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Comment by danbmil99 | Hacker News Reader

The Bernie Madoff off of clinical trials?

People in my immediate circle suffer from ailments mentioned in this article. Do these researchers have any conscience at all? Did they understand they're playing with people's lives?

I put them in the same category as the pharmacist who watered down the chemo drugs. There really should be criminal prosecutions and jail time for these crimes.

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I think what was most scary about this article is that if Sato had just been slightly more "realistic" in his fake data - such as having fewer fake patients and slightly less dramatic results - he would have got away with it.

As such it's not really comparable to Madoff. Madoff would have been caught eventually whatever happened because what he was doing was fundamentally unsustainable. But this fraud was fairly close to being undiscovered. It was only caught because of the persistence of some researchers (for whom it wasn't even their job) and the unbelievable data.

He presumably killed himself after being exposed as a fraud. It's weird to me because malpractice is such a heavy thing in the US, but I don't think it extends into falsified research. Can a nation sue a researcher in another country because they funded studies based on their falsified data?

In the United States, this can actually happen if federal funding is involved, although it's pretty rare to my knowledge. Implemented by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI).

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