Dana-Farberications at Harvard University

https://forbetterscience.com/2024/01/02/dana-farberications-at-harvard-university/

by RadixDLT • 3 years ago

221 117 3 years ago

delichon• 3 years ago

The teaching standards at Harvard have been declining remarkably steadily for many years now.

https://www.chartr.co/stories/2023-12-08-2-grade-inflation-a...

Apparently teachers' standards have declined for themselves too. Some of that would be a result of being trained at Harvard, a vicious circle.

IceHegel• 3 years ago

They thought it would never catch up to them, they thought grade inflation didn’t matter because it was still hard to get in.

gonzo41• 3 years ago

"Hard to get in" is relative. I only recently learned about legacy admissions.

Gustomaximus• 3 years ago

Could this be because Harvard is increasingly desirable & hard to get into? From this, the average standard of students + their dedication to their work/GPA may well have steadily grown too.

From a quick google, the acceptance rate to Harvard was 20% higher in the 70's. In 1940 it had an absolute acceptance rate of 85%.

I dont actually know the answer, but from that graph only, the rising rate could be as much from a higher standard of student as lowering standards of marking.

somenameforme4• 3 years ago

In the past a university education was 100% optional - as was high school for that matter, and so the only people pursuing such tended to be exceptional academic/intellectual outliers. The pool of people interested was very low, and standards were exceptionally high. For instance, this [1] is a Harvard entrance exam from 1869!

[1] https://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvard...

asylteltine• 3 years ago

Going to schools like Harvard is 90% about networking and 10% education. Harvard dudes hire Harvard. It’s gross

whatyesaid2• 3 years ago

Grade inflation has been happening at literally every institution. So you can't point just to Harvard. But a middle rated school can't take a stand, only the very top schools can start to, and they'd have to do it slowly to give employers and students time to adjust.

There are apparently advanced classes like Math 55 that had huge dropout rates that had to be cleaned up though. So those courses have been completely changed instead of just awarding higher marks I'd imagine.

sudosysgen• 2 years ago

There are plenty of 'middile rated schools, and even top 50' that have things like target average grades. It's also not uncommon across the world for entire programs to have dropout rates around 50%, it's just rare in reputable anglophone schools.

WhitneyLand• 3 years ago

Grade inflation is a statistic not a cause.

It could be caused by lowered standards or more competition or better student performance.

tjpnz• 3 years ago

The publishing record of their former president speaks volumes. I wonder what it takes to be a lecturer there.

burningChrome• 3 years ago

I've had several HS friends go to Harvard. They all said the same thing - its for networking post graduation, the education itself is all smoke and mirrors.

My buddy said he had to take a botany class as a filler for some academic requirement for graduation. He said the entire class was to pick a tree out on campus and then describe how it changed over the course of the semester.

He maintained he had more rigorous classes in HS then he had at Harvard and said the progressive politics were so pervasive, that as long as you towed the ideological line, then you got favorable grades.

It would appear not much as changed since he was there in the early aughts.

andirk• 3 years ago

Oregon (kind of) dropped requirements for very basic reading, writing, and arithmetic to graduate high school because such skills were deemed racist.

I'm not a big fan of standardized tests, but they can identify serious issues to address especially as it pertains to geographical, ethnic, etc. groups and allocate funding accordingly. If we keep lowering bars instead of addressing the issues, this is going to get very bad.

https://www.oregonlive.com/education/2023/10/oregon-again-sa...

https://www.opb.org/article/2021/09/20/examining-oregon-deci...

wsc9812• 3 years ago

Oregon (kind of) dropped requirements for very basic reading, writing, and arithmetic to graduate high school because such skills were deemed racist.

It’s ironic that this stance is actually racist, since it implies certain races perform worse.

perihelions• 3 years ago

Dupe

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39090959 (34 comments)

dang• 3 years ago

That article cites this one as the original source, so even though this one is rather strangely written, I guess we can let the current thread run.

p-e-w2• 3 years ago

All rankings that attempt to compare the academic quality of universities are self-fulfilling prophecies.

