And,
And,
Therefore. . .
If this doesn't seem like a big deal, consider. . .
Every assertion that you have ever heard from the sources of authority in our soceity about what is and is not possible in our world has been shaped by those who choose to promote lies as truth and truth as lies.
Consider the pillars of 'fact' which hold up the public perception of reality.
It is reasonable to assume that there are events and forces at work in the world which most people are not willing to recognize.
The things most laughed at by science represent sources of fear; why ridicule something which doesn't bother you on some level?
My personal opinion is that Religion just another arm of this same trap designed to keep people in cages of the mind. With Science and Religion dividing up the masses, Spirituality represents the thin pathway between these two forces of social control and limitation.
Observe those subjects which both Science and Religion unanimously fear, studiously ignore or otherwise distract from, and start there.
-FL
slashdot posts articles with fabricated data all the time....
A guy has been missing over a year and they only now fire him? How many here would expect their employers to do the same thing?
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Sure, the professor's a fabricator, but he's no Fabrikant !
my blog
When a scientific experiment yields unexpected results, you need to re-do it. First you figure out why you got those results, and fix that problem. If you can't find a problem, and don't get the same (unexpected) results you need to do it yet again.
So school science needs to give you enough lab time to re-do the experiment if you don't get the expected result. (Remember you always start with a hypothesis, so you know when you data doesn't fit) Then you need to turn in all your results, both the good and the bad, along with a writing on why those bad results are wrong.
History, my friend... War has always boosted the economy, bolstered research and in general created more money than it costed. It was true for World War 1, World War 2, and will hold true for this war as well. (I can personally attest to the bolstering of research)
-everphilski-
Maybe his experimental data made no sense, like this guy's lab report
of his Ph.D. Just like the German (likely all over this topic) Jan Hendrik Schön. I'm a big fan of holding people acting as an agent to Science or The Public Knowledge or The Public Good accountable for their actions. If they act in violation of their implicit powers entrusted them by their peers and/or readers (e.g. data theft or total fabrication), then the PhD ought to be revoked.
Just as a Jurispudence Doctorate gives one the ability to publically argue a case on the behalf - or at the behest - of another, so too does a Doctorate of Philosophy imply that the bearer ought act in accord with the advancement of science (and the subsequent betterment of man's plight).
My two cents.
Never ever trust a man with 3 names and actually uses them.
You're painting with far too wide a brush. Many alternative medicine practitioners and researchers are using the scientific method and expanding our knowledge of medicine. Take a look at the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine - part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. http://nccam.nih.gov/
I've already taken a look. I recommend you look at this.
GMD
watch this
ABC / Radio National's "Science Show" did a story on an Australian
2 50.htm
scientist, who falsely reported data from "experiments" that
had never been conducted, ie, committed scientific fraud.
An ethical Asian female co-researcher quite rightly
"blew the whistle" on the unethical researcher.
The results:
- He (the "bad guy") is STILL employed by his university / research institute
- She (the "good guy") LOST funding & access to her research facilities & experimental animals
- One of the investigative journalists announced that
HE'LL WILL NEVER REPORT ANOTHER CASE (see below)
He's host of ABC's weekly "Health Report" show:
Norman Swan: "I will never do a case of scientific fraud
ever again.
And the reason for that is just
the failure of institutional responses.
If the University of NSW can get away with
something like this what is the point?
Im not going to do another one because
I just dont think that the institutions in
this country have responded seriously to this."
(Just imagine the kind of world it would be, eg, if ALL
journo's, police, judges, et al. felt like this guy...)
Excerpt from The Science Show:
"What happens to the Whistleblowers?"
The program aired on 3 September 2005.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/stories/s1451
So, I'd say the MIT researcher could do well
in at least ONE Australian research university.
Australia's embarrassing tradition continues...
