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a story where MIT has fired an associate professor of biology for fabricating data in a published scientific paper, in unpublished manuscripts, and in grant applications.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. :)
"And I wouldn't have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those meddling kids!" Scoooby-Dooby-Doooo!
I'm sure they will try and twist it that way, but it's worth keeping in mind that we know about this precisely because scientists take things like making up data seriously, and try very hard to uncover those who would do it. The Intelligent Design side isn't quite so gung-ho in terms of caring about falsifying data (heck, or even providing data).
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.
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
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.
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).
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