Rankings influence prestige. Prestige influences perception, even among experts. Is Nature really going to reject that paper? It was written by a Harvard guy, after all.

And next, the number of "high-impact" publications (such as in Nature) is used to rank universities. Good luck...

whatyesaid2• 3 years ago

You can have double blind papers and double blind research funding I guess to help that a little?

Not sure what else you can do. Table rankings are actually only applicable for undergrads in practical terms. At research level, You have world leading experts at random universities often, and then people who worked in top universities who advanced the field by none after decades.

I wonder how many universities actually mega climbed ranks in the past decades though

p-e-w2• 3 years ago

The peer review process isn't actually blind in practice. The number of experts working in a given problem space is small enough that they know most of their peers, and usually can identify at a glance who the author of a paper is, from the topic, writing style, and experimental design, which they can recognize from previous publications and correspondence.

sbalamurugan• 3 years ago

Desk rejects also happen regularly from Editors (who are not blind to the author names and affiliations). Editors can also make final decisions to accept or reject when reviewers don't agree.

Even in a blind peer review, the subject of study introduces another layer of bias in the process. Let's say two economics papers are submitted that discusses how people spend their last part of their pay check. One studies a pool of people across United States and other studies of people across Nigeria. Which one do you think is going to get positive review from editors and reviewers? The Nigeria paper might not even go to review. The editor is going to say something on the lines of "the focus of the study is too narrow for the journal" but won't say the same when it is across US. This is in addition to the trust issues with any research conducted outside western countries.

For researchers from the "low ranked" universities, the game is rigged against them and there is nothing they can do to swing it to their favour.

jackcosgrove2• 3 years ago

I wonder how many universities actually mega climbed ranks in the past decades though

I know of one, the University of Chicago. And it did so by gaming the ranking metrics. It dropped its long and idiosyncratic application and adopted the Common App. The admissions rate tanked from above 40% less than twenty years ago to about 5% now simply because more students applied. Did the quality of the education change? I doubt it.

P.S. Chicago recently dropped out of the top 10 this past year for the first time since adopting the Common App, due to a change in the ranking formula. Which says more about the inside baseball of rankings than it does about the education on offer.

dlkf• 3 years ago

I’m not sure that you can. What I’ve read is that in a lot of fields, the community is small enough that you have a reasonable idea whose work you are reviewing even if the author’s name is redacted.

neilv2• 3 years ago

I wonder how many universities actually mega climbed ranks in the past decades though

An example of rankings being climbed:

https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2014/08/26/how-northeast...

(Not to dis Northeastern. They have some great professors, and do some great teaching and research. And the faculty of a university don't necessarily agree with the businesspeople.)

But if you think that kind of college rankings climbing is a concern, the climbing demand that college has evolved for students is worse, and has implications for tech industry, as I asserted recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39086755

Aeolun2• 3 years ago

Still, there are peer reviewers and editors for these papers. They don’t go in without anyone checking them. So what goes wrong there?

sgt1013• 2 years ago

Peer review is difficult and unpaid. Also there are quite a lot of corrupt bastards who do peer review specifically to approve their friends papers and to stop other peoples.

If you are in a specialist field you generally know who's paper you are looking at - shaping review is a good way of getting ahead.

petesergeant• 3 years ago

Is Nature really going to reject that paper? It was written by a Harvard guy, after all.

Yes.

j7ake• 2 years ago

This. You’d be surprised how many papers get rejected by Nature “even” papers from Harvard.

Experiment: randomly pick a “Harvard guy” in biology and check their publications, count what fraction of them are in Nature (or comparable journals).

FooBarBizBazz• 2 years ago

That's a good point. It reminds me of:

1. Ray Dalio's "believability" cult:

- https://www.businessinsider.com/bridgewater-rigged-believabi...

