And after six iterations of this it just never pans out. Real replication is whether you can reliably build on top of a previous study.
Damn my father has Alzheimer's, so this really hurts deep.
I think something like fines equivalent to the amounts of the grants for the institution, and professional censure and a ban from working in grant-funded research for the researcher, would be more effective and appropriate than prison.
It didn't start changing until outside researchers wrote a major editorial about how bad it was in Nature.
The biggest alternative is the infection hypothesis - amyloid beta is left by our immune reaction to diseases that manage to get into the brain. If that idea had been pursued for 25 years, we might actually know by now what the real connections are with HSV1 (warts), gum disease, and so on.
I think being flayed alive would be more appropriate than prison.
Yes, but it must meet a strict standard of intent. Jailing scientists based on the content of their work is generally risky. If you create specific areas where prosecution is likely, you're more likely to dissuade research than increase quality.
The present problem appears to be the fraud has a low probability of being caught. Improving that might have better pay-offs than deepening consequences for the minority who get found out.
As for low probability of being caught, nah, academic fraud gets caught all the time. There's so much out there it's like shooting fish in a barrel. Elizabeth Bik primarily goes after biomedical studies that can be spotted via image analysis and has said:
“Science has a huge problem: 100s (1000s?) of science papers with obvious photoshops that have been reported, but that are all swept under the proverbial rug, with no action or only an author-friendly correction … There are dozens of examples where journals rather accept a clean (better photoshopped?) figure redo than asking the authors for a thorough explanation.”
University vice presidents are almost always reluctant to get involved, and is that so surprising when fraud is so widespread that the President of Stanford is caught doing it? All you do by exposing fraud is make enemies. Theo Baker is an undergrad studying CS so has many options outside of academia but if he didn't, would he really have shot the king like this?
Enforce sanctions against the people who are so lazy about fraud they get caught by random volunteers on Twitter, then worry about how to find the rest.
Bans on grants, or the government could claw back the money. In either case, the universities would be incentivized to never recognize fraud ... which is maybe no different actually.
i think that technological complexity kind of snuck up on many fields and it has taken time for the very competitive research culture to adapt.
releasing data was a complicated proposition back in the 2000s, where today more and more are appreciating the need for it.
i think the real solution to all these problems comes from adjusting the funding model. there should be more money available for those who are willing to do the less exciting work of completely reproducing pivotal results from scratch.
Oof, I couldn't disagree more. As a society we should be moving away from punitive measures and toward systemic reform. I don't think the prospect of prison time is going to deter people from playing the game they feel they have to in order to get research funding.
Fraud in science is a problem in that the very small minority of actors that conduct themselves unethically has had massive reach with groups that seek to discredit science.
20 years ago, being science illiterate was seen as bad for you. Today, 50% of us believe that being science illiterate is a positive trait in people seeking presidency.
Jail or not, these people are causing significant public issues, so I’ll have to agree. It’s not going to reduce it, but still, fuck them for the damage they’ve wrought.