Doubts about Johns Hopkins research have gone unanswered, scientist says

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/doubts-about-johns-hopkins-research-have-gone-unanswered-scientist-says/2013/03/11/52822cba-7c84-11e2-82e8-61a46c2cde3d_story.html?hpid=z2#.UT-IYe5b9aw.hackernews

by jalanco • 13 years ago

101 37 13 years ago

washingtonpost.com

taeric• 13 years ago

I can't help but think some of this relates to this: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about...

The pressures that we put researchers under to deliver nothing but positive results is terrible. There is an overhead to research. There is an overhead to progress. Why do we try to eliminate it with such prejudice, when the consequences seem so obviously dire?

anigbrowl• 13 years ago

I strongly agree. I was struck by the mention that in the 60s 2/3rds of research projects were funded, whereas nowadays only 1/5th are. This is not just due to stinginess; there are more research labs chasing funding and grant applications have become professionalized, if not commercialized. Maybe this is also a function of more people pursuing academic success as a career path, because the rise of IT has resulted in a significant devaluation of labor-intensive work and thus the earning power of people engaged in it.

marcelsalathe• 13 years ago

1/5? That would be nice... NIH funding levels are at 1/10 nowadays.

frozenport2• 13 years ago

I have a theory that the change is due to the communication revolution. It is significantly easier to submit a proposal, and many proposals are now unsolicited, before you needed an 'in' and now you only need to submit the document through a website.

HarryHirsch2• 13 years ago

NIH proposals are, as always, solicited three times a year, and the paperwork is also the mostly the same as always, except that some extra forms were added a few years back.

What has changed is the fact that research is getting more expensive, and that the financing model of state universities changed in the last decade - state funds have declined, and there is a greater pressure on professors to bring in external funding. The NIH budget, on the contrary, has not grown.

This is getting off-topic, but universities are in for an interesting time. A greater financial burden is placed on students, who then cannot find jobs thanks to the recession, the scramble for grant funding is increasing, there will be greater emphasis on teaching faculty, which at some point you cannot pay peanuts any longer. Altogether a perfect storm for deans.

olefoo2• 13 years ago

I would trace this to the same root as the reason the largest banks are allowed to walk away from open corruption and money-laundering. We have inculcated into our society a servile deference to power. Nobody of any importance is held accountable for their actions, even if they would be universally recognized as wrong.

While it may be shocking that a laboratory director is more concerned with the reputation of his institution than that it does good science in an ethical and responsible; I doubt anyone is terribly surprised.

We know this, but to face it requires us to acknowledge our own complicity in the lie that things are alright, that we live in a stable society that is not on the verge of collapse. Our institutions are visibly failing, and we don't know what we would replace them with.

tome• 13 years ago

I don't agree with you, but I'll add evidence in your favour: Jimmy Savile.

DanBC• 13 years ago

Most of the problem was lack of trust of women making allegations, not undue deference for Savile.

Other problems include lack of communication between local police forces, so a number of allegations from women in different areas don't pile up in one report.

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21756150)

It's easy to say that these are because of deference to Savile, but let's not forget that many young women told police that they were being raped and forced to work as prostitutes and those women were also dismissed and ignored, and their attackers were not famous.

rayiner3• 13 years ago

Oh yes, because a bunch of academics or paper-pushers at NIH have any power...

The reality of why nobody addresses these concerns is:

1) It's bad publicity. Everyone is on board with making these things look good, from the universities that support this research to the federal government that spends billions funding this research. It doesn't serve anybody's interest to blow the lid on something like this.

2) It's boring. It's too esoteric to explain to the average person what actually constitutes scientific misconduct.

3) It's hard to pin down. Scientists aren't self-policing. Academics don't have a culture of ripping into each others' work, and indeed academia has a culture of letting everyone puff up their little egos. A given academic doesn't really rip into other academics so they don't rip into him.

scott_s2• 13 years ago

Academics don't have a culture of ripping into each others' work

From my experience reviewing papers, being privy to program committee discussions, listening to my colleagues talk, and attending conferences, I have to disagree.

carbocation• 13 years ago

> Academics don't have a culture of ripping into each others' work

I haven't experienced this. What field of academia were/are you most familiar with?

HarryHirsch2• 13 years ago

> 1) It's bad publicity.

Close. The professor and the university both draw their salaries from the funding agency - the university through "indirect costs" - and understandably have little incentive to get to the bottom of the matter and risk having their grant terminated or worse.