- NYT: https://archive.is/ODbAv

2. PageRank. Or, the way that PageRank was a beautiful, effective algorithm only for a few years until people figured out how to game it.

UncleMeat3• 2 years ago

Yes, Nature is absolutely going to reject that paper. I went to grad school at one of the very best programs in the world and know a ton of people who attended programs of similar caliber and had world renowned faculty as authors on their papers. People got their shit rejected all the time.

Yes, the bias you describe that makes people respect papers from well known sources more than papers from outsiders is real. But it isn't nearly as extreme as you describe it.

ossicones2• 3 years ago

I would’ve preferred a less editorialized article about this. In particular, this article has left me wondering who’s actually written fraudulent articles and whose biggest mistake was trusting the wrong collaborators.

mitchellst2• 3 years ago

Agreed. I don't think the snark helps.

Not my field, but my understanding of how these things work in big medical research factories: first few authors tend to be young researchers (maybe med students or even undergrads) trying to match residency or get into grad school. They do much of the work actually assembling the submission. The later names on the author list (who this article is taking to task) run labs or oversee research groups. Should they correct the record when it's pointed out? Yes. (But the snark and tenor of the post doesn't exactly convince someone they can admit an oversight in good faith.)

Should they be vigilant enough to check and notice these things? Of course. Some of the fakes are not subtle. Others, like the copy-paste of empty space in the lane to cover some undesirable result? Way harder to spot with the naked eye. I don't think there was great automated tech to detect image duplication in the 00's when these were published.

So your med student fudges data on a paper. The ethical answer is to expel them—"the world needs plenty of bartenders." But it appears big institutions these days are pretty invested in the sunk costs of prestige, dislike admitting error in admission or hiring, and prioritize go-along-get-along environments. It could be career limiting if students don't get any/enough pubs working in your lab. It'd a lot of hearings and paperwork to report him, plus I heard his uncle's a donor. If she got kicked out she'd lose her visa. And if I reported them, I'd be obliged to report everyone, and I'd be sunk in discipline hearings three times a year. So much easier to just... not look very hard.

It's bad science and bad ethics, but if you want better, reform the incentives. "Public" shaming by a niche newsletter... might be better than nothing, but doesn't qualify as an incentive.

wrs2• 3 years ago

They won't correct the record because they "can't admit an oversight" due to the snark in a niche newsletter...a newsletter which you then say isn't important enough to serve as an incentive? So which is it, important or not?

I would think they can't admit an oversight due to the institutional incentives you mention; the snark is irrelevant. If anything, it encourages publicity for the oversight, which is the only thing that might change the incentive.

theGnuMe3• 3 years ago

I mean there is an alternative to expel and that is rehabilitation. I think that happens in a lot of cases. These though are systematic repeated..

The first author 'undergrads' or 'med students' are not assembling the paper no way. For sure the last authors know what is going on.

shkkmo• 3 years ago

Even the collaborators who did not engage in fraud show a shockingly low level of concern for correcting or retracting fraudulent papers their names are attached to. At this point, I think it is best to assume all involved are guilty and they should have to demonstrate their integrity by how proactively they work to correct the errors.

sgt1013• 2 years ago

biggest mistake was trusting the wrong collaborators.

This is no excuse, and allowing it to be an excuse is at the root of why things are going so wrong in Science. If your name is on the paper you 100% must own every word.

There should be some agreed sanctions for this kind of thing. I would recommend that if any paper is withdrawn all the authors should be prohibited from receiving government funding for 3 years, and they should be banned from publication & citation for 5 years.

I am thinking this would change the culture quite radically.

ossicones2• 2 years ago

If researchers were unable to trust their collaborators, it would mean that they would have to master and oversee every step of every process. This would stop interdisciplinary research completely and massively reduce output.

In software, this would be the equivalent of not importing a package unless you first checked the code line by line.

The system works okay now, but there's a lot of room for improvement. I generally think the best way to improve it is to require more open data so that consumers of research can validate the findings of papers.

galkk• 3 years ago

The piece reads very weirdly.

