Hacker News Reader

Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry for you and your father, but research fraud didn't cause his Alzheimers. It sucks that there is no treatment or cure but that is the case with a lot of diseases.

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.

View on HN

But research fraud does delay finding treatment. How many hours of wasted time chasing dead ends.

That presumes there is a treatment, and the proposal to research it would have been funded, and it would have been found to be effective. But yes, research dollars are somewhat of a fixed pie, and there are always people who don't get a slice.

In the last 25 years, tens of billions almost all spent chasing the amyloid beta hypothesis, with other theories getting the short end of the stick.

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.

That research fraud cost the public billions and set the field back more than a decade. Sad, huh?

I think being flayed alive would be more appropriate than prison.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com