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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a story where MIT has fired an associate professor of biology for fabricating data in a published scientific paper, in unpublished manuscripts, and in grant applications.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."
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.
I can name one that I was in where I saw a ton of data being fabricated and work stolen - the department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and in general the school of Engineering, where I got my Ph.D. I have had my work ripped off by Professors, and seen the same people even do this with Undergraduate summer projects. The area that I found most of this sort of stuff, including fabricating data, is in computer vision and robotics. Everyone is so busy publishing, no one ever checks the papers. The truth is most robotics stuff you hear in the news is some nonsense cooked up for media attention. Then the actual papers never carry out the stuff that the researchers claimed in the news. You know stuff like "MIT professor makes robot with emotions". What a lot of crap.
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?
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make install -not war
..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 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...
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).
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.
True, but I've heard of this kind of thing happening quite frequently from my friends in the ahem, military equipment sector.
Not that they say it happens to them, but the stories are ridiculous, with tests designed so they can't fail, or so failures are marked as partial successes, etc, because the project cannot have any black marks against it till acquisition... after which the govt will gladly pay to upgrade baselines to fix the flaws over the next decade. Check fas.org, but the first sparrow missle, the first line of tomahawks, b1 bomber, osprey, bradley's, even the proposed missle shield, all were/are acquired with obvious, mission-comprimising flaws that cost billions-10s of billions per project to fix. The problem is the acquisition system, especially congress's oversight, doesn't have an independent verification mechanism to prove that said equipment works within required parameters, and anyone who tries to say anything generally gets discharged from the military for going outside the chain of command and "comprimising the integrity of a classified project", even if the congressmen have clearance.
So if you were ever curious why so many ex-military officers found surprisingly comfortable jobs in the defense sector, theres an idea.
The corruption in the military-industrial complex goes beyond anything we can imagine in the private sector. Actual results being valued far less than pork per district works great in politics, but tends to hurt 2 politically defenseless groups, the taxpayers who fund these nightmares, and the poor troops who end up wondering why they have to bolt sheet metal onto their hummvees while people are shooting at them.
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
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.
The blow is to MIT's hiring practice and peer review. An instance of fraud indicates that the faculty there is verifiably capable of fraud. It indicates that their hiring practices are not infalliable, as may have previously been thought, and to which there was previously no example to turn to. While it may not produce any overwhelming skepticism of their other results, particularly with their reaction, it does show a falliability in hiring practice, and a lack of internal peer review prior to publication.
It is a blow to their reputation. MIT hired someone capable of lying, who lacks the foresight to expect to be caught in a system of skepticism and peer review, who is more ambitious than smart. Otherwise impecable hiring practices are tarnished by this mistake. Respect that may have been inherent and implicit to authors at MIT now stands next to the possibility fraud such as this. In my mind, this paints everyone who arrived at MIT in the same way with the same brush.
While admirable, I do not think their reaction can actually produce greater respect than would have otherwise been there had they not hired a charlatan. The respect I hold for their reaction is different from, and in no way increases, my faith in their capacity to hire appropriately and produce reliable work. Their reaction was the lesser blow to reputation, and in my mind necessary. Had they let the case die in the darkness, if it ever came to light it would undermine their reputation, not tarnish it.
I'm just tired of the crap. I tell people I studied philosophy and they ask me retarded questions, "Durrr, so do we exist or not?"
I spent my time learning to write automata with higher Turing scores than morons like that, and routinely work with logic loops that would make their tiny minds asplode, and I get crap because they think their business degree, or their non-programming I/S degree was more challenging than what I studied?
It just pisses me off. It's not my fault a bunch of wankers in europe decided that their subjective experiences had external validity, and that their crackpot theories happened to fall into the fuzzy area between philosophy and religion, and it really irks me when people who know better draw no distinction between the two...It's like putting the ID people and the Evolution people in the same category.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Actually I wrote fiction and freelance coded for a couple of years, then moved to I/T full time.
I kinda thought I wanted to be a writer at the time, but I found the hard satisfaction of coding to be more desirable than the ephemeral nature of "success" in writing, where the quality of your work had no relation to its value.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
It's not insecurity. It's sticking up for a branch of study that's gotten the shaft in the last 80 years. I got three undergrad degrees (double major, with a minor that turned into a major), including straight up CompSci, so if I was ashamed of what I'd studied, I'd just pretend like I hadn't done it. You don't see me claiming my English degree all that often ;), though having classes filled with girls did make me the envy of all my CS peers.
The thing about philosophy is that it's really about the process...If you want a branch of study that is completely focused on critical thinking, logical analysis, and proofs, philosophy is the best way to go, and the great thing about it is you don't have to go on and study metaphysics or any of the unpractical stuff if you don't want to...All the methods apply well to any other organized branch of study. Hardcore logic training has been invaluable to me in CS, much moreso than the 4 semesters of Calc I had to take.