In the beginning the picture of copypasted images and doctored results is very clear.

But when it goes to the passage about genius, and it is so strange. Out of place, weird rant about chosen word…

Whatever bastard Sabatiny is, the author’s approach also leaves bad taste in mouth

theGnuMe3• 3 years ago

Man what a mess. I guess if you give someone something to optimize (publications) they will do so.

Science has become distracted by celebrity and money.

What a waste of grant money. I hope the NCI, NSF and NIH fund a program to route out scientific fraud, it is clearly needed.

When I was in grad school some fellow students were admonished for plagiarism but allowed to stay. I always think of who was denied a place by these folks.

mike_hearn2• 2 years ago

The US has a whole department that is supposed to police scientific fraud, the ORI. It was set up in the 70s after a series of fraudulent studies caught the attention of Congress.

Unfortunately after a few failed prosecutions early in its history the ORI now does very little, only a handful of cases per year. Compared to the scale of the problem which is often measured in something like 50%+ or more of papers, it's just irrelevant. There is no "police department" you could staff up that'd be big enough to get a handle on this problem.

pessimist• 3 years ago

My brother is dying of a grade 4 brain tumor, and I've spend countless hours poring through papers. Horrifying to realize they may be falsified. I am always sceptical of pre-clinical studies since so many have tended to fail in the real world, but now I wonder how many were just fake? These aren't scientists but thieves robbing public money with no skin the game.

patryn20• 3 years ago

Reading through papers on cholangiocarcinoma: most of them ARE falsified. And I want to harm people for it. Only three new drugs in 29 years. And I can’t help but think it’s partially due to this.

Mother has stage 4 intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma.

boxed3• 2 years ago

The deepest irony is of course that they themselves are probably going to get cancer at some point and die years earlier than if they hadn't poisoned the science.

theGnuMe3• 2 years ago

Sorry to hear about your brother that is rough.

User23• 3 years ago

I look forward to seeing the Gell-Mann amnesia the next time an obviously cooked climate study comes out and people get all worked up over nothing.

If reading that makes you upset, do you have a rational reason why? Can you explain how climate science is immune to the social dynamics at work here? Or is it just knee-jerk offense at having your religious beliefs questioned?

throwaway20222• 3 years ago

Can you clarify what you mean please? And what evidence you have to support the social dynamics whichever way you are saying they are being swayed?

This is a genuine question because I may be the one with the religious beliefs, but I am not beyond them being questioned.

boxed3• 2 years ago

The difference here is that anti-warming studies are the ones with the money behind them. Your conspiracy theory is falsified in that one stroke.

ejb999• 2 years ago

don't kid yourself - there is plenty of money to be made on both sides of the climate misinformation industry.

ChrisArchitect• 3 years ago

[dupe]

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39090959

Semaphor• 2 years ago

[dupe comment]

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39099565

;)

neilv2• 3 years ago

"Dana-Farberications" is indirectly playing on the name of someone who presumably had nothing to do with these allegations, and who sounds more at the other end of the spectrum of respectability:

Sidney Farber (September 30, 1903 – March 30, 1973) was an American pediatric pathologist. He is regarded as the father of modern chemotherapy for his work using folic acid antagonists to combat leukemia, which led to the development of other chemotherapeutic agents against other malignancies. Farber was also active in cancer research advocacy and fundraising, most notably through his establishment of the Jimmy Fund, a foundation dedicated to pediatric research in childhood cancers. The Dana–Farber Cancer Institute is named after him.

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Farber

CartyBoston• 2 years ago

It's the name of an institution, not just a person.

bmitc4• 2 years ago

They or their estate are perfectly capable (maybe, depending on contracts) of removing their name from the institute. If you want to pay to have your name attached to something, you should be prepared to have your name attached to that something and its activities.

profsummergig• 3 years ago

David Sabatini was anointed a future Nobel Laureate by the university-academic complex.

