A joint investigation carried out over the course of 2 years by the ORI and the UK found that Eric Smart, who studied the molecular mechanisms behind cardiovascular diseases and diabetes, had falsified or fabricated a total of 45 figures—mostly images of Western blots, a technique used to identify proteins—in seven grant applications, three progress reports, and 10 published papers, some of which were cited more than 100 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. The notice says that Smart also reported experimental data from knockout mice that did not exist.
Anyone who has worked in the University ‘paper mill’ system knows that peer review is politics not science.
Yes, a lot of junk and even lies finds a publisher.
But – “peer Reciew” is not meant to check for that anyway. It only means someone has glanced through it and not spotted anything that really jumped off the page.
That is how, for instance, Bellsisles got away with saying Thomas Jefferson must not have had any guns because none were mentioned in his will – neither he nor most of his reviewers noted the absurdity, considering among other things that a pair of pistols are on display at Monticello…
That’s alright because it’s not like there is human life at stake or anything.
“knockout mice”?
Well for one thing, we learned that Smart was smarter than the jackasses who rubber-stamped his work.
If this keeps up the title “professor” will be synonymous with “Swedish Chef” (hurky furky durky).
Fraud on a huge scale – and he “has agreed to exclude himself from federal grant applications for the next 7 years—longer than the typical 3- or 5-year bans.”
Oh well, it’s all okay then? Really? Where the eff are the idiots who are handing out our cash? They should be fired, and this turd should be fired, jailed, and forced to pay restitution.
Climategate is the best example of the fraud called ‘peer review’. It’s nothing more than glorified “I’ll scratch your back, if you scratch mine.”
Knockout mice are mice where a gene has been eliminated or its expression nullified ie it is knocked-out.
I find this remarkable…
According to the late Micheal Chricton medical research peer revue was the last bastion of truth and accuracy..after seeing the breakdown of the peer revue process in climate science.
Peer review? Smart is right up there with the murderer who said vaccines cause autism,OCD,etc. And Rachel Carson,who condemned millions of kids to death through malaria by her unfounded claims against DDT.Of course this “scared” the idiot sheeple into not getting their kids protected.Now we have measles,chicken pox,mumps,and probably polio coming back.Any punishment is not enough for these clowns.
Justthinking…vaccines are highly over rated. Look at all the money and government interference we have now with the flu vaccine. I will be forced to conform to receive a vaccine that has not been proven effective or harmless.
The science is not settled on flu vaccine. Chicken pox in childhood is harmless.
Sounds like Michael Mann doesn’t it.
Noting that we still need researchers in all scientific endeavors and that a proper role of government is indeed funding basic research, I offer the following:
Yoshitaka Fujii – a Japanese researcher in anesthesiology, who in 2012 was found to have fabricated data in at least 172 scientific papers, setting what is believed to be a record for the number of papers by a single author requiring retractions. (Wikipedia)
and more recently
Lawrence Sanna – Lawrence Sanna departed University of Michigan amid questions over his work from ‘data detective’ Uri Simonsohn. (Nature.com)
And thank goodness for people like Uri Simonsohn and Ross McKitrick (University of Guelph, Ontario)
Justthinkin and David in Michigan, well said. It seems much research these days has an agenda and or a money trail.
The really sad part of all of this research fraud is that taxpayers are getting fleeced, populations getting hoodwinked, and idiotic legislation passed.
More like Beer Review . . . Get drunk and just say yes.
It’s good to see that the system does work. Peer review is one of several checks on fraud or error. So are publication (which exposes findings to another tier of scrutiny) and replicability. Thanks for the illustrative example.
“Federal investigators have censured a former University of Kentucky (UK) senior biomedical researcher”
Censured?
I would hope he would be fired and never be able to get a job as a researcher or professor again. And perhaps get sued for the grant money.
And according to Wikipedia…
“In criminal law, a fraud is an intentional deception made for personal gain”
Bloblobican is back to trolling SDA? Gawd.
Dear bloby, these are falsified grant applications. Money involved. Millions of dollars. This is not a good thing.
Fraud over 10 years means the system works? I think it could use a tune up, such as not allowing mutual beneficieries to perform the review, as in climategate.
For those who are criticizing the peer reviewers…
I do peer review, and the ability of peer reviewers to detect fraud is limited. Unless the fraud is obvious, a peer reviewer would either have to visit the researchers’ office and demand to see evidence, or repeat the experiments him or herself. Neither is practical.
When you do peer review, you are critiquing the scientific merits and the quality of writing and exposition of a paper, not the honesty of the authors. In other words, a peer reviewer is forced to assume that the authors are honest.
Greg:
“Fraud over 10 years means the system works?”