To me, having someone put down philosophy as a whole like it's only suitable for coffeehouses is the same as someone dismissing physics because it isn't in the bible.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Did your physics prof understand that his 'science' grew out of Philosophic Inquiry?
Sure there are idiots in Philosophy, but it gave birth to all modern sciences.
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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.
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
In your post, you were trying to defend philosophy from the /. masses. I admire this, and agree with most of what you said to them, but still I can't shake the feeling that I have to defend philosophy against you. I hope you can excuse the impropriety. ;)
If I follow you, your problem with some varieties of philosophy is that they are "unpractical," as you put it. It isn't exactly clear which sorts of philosophy you are fingering here, so I'm going to consider two possible readings of what you specifically said. Before that though, I need to give everyone else a quick sketch of what doing philosophy in the 21st century means. It's my personal belief that a lot of the frustration that you and I both face when we're talking to people without a philosophy background is the fact that the discipline is shrouded in mystery. More than that, though, I need it to make my response to you make sense.
Now, very roughly speaking, at the very highest level of abstraction there are three ways of "doing philosophy" in academia. You can be a historical scholar, a member of the Anglo-American (aka Analytic) School, or a member of the Continental School. The work of historical scholars are pretty straight forward: they take texts written by (frequently long) dead philosophers and they try to interpret them, or they try to demonstrate the relationships between different thinkers, or things like that. What they do is quite a bit like art historians or literature experts, only in a philosophical mode. Conversely, the Analytic School and the Continental School are concerned with the production of new thought: they are the two sides of what it sometimes refered to as the Split, because, starting around, oh, 1900, they stopped talking to each other. There are many differences between the two sides of the Split, but the ones that concern us here are just these: the Analytics are primarily interested in logic, rationality, and the physical sciences plus psychology and linguistics, while writting in a clear manner akin to scientific journals, and having their power in the UK and most US schools, while the Continentals are primarily interested in art and literary criticism, the social sciences, and what might be called "The Big Questions", while frequently writting in poetic if obscure manners, and having their power in France, Germany, and select schools in the US. Russell is the most commonly known analytic, while Sartre is the most commonly known continental. (And, IMHO, these are both tragedies.)
There were huge generalizations made above I would want to fix in a formal setting (historians tend to either have continetnal or analytic tendencies, for instance), but it's good enough for the purpose at hand. To get back to your comment, then, there are two things you could be saying. Either (A) that history of philosophy, and subjecting colleges students to it is pointless because its unpractical, or (B) you could be taking a very hard analytic position against continental philosophy, that talking about the Being of Being or the Other or Deconstruction is pointless because it never matters in the real world, like, say Cognitive Science or Decision Theory does (One might imagine this argument ending with "Get a job, hippy!").
Against (A) I'd say, okay, if you really want to be that hard-headed about the singular importance of science in human education, there's nothing really I can say, but, you are also saying that the humanities in general are without practical significance. Does learning history _really_ help us avoid repeating it? Maybe occasionally, but not enough to warrent the amount of money we spend on teaching it. And the other humanities, art history, the study of dead languages, literature, even many forms of abstract mathematics: there really can't be a good way to justify them. In my mind, however, learning these things just lead to better, fuller lives, not just because of the skills you get when you do it, but because it demonstrates to you t
"Nevermore shall I return... Escape these caves of ice" -Xanadu, Neil Peart, Rush
Your school system must be different from mine!
I won first place in the district science with an experient that FAILED. Yes, it didn't work!
But I did good science, explained WHY it failed, and postulated appropriate requirements for success.
It was also possible in my chemistry and physics classes to achieve a near-perfect score for an experiment that didn't work. You would only lose marks on the do-it-right part of the evaluation, so long as your write up was good and you explained your errors.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
My philosophy professors said that about philosophy too, and they didn't dismiss physics or mathematics while doing so, because they fully understood how they worked. Philosophy is more about logic than mathematics or physics are. If you don't undertand that, you didn't understood anything about philosophy. In fact, mathematics and physics are a concequence of philosphy, like C and lisp are concequence of computer science, but i won't even try to argue about that because you damn 'scientists' guys are so entranched in your way of thinking that you wouldn't be able to admit it anyway. ...
And that's what's so ironic: you can have a philosophy guy admit anything if you can proove it, even things like "you don't exist". Why ? because if the logic behind the argument is irrefutable, it is by all means true unless you can proove otherwise. But scientists, who believe they have the finest logics that exists, can't be bothered with all this stuff because because you can't measure it, look at it, or quantify it. They're a subset of philosophy which deals whith tangible things, but they forgot it, and believe the science which gave them birth is crap because they don't understand it anymore. Total nonsense
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.
He was educated at Caltech by David Baltimore, a long-time MIT professor. So we might also suggest that MIT quit polluting the rest of academia?
Incidentally, this isn't the first time that Baltimore has been tied to academic fraud scandal. One would hope it's coincidence.
"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
- 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.
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