What's astonishing is that when his work was discovered to have silly photoshop manipulations, he reacted by calling (on Twitter) the people who caught him "steaming turds".

https://forbetterscience.com/2020/01/29/david-sabatini-torme...

ramraj072• 2 years ago

Guess who’s bankrolling his “uncancellation” with a $25MM fund? Bill Ackman lol.

throwaway81523• 2 years ago

I hadn't heard of Bill Ackman before the Claudine Gay thing, but this is amazing: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/bill-ackma... (https://archive.is/ypLSo)

lupire• 2 years ago

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/02/12/us/a...

I'm a bit suspicious of your attempt to impugn Ackman, who is the leading voice in the fight against academic dishonesty... at Harvard... by women... not married to him... who tolerate Palestinians. His focus is oddly specific, if it's still an important contribution to scientific integrity.

Yes, this is sarcasm.

bmitc4• 2 years ago

Who is also husband to former MIT Media Lab professor Neri Oxman, a place and people also embattled with dubious research methods and funding sources.

bmitc4• 2 years ago

He was also fired for violating several sexual harassment and other policies and has fled to Europe for employment.

https://www.science.org/content/article/despite-sexual-haras...

Manuel_D2• 2 years ago

For an alternative perspective: https://www.thefp.com/p/he-was-a-world-renowned-cancer-resea...

harry82• 3 years ago

There’s literally f.all point having peer review if the peer reviewers who passed this junk for publication aren’t the ones deciding if the paper needs to be retracted when this stuff comes out.

How are these journals retaining any prestige when this stuff is un-retracted?

The stink should be smeared all over all of them. The publishers should be sued into the ground for fraud given the exorbitant subscription fees. I can’t think of a single reason not to burn it all down.

bsenftner• 2 years ago

We need to burn these failed institutions down, and hard. A lesson needs to be taught to our larger terribly immature public: do this crap and you'll be destroyed.

UncleMeat3• 2 years ago

Peer review means "other academics read the paper and provide feedback about whether the paper is novel, important, and clear." This usually involves a couple hours of work from the reviewer.

It is woefully incapable of detecting fraudulent data. How could it? Some fraud has been caught through statistical analysis of datasets, but this takes a lot of time and requires expertise that most academics don't have. Detecting faked images has an even less clear path that people can follow.

Academic fraud is bad. But it isn't like other ecosystems are more effective and capable of detecting fraudulent work.

The journals suck, but mostly for reasons totally unrelated to the limitations of peer review.

harry82• 2 years ago

The peer reviewers are clearly capable of going back and reviewing the new criticism about the paper at the direction of the journal and deciding, “Yes. We didn’t see this at the time but the criticism is valid and the paper should be withdrawn.”

Note that there is presently no note on the publications that the papers should not be relied on in any way. The authors are pretending there is no problem which is utterly ridiculous and embarrassingly so. I’m not ok with that as the status quo. I don’t think anyone should be.

cosmojg• 3 years ago

Hot take, but if the FDA hadn't raised the bar for clinical trials to where it sits now (specifically with regard to the expenses associated with bureaucratic approval and regulatory compliance), I'd expect we'd see far fewer falsified studies. When it's impossible to test an idea in the real world, bias and whimsy run rampant, free to rule the printed page. In the absence of empiricism, passing the vibe check passes for peer review.

stdbrouw• 2 years ago

How cheaply do you think you can run a clinical trial with human patients in the absence of bureaucracy? I imagine increased insurance and recruitment costs would eat up the difference.

concordDance• 2 years ago

I expect we could empirically look at how much trials cost 50 years ago on the assumption there has been a regulatory ratchet effect. I don't know how to find that data though...

alejohausner• 2 years ago

Ralph Moss’s “Cancer Incorporated” is a must read. It details the deep corruption in the oncology industry. Oncologists are paid a lot of money for each prescription. Clinical trials for new cancer drugs are absolutely full of shenanigans, such as cherry picking test subjects. New breakthroughs are announced weekly, but death rates remain unchanged from 50 years ago (aside from lung cancer deaths, which decreased due to anti-smoking campaigns).