- After WW 2, AU accepted Nazis from Germany,
apparently forgiving their atrocities [as long as
they brought enough of their spoils to live well here]
- today, at least one Australian research institution
seems to forgive scientific fraud [as long as they
can still attract research grant money]
"Past is Prologue"
Being a researcher myself, I have seen big lies and little lies. The big ones sometimes become public, like the present case. But I have seen so many little lies and they do have an impact on research, too. For example, people find a peak in a distribution and overestimate the statistical significance of the peak. All the sudden a few counts become a new discovery. Lots of money goes into further investigations until the case is settled. Or take the systematical uncertainty of a measurement. A scientific result is not just a single value. Normally we also have to specify an error of an experimental or theoretical result. Of course everybody likes to do a good job. But to get data published people sometimes attach unreasonable errors to their numbers just to ensure their results get published. Collaborations accept those numbers because nobody has the time to deal with those issues. Everbody has their own little project and it costs a lot of time to proof someone wrong, even if everybody knows the numbers are wrong. Eventually nobody asks to be taken off the author list of a publication. Other researchers then take the published results, fit models, make comparisons and find, of course, that their calculations are dominated by those results with the smallest errors. Again, it takes decades until the falsified results get filtered out. The situation is caused by funding agencies. They want to see positive results, fast. No publication, no money. It is that simple. Just because someone spends the time needed to evaluate carefully all aspects of an experiment or theory does not mean the researcher gets funded. On the contrary! The quick-and-dirty jobs are being awarded with precious resources such as research positions. Jobs are the critical resource here. Funding agencies spend a lot of money into equipment, labs and other infrastructure. Life is good. But there are just not enough positions for researchers available. My older colleagues tell me that things have gone a lot worse over the past few decades. You can also see this when you look at the distribution of the researchers' age. Things are worse in the EU than in the US. The EU is putting a lot of money into projects, but far too little into jobs. The taxi driver with doctor title is no joke. The US has traditionally welcomed foreign researchers, but that has changed some 5 years ago dramatically (long before 9/11) and things get worse for everybody. Science and research is not just end in itself. It is part of our culture and our future. Keep an eye on researchers. Make sure they do their job. But also make sure they can do their job. My research is funded by DOE, thanks.
Updated for context, and also Image 2. Pass 'em around...or not.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
I don't think this is MIT's fault. Instead it should be the fault of the moral judgement of the person. It isn't a blow as much as to MIT in that it is a blow to scientists.
My UID is prime is yours?
We VERY rarely hear of research actually failing, when in fact we should be hearing it ALL THE TIME since taking stabs at new ideas shouldn't be successful all the time. Failure should be a natural part of research, and there really shouldn't be an urge to have to make your research fruitful everytime.
/. you've pretended to slightly more knowledge, expertise or insight than you really truly have. If you're a mortal, it happens.
An exceedingly important point, and it is I think the crux of the issue. It is hopeless to guard against fraud in science by expecting to hire only heroes with such iron wills that they can stand up to the enormous pressure to produce success and avoid the "small correction" that turns a bitter failure into a modest success. It's nice when people exist like that, but most of us are just not up to it. The prospect of seeing everything we've hoped for go up in smoke all at once, because a brilliant idea we'd sold a lot of stock in turns out to be wrong, is just too much for mere mortals, and it becomes easy to talk yourself into bullshitting a little bit.
Don't think so? Ask yourself honestly how many times, for example, on
What to do? Science today is so fiendishly focussed on success and advancement that it's hard to get respect for a brilliant experiment that definitely proves some promising concept is wrong or a blind alley. These things should, as you say, earn a lot of respect, but they seem often not to.
I think Feynmann said science is largely a process of finding the right idea by trying all the wrong ideas, one by one, and realizing, one by one, that they're dumb. What's left is the truth.
From that perpective, a negative result, a big failure, is quite valuable indeed: it means that particular route can be abandoned for good, saving everybody a lot of time and effort. "Promising" but non-definite results ("this might be a good idea") are by contrast less valuable, because they don't really save anyone time and effort. You've still got to see if the idea does work out.
But we don't see it this way, much. It's a giant flaw in the system. I wish I knew how to fix it.
soon or later he was going to get caught anyway.
That truly sucks. I know his work. Is there some donation fund or other for his legal costs? I'd send him a few bucks.
