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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a story where MIT has fired an associate professor of biology for fabricating data in a published scientific paper, in unpublished manuscripts, and in grant applications.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."
This sort of black mark generally means that the person will likely have to leave academia and research altogether. In research your integrity is everything. If you lie once, nobody knows if you won't lie again. Peer reviewed Journals will generally refuse your papers without reading them. No research body would risk your name going on one of their papers which would cause it to get red flagged for automatic refusal. It's a very grave situation which can't just be dismissed by "I made a mistake." The guy went through enough school to get a Ph.D., he knew what would happen if he got caught.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
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
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.
There's a lot of unimportant crap that gets published in scientific journals and/or accepted for conferences (I know; I've written some of this crap). Important papers (published research that actually has implications for anyone other than the authors) tends to get reviewed more thoroughly- the whole "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" principle. That's not to say that fabrication doesn't happen, it's just that eventually it's going to get caught, at least for the stuff that matters. The issue is whether it gets caught sooner rather than later.
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories
Ok, just to be clear here, the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics is a well-known waste of academic space. It regularly spams people requesting submissions, has no obvious standards, and will accept pretty much any paper the authors are willing to pay to have published. It has no safeguards. It also has no respect. The MIT tool was developed specifically to prove that the conference in question was a sham.
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.
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
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.
Oh, research does fail all the time, believe me. In fact, right before I wrote this, one of my own experimental setups came up with disappointing results.
The reason you don't hear about it is that no one tends to publish the negative results - they're usually not nearly as interesting (or profitable) as the positive ones. I will not get a paper out of the experiment I just ran, for instance - instead, I will probably change my setup or hypothesis, and try running other ones.
It is unfortunate that this happens, though - sometimes this can produce what is known as the "file drawer effect", where positive results from one study are not compared against unpublished negative results in similar experiments.
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