Depressing.

It’s a very profitable industry, and profits corrode science.

vasilipupkin• 2 years ago

I don't think this is true https://usafacts.org/articles/how-have-cancer-rates-changed-...

hiAndrewQuinn• 2 years ago

Huh, a blast from the past. After dropping out of high school and before getting into college I remember visiting the DFCI once or twice to talk with one of the PhDs in there about suffix trees in bioinformatics. I even recognize some of the names in this article.

Weird to think I could have ended up working there if I had cut getting my philosophical act together short and set myself to my education immediately. It was a really cool place right in the center of the city near my high school.

Suffix trees are still rad and any DSA-inclined teenager will benefit greatly from learning them :)

astrolx3• 2 years ago

This is insane. As a researcher I had to take research ethics course, and obviously we study some cases of research misconduct and fraud. But this kind of stuff is next-level.

I know Sweden launched a national board to investigate research misconduct [1], I hope more countries do the same.

[1] https://npof.se/en/

cm2187• 2 years ago

Though many of them look like outright fraud (anytime photoshopping is involved), I think some could be honest mistakes. If you have dozens of images that are small variants of the same study, it's very easy to misname one of the files or pick the wrong one when loading it into the image editor.

astrolx3• 2 years ago

Exactly, honests mistakes can be made (happens to me), and it happened that I spotted some in a paper and contacted the authors and they publish an erratum (or not). But this kind of photoshopping, done over a period, really gets me.

DonsDiscountGas• 2 years ago

It always amazes me how lazy and amateurish this type of fraud is. Copying and pasting pictures? Can't even add a little fuzz? I'm often trying to teach scientists to code, if they actually learned they could fake data much more credibly. Schon[0] was another big one; he didn't copy images but rather numbers which made up graphs. Adding some noise would've been really easy. It makes one wonder how much fraud is never caught simply because the fraudsters are a little smarter.

A basic assumption in science is that the raw facts a scientist presents are true. People question the statistical methods, they question which conclusions are appropriate given the data, but raw data itself is assumed to be accurate. We apply a lot more scrutiny to clinical trials (for obvious reasons), but trying to apply that same standard to all research everywhere would be cost prohibitive and slow research by a huge amount.

A lot of journals use image-duplication detectors now (the post mentions ImageTwin.ai) so I expect this particular form of fraud will stop. I suspect cherry-picking data ("inappropriate data exclusion") is the most common form, and will remain so. It's very difficult (often impossible) to detect.

On the positive side, I suspect the impact of stuff like this is fairly minimal. Everybody in the field knows that experimental biology is difficult and results are untrustworthy. Even excluding outright fraud, it's really easy to just mess something up. Or get a result which is "true" but doesn't generalize, and so it's useless. Good scientists don't trust something just because it's in Nature/Science/Cell, if they really care about the result then they replicate it before building on it. This would remain true even if all deliberate fraud stopped immediately.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal

[1] I dunno about the mouse one, it doesn't seem to be a direct copy/paste and a good experimentalist will do a lot to ensure consistent conditions. Everything else is pretty blatant though.

FrustratedMonky2• 2 years ago

This is all true, but think your conclusions are not correct.

I don't think this is true for everyone. If it is difficult, and easy to mess something up, then all the more reason to have as accurate results as possible. Fudging data isn't acceptable.