By noticing patterns in the data, i.e. design. That's a double-edged sword you are playing with.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
"The revelations are a serious blow to MIT, which prides itself on its reputation as a scientific powerhouse. " I would have to say the opposite. Before coming to MIT, he was at both Harvard and Caltech, where he had apparently also been fabricating data. The difference is that, unlike Harvard or Caltech, at MIT they found it, investigated it, and took action.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
He can always get a job at the Whitehouse....
To all the creepy sibling AC posters ... maybe you could just use Google?
s ha
:-D
http://images.google.com/images?q=site:mit.edu+ma
I make no claims that the results of this search are accurate
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
My AP biology teacher constantly tells us to not fabricate data on lab exercises even if the current data doesn't make sense and then shows us a bunch of articles about fired scientists. Guess he has a point here; it generally stalls your career for 10-15 years and may even end it.
Cogito, ergo sum, fosho!
- Probably brilliant biologist with
- a PhD from Harvard, who is now
- Discredited among his peers and unemployed, and who
- Apparently doesn't have much of a grasp of ethics.
I can see it now...Those bastards, we'll see who has the last laugh now... Soon my army of Super Mutants will TAKE OVER THE WORLD! Muahahah!
It sounds like the origins of some kind of cheap comic book super vilain. Except, its not really that funny. This guy might be developing biological weapons for terrorists in the near future. If all he cares about is money and isn't too concerned about right and wrong, he's going to go work for somebody who might overlook his past mistakes as long as he can deliver what they want.
I feel really sorry for this guy and I think that a good part of the blame should be passed on to the universities which granted this guy his academic credentials yet failed to beat enough ethics into his head in the process to prevent him from making this tragic career mistake.
Hopefully he can take this in stride, and find some "good guys" who are willing to give him another chance. You can't get that far along without knowing something about biology, and it would be a shame to loose a valuable scientist of that caliber. This is going to be a painful lesson in professional ethics for Dr. Varijs which he will wish he had learned a lot earlier on.
Clickety Click
The "hockey stick" first appeared in Mann, M.E., Bradley, R.S. and Hughes, M.K., Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations, Geophysical Research Letters, 26, 759-762, 1999 (available as PDF via FTP at ftp://holocene.evsc.virginia.edu/pub/mann/mbh98.pd f/).
Worse still, it turns out that they calculated the r^2 and got close to 0 in most cases but only reported the one good correlation. Their own software told them that their results were statistically insignificant at any level!
2. Astrology
3. Acupuncture
4. Alternative energy (Cold Fusion, Zero Point Energy, etc.)
5. Alternative medicine (Homeopathy, Reikki, etc.)
6. Cattle Mutilation
7. Crop Circles
8. Energy awareness (Chi)
9. Human history through true archeolgoy
10. The true nature of space and time.
Of course, Science itself and real scientists aren't afraid to examine such areas, and indeed, they have done with spectacular results. But how often do such studies get funded and how often are the findings allowed to affect the status quo or even reach the main stream? This is where the fear is manifest. A room full of biased men in lab coats who go through the motions of research are *not* true scientists. They are frightened men who are willing to observe and measure the Universe only so long as it does not stray outside the comfortable, pre-conceived parameters dictated by society.
Interestingly, those who are not enslaved at the civilian level are allowed to study without restraint.
-FL
The misconduct board has been operating for ten years, yet there have been very few firings and investiations. During that time there have been around 2000 fulltime and part time professors at MIT.
I always wondered when they say as many as half of high school and college students cheat in some fashion according to some surveys, how this becomes relatively rare in faculty. Several search engine studies of online academic journals have more less a one percent rate of xeno-plagarism. (Though the rates of auto-plagarism, the recycling of previous paragraphs by the same research groups is substantially higher.) Research miscondent is so rare that it still makes headlines.
If expressing one's thoughts on a relevant subject on a public discussion board is 'Trolling', then I guess every last poster is a 'troll'. Honestly. If you find an idea makes you auto-react or feel uncomfortable, then perhaps you could benefit from doing a little inward searching to find out why, rather than outward labeling to suppress it.
Those who see discussion boards as mechanisms for winning and losing have slipped into the Ego trap. Ideally, Discussion and Learning are what it should all be about.
-FL