Scientists take the long view.
Taking the long view doesn’t mean no improvements are needed. The level of review should have some corelation to the value of the paper. So yes, in some cases you should demand to be allowed to replicate, see evidence etc.
Sadly it seems “PAL” revue has replaced peer review in the process.
Re flu vacines….last time I bothered was with the H1N1 panic…which exposed me to a whack of people….impairing my successful practice of avoiding crowds. BTW I don’t touch people…or shake hands….
It works.
Greg:
Some researchers publish ten or more papers a year. To have peer reviewers directly inspect the evidence for every paper just can’t be done. The work load would be immense, and no one would want to do peer review.
It might be possible for reviewers to verify really, really critical papers, but it might be that no single paper by Eric Smart fell into that category. Researchers like to publish many smaller papers rather than one big one because it fattens up their resume.
My question though — Smart was working with about a dozen other researchers. Where were they in all of this? They would have been in the best position to detect fraud, and would have known there were no mice.
Chicken pox in childhood is harmless.
Posted by: HCW at November 29, 2012 8:16 AM
uhuh…and it leads to shingles as you get older.Get a grip and get off mommy’s ‘puter.
And nice to see babbly back.Those Islam nuts are everywhere.Your hubby beat you lately?
I’ve been thinking about this issue a fair bit of late, but mostly in regard to Humanities rather than Sciences.
A year or two ago it was the 140th anniversary of the Paris Commune, and a professor I know was flown to and put up in Paris to attend some conference. Now if he were a History prof (and this was his area of research), I’d grudgingly admit it was appropriate. But he was an English Lit professor, and this conference had little if anything to do with his subject of study.
Why isn’t there some sort of civilian oversight when tax dollars are spent on academic projects? The argument, presumably, is that we proles can’t understand the complexity of the subjects, that there is a need for academic freedom, etc. But that’s clearly bull.
Imagine for a moment if we applied that logic to military procurement, if we told all those with concerns about the F35, (for example) that this decision will be made solely by the military, reviewed and approved by other members of the military, and not subject to any outside scrutiny? They’d howl. But when it comes to their funding, ….that’s different.
We could probably cut our academic funding to the Arts in half by simply having a hard-ass ask a few pointed questions: 1). How does this relate to your field of study, 2). How will it benefit Canadians? 3). How will we judge whether this investment has been successful?
Man, I’d sign up for that post in a second. The universities have chosen to politicize academia; there should be political consequences for that and the best way to clip the wings of the most radical professors is to stall their careers through lack of funding.
“These are falsified grant applications. Money involved. Millions of dollars. This is not a good thing”.
Absolutely. Dude got caught. System worked.
Balbulican, based on your assumptoins, Bernie Madoff got caught, no need to change the way the SEC operates? No additional checks and balances? No increased enforcement? May be we should loosen things up a little.
And you wonder why 60 yrs of heavily funded cancer research has netted nothing of significance.
@ Occam at November 29, 2012 12:05 PM
Cancer is a trillion dollar world wide industry with millions of shareholders in thousands of ventures. A cure would devastate those industries and investments. A cure is the last thing they are looking for as there is so much money involved big Pharma and related industries would do anything to hide said cure. What they would accept is something down the line of 3 expensive pills a day that would stabilize the disease for the rest of a patients life. Like everything else, just follow the money. All disease research is profit motivated.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AazObF_pHSU
sasquach…so a novelist thinks med peer review is “the last bastion”…meanwhile the former editor in chief of the NEJM quits in disgust and claims it is the biggest cesspool of academic/scientific/corporate fraud in history…who ya gonna believe? Google marcia angel.
As an interesting aside, having been a regular reader here for around a decade, it boggles my mind how so many here “get it” with the AGW scam, but fail to realize that our “belief” in the superiority of modern (patent drug based) medicine was manufactured in the identical fashion to the “progressives” belief in AGW, by and large by the same financial interests for the exact same reasons…monopoly and control…the pharma biz is about pension funds and big banks (and crooked insiders), not about health
Of course, in Germany, “knockout mice” are the irresistibly sexy ones…
peterj and peter, I am beginning to think you are right about this. Plus, it keeps many people employed.
No, balbulican, the system DOESN’T work and that’s the problem. Bury your head in the sand some more and pretend there are no problems (as you usually do).
“Balbulican, based on your assumptoins, Bernie Madoff got caught, no need to change the way the SEC operates? No additional checks and balances? No increased enforcement? May be we should loosen things up a little.”
Not quite. To apply a similar hyperbole on the other side of the argument: “The system failed to prevent a Bernie Madoff, so let’s eliminate investment Counselling.”