RougeFemme2• 13 years ago

It seems that in this case, the university was self-policiing; it just wouldn't listen to itself.

scarmig• 13 years ago

I'm reminded of an article that David Brooks wrote a decade ago, about the Organization Kid. Parents nowadays raise their kids to respect organizational authority with the expectation that that's not only a way to get ahead but in fact the only way to get ahead. You take tests that provide a rational ordering of who is better than who, you do as many extracurricular activities as you can to prove that you're more well-rounded than the typical person on your resume, and you listen to the people around you to not do anything wrong. If you do these things and the right internships and get good grades, you get to go to the best med schools or financial or legal firms or grad schools. And thus you're granted a starry lifestyle, with the expectation you won't rock the boat too much or make things difficult within the organization.

When you look at the crimes of people in finance, government, academia, wherever, they're not particularly unique. If you're part of that system, you can easily see them as just doing their jobs. Of course GS screws its clients, what else are you supposed to do? That's the point of the organization. Of course you over hype your scientific results, how else will you get the next grant? Etc.

My suspicion is that this is setting up a period of reckoning which won't be too pretty for people who have planned out every step of their lives.

rayiner3• 13 years ago

The problem with this line of thought is that the trend has been towards a breakdown of all of these organizations. You think parents taught their kids to respect organizational authority less in the 1940's and 1950's? Of course not! Indeed, it was a far better bet half a century ago to go to the best med schools and law firms and grad schools. That was an age of monopolies and guilds and white upper class privilege. It was back when blue-blood white kids didn't have to compete against striving asian immigrants to get a seat at Harvard, back when getting into that top med school or top law firm or top investment bank was a ticket for life instead of just an opportunity to strive some more.[1]

I read a compelling article recently (I can't for the life of me remember where) that makes precisely the opposite argument, which is that misconduct arises from a breakdown of stratification and the subjection of everything to competitive market pressures. In a world where what mattered is who your parents were and where you went to school and where you summered, there was substantially less incentive to fake outputs than one in which your outputs are carefully measured and compared against the outputs of your counter parts.

Not that I think a meritocratic world isn't better than the one we left behind. But I find that misconduct arising from the pressures of meritocracy better fits the available data than the theory you present.

[1] In 1965, a lawyer at a large firm might bill 1200-1600 hours per year, versus 1800-2200 today. This increase has been the result of the breakdown of long-term client relationships and the consequent increase in the competition for business and for rainmaker partners with business. What do you think that this increase does to the incentive structure vis-a-vis misconduct? Can you see how the same basic story has played out in many different fields, including academia?

snowwrestler• 13 years ago

We do live in a stable society that is not on the edge of collapse.

Some faked scientific research--if it was indeed faked--is deplorable but does not mean that all our shit about to coming falling down around our ears.

olefoo2• 13 years ago

It's a symptom, not a cause. Like the way a bridge will start singing in the wind long before the retaining bolts crack.[1] Certainly on a day to day level it seems stable. But if you look beneath the surface, if you ask the people around you, you will discover a vast reservoir of anger and pain, that the fabric of our society is being stressed more and more, and that we all know that a small minority profits; while the rest of us are just wondering when the other shoe will drop, and if we'll be underneath it when it lands.

The thing about earthquake weather is that everything is fine, until it isn't.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge

wuest• 13 years ago

The crux of this sort of issue was laid bare relatively early in this article: results and papers are more important than good science, which leads to an increased incidence of fraud and related misconduct. If good science were actually valued, one scientist wouldn't have been driven to suicide by the fact that his research (assuming it was not fabricated to begin with) was being questioned and the colleague who raised valid questions wouldn't have lost his job. I can't imagine that this is all that uncommon a scenario.

kpierre• 13 years ago

Curiously, the data is publicly available: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/query/acc.cgi?acc=GSE29662

frozenport2• 13 years ago

It better be, the NIH paid for it and this kind of research must submit to an NIH approved archiving service.

plg2• 13 years ago

Shoot first and ask questions later. Better to apologize after than to ask permission before. Too big to fail.

drucken• 13 years ago

"Deceased respondents no longer pose a risk," the letter said.

- classic! Yes, science stops when the scientist is dead, says the US government ...

RougeFemme2• 13 years ago

Or. . .even if doesn't stop, we now have an excuse to sit back and do nothing until our chain is yanked again.

skosuri2• 13 years ago

This is one side of a story of guy that had just been fired and is filing a lawsuit. What exactly is the criticism of the paper since the paper is available? If the only argument is the threshold to consider something a hit or not on the screen, there is a ton of followup in the paper looking at those genes more closely. Am I missing something?

demetrius• 13 years ago

I don't understand why you've mentioned "on the screen".

If the treshold is set too low, we'll end up with false positives. I.e. we'll think the study shows something when in fact it doesn’t. And this is not something that can be fixed in follow-up papers.

skosuri2• 13 years ago

It was a genome wide screen looking for synthetic lethality with another gene. As with all screens you get a bunch of hits and you follow up on the most promising ones, which they did in the paper.

Doubts about Johns Hopkins research have gone unanswered, scientist says

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