"Everybody in the field knows that experimental biology is difficult and results are untrustworthy"

"Good scientists don't trust something just because it's in Nature/Science/Cell, if they really care about the result then they replicate it before building on it"

-> But, I'm Joe Blow, I'm not setting up a lab to replicate every study I read about. This might be fine for a VC, test it before building something. But it forgets how many people might make smaller decisions based on an article in Nature or Cell.

or Extrema: I just read about the Higgs-Boson, do I need to not trust the results until I can build a collider and replicate it.

mike_hearn2• 2 years ago

It's not actually fine for VCs. I recall reading somewhere (forget where) that VCs are loathe to invest in biotech because they've been repeatedly burned by startups spending a few million to set up a lab and then failing to replicate the academic result they wanted to commercialize. Getting a startup to the point where you can find out you've been defrauded is expensive, so they prefer to focus on computing where this isn't an issue.

bombcar2• 2 years ago

It always amazes me how lazy and amateurish this type of fraud is.

You mean how lazy and amateurish the fraud that is caught is. I just generally assume most of it is complete bullshit, because you have a group of highly-paid professionals producing write-only documents that nobody gives a damn about. This is a recipe for a constant level of low-grade fraud because people are lazy.

FrustratedMonky2• 2 years ago

Guess it is a lot worse than I thought.

I'm usually a science apologist, defender.

Sure, the Harvard president might have misquoted something. And social sciences have a lot of difficulty re-staging the same trials to replicated them, but aren't doing it nefariously.

But here, a hard science, with hard data, and blatantly falsifying it. This is pretty unforgivable.

rdtsc2• 2 years ago

This looks systemic. Cheating like this is probably rampant by now. Fresh students watched carefully as others in the department did it, and got promoted, finished faster, got funding and good positions. This on top of minimal repercussions if anyone got caught. These students become department heads and then everyone under them start tolerating it.

It spreads like a cancer. Apologies for the pun but it fits aptly here.

2cynykyl• 2 years ago

Think about it the other way...what would happen if they didn't cheat? Imagine spending 6 of your prime years in a lab doing experiments that refused to work...your hypothesis is totally wrong, etc. It is not hard to imagine a student in this situation resorting to this option, because it is barely an exaggeration to say their life depends on it.

rdtsc2• 2 years ago

Imagine spending 6 of your prime years in a lab doing experiments that refused to work...your hypothesis is totally wrong, etc. It is not hard to imagine a student in this situation resorting to this option, because it is barely an exaggeration to say their life depends on it.

Actually that might be ok if the system allowed just publishing the results and saying "I had this hypothesis and it didn't work, here are the experimental results".

However, the main problem is they watch others around them who bend the rules and get away with it and succeed. The system overall seems to reward cheating, so they get "on board" with it, thus perpetuation the system.

Even more, once it becomes pervasive, the standards are raised for everyone. Now those who don't cut corners, to put it very mildly, are not even able to compete. Honest works becomes impossible. The choice is either leave or start cheating.

sydbarrett74• 2 years ago

Just goes to show that scientists are human too and are no more inherently virtuous than those in any other field. Replication, whilst unsexy, is one of the few checks against human venality.

StreetChief• 2 years ago

Wow the evidence is so damning.

jl2718• 2 years ago

Imagine a machine learning paper that released no code, and no data, and was funded by public money, and the IP was owned by a startup that was also funded by public money, and the PI was on the payroll. Laughable, right?

Generally there is more trust when the theory, the data collection, the data analysis, the model development, the product, and the application, are all completely separate and open. It also advances the science much faster. However, it definitely kills a lot of those monopoly profits.

I propose that there’s really no reason that pharmaceuticals research can’t progress in this manner, with great public benefit. And it would be so simple to enforce: all public grants require everything to be developed in the open, not just data release at the time of publication, or pre-registration, but full release at each stage, no patents, and a preference for funding independent dataset production rather than results. As it is, we pay for the research, then we pay monopoly prices for the drug. It’s like these companies don’t really do anything but collect money.

Also, If anybody knows of a way to donate money to cancer research in a way that doesn’t feed directly into somebody’s profits, please let me know. I have recently become loosely connected to a foundation that has been dumping a lot of money into Dana Farber, and this is highlighting a lot of my concerns as I learn more about the industry.

astrolx3• 2 years ago

There's a follow up to this blog post on Nature https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00202-9

Dana-Farberications at Harvard University

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