As I said above, peer review is one of several strategies used to improve the reliability of scientific findings, just as audits are one of several strategies intended to improve financial accountability. Neither are fullproof – either (like any human system) can and should be improved.)
My point hearkens back to an argument in another thread. This reflexively anti-science stance popular among some conservatives may be a necessary adaptation to enable dismissal findings that prove ideologically inconvenient: but it’s not a particularly healthy one.
And once again, balbulican tries to impress how smart he thinks he is on everyone.
Show me one person here who is anti-science (actually anti-science, not what you think is anti-science). That several people were allowed to get away with misconduct shows there is a more of a political bent in journals and not a scientific one. One might even say THEY are anti-science. Let the facts be disposed of they don’t conform to political theory or personal gain.
peterj…correct. And it’s big Pharma behind the push for flu vaccine.
I would be quite open to scientific proof wrt flu vaccine be safe and effective . It cannot be found.
justthinking…since you prefer insults instead of intelligent dialogue, I will reluctantly respond. I am a health care worker, continually involved in study and research. Your statement with regard the chicken pox/shingles is incorrect.
HCW, what evidence would you accept?
We are not against science, just perverted science. There is more than one scientist either on this blog or associated with it in some way.
“Your statement with regard the chicken pox/shingles is incorrect.”, that is not what our doctor told us, and my wife has had shingles a few times, which was caught in time.
balby…scientific evidence , of course.
Studies not prepared by big pharma and the government. They are difficult to find.
Facts, stats, and questions answered, such as:
How many vaccinated (flu) persons suffer from flu like illness after vaccine compared to those not vaccinated?
An intersting post here wrt the chicken pox/shingles discussion.The last 2 paragraphs are especially relevant to this discussion of so-called peer review:
http://vran.org/vaccines/cpox/shingles-threat.htm
HCW:
“Studies not prepared by big pharma and the government.”
Yeah, that cuts it down. Given that virtually all research into pharmaceuticals is conducted by or funded by pharmaceutical companies, government monitoring agencies, or government funded universities, it’s going to be pretty tough to find evidence that will satisfy you.
Normally one would look at the scientific quality of the study itself – scope and scale of study, quality of research questions, data sources, etc. – rather than simply dismissing the source. That wouldn’t do the trick for you?
@ balbulican
Most of the big pharmaceuticals now outsource their research and trials. Life is cheap in China,India and 3 rd world countries. Stories like this are common :
http://openchannel.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/03/04/10562883-in-india-oversight-lacking-in-outsourced-drug-trials?lite
The manufacture of most drugs has also been outsourced.
Peterj, if one decides that all available evidence is going to be excluded from consideration because of its source and not its quality, then one leaves the realm of scientific debate (which can be productive) and enters a simple ideological spat (which usually isn’t).. Just trying to figure out where HCW is at on that continuum.
Why are you people talking to the troll? He’s a -troll-, at best he’s just trying to waste your time and hack you off. y’all know any time some fool comes on here and says “anti-science” what their goal is.
Back under your bridge blob.
Agree Phantom. He’s not very strong on his homework.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/28/us-china-pharmaceuticals-idUSBRE87R0OD20120828
Free tax money corrupts. That’s the long and short of it.
Solution: abolish coercion, including (in the long run) taxation.
This is what happens when you replace morality with secularism based on Relativism.
When you say there is no right or wrong this should have been anticipated.
Human nature makes it inevatable.
To get back to the point: HCW has indicated that he would not accept studies on vaccine safety or efficacy if they were conducted by government or by the pharmaceutical industry (which is required to test them before Health Canada okays distribution).
So – whose vaccine testing would HCW (or other vaccine skeptics) accept? OR is acceptance or research finding contingent on the degree to which it overlaps with your own beliefs (as is the case among Truthers, Birthers, and other peculiar ideologues of the right and the left?)
Revnant Dream, that is it. In the old days a scientist suspected of fudging oor outright fabricating evidence would be shunned by the rest of his peers. The theft of funds would be considered less important than the perversion of science.
These days guys publish total horsesh1t in the literature all day long and only the squares seem to care about either the money or the science. The entire medical literature on gun control is falsified by omission at least, by fabrication in several famous cases. Those authors are still pumping out crap with essentially stolen grants, nobody cares.
Or perhaps more accurately, nobody on the Left cares. They seem to like it.
I would be quite open to scientific proof wrt flu vaccine be safe and effective .
1) The flue vaccine is semi-effective ~60% prevention of flu. Worth it. 2) It’s incumbent on you to show it’s dangerous.
The chickenpox virus absolutely causes shingles. If you are really a healthcare worker can you please stop being a healthcare worker? Scary.