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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

I agree, this seems like it should be heavily prosecuted. This sort of misbehavior and subsequent lack of serious enforcement is just grist to the mill of people who want to cut scientific funding across the board, claim climate change is a hoax by grant-chasing scientists etc.

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Why isn't this considered "grant piracy" and this guy charged with wire-fraud by the feds? Surely he mis-used the postal service, banking system, and inter-state commerce in here somewhere? Why not a conspiracy under RICO? there seem to be all kinds of ways to send a better message than...please wait three years to attempt your next crime!

Laws aren't meant to be weapons to be used against those we hate. If he committed a crime, then let his actual crime be the crime we charge him with. Laws against wire fraud protect people from a certain kind of malicious behavior which wasn't exhibited here.

Going down the route of "find crimes to charge him with" is a bad idea for many reasons, one being: if it becomes commonplace to bend the spirit of laws just to send a message, then that will make the already-too-powerful courts even moreso.

I agree with your premise that the spirit of a law shouldn't be violated to send a message but I don't see that it applies here.

For me this doesn't pass the sense test: should a person be able to knowingly, intentionally fake the results of a scientific experiment in order to secure a grant of taxpayer money? No. No more than you should be able to fake the 'results' of your yearly income, say, for the purpose of receiving welfare.

I don't believe the comment was to not charge the guy with anything, it was not to charge him with more than necessary to punish him for the crime he actually did commit.

IANAL, but my understanding is that wire fraud is specifically used to give federal prosecutors standing in a case they might not otherwise have jurisdiction to prosecute. That is is a fraud took place entirely within one state, it would be a state affair, and there would be no federal crime -- unless they used either the mail or a national telecommunications network to facilitate the fraud.

However, in this case since the target was a federal agency, presumably it is a federal crime already. More interesting I would think is that even if the US attorney doesn't want to press charges, I'm sure the AG of Iowa (and possibly Maryland) could.

think of it this way, though: the taxpayer is forced to pay for this. Before you say, 'but basic science wouldn't be funded otherwise', consider Janelia Farms, or Glyn Research Ltd (which discovered the chemiosmotic effect and got the nobel prize), which are/were funded privately; and if they commit fraud then only the donors are left holding the bag - a risk they know to be taking when they make their donation.

As for prosecution, the agreement to get only three years is awful; Consider Leo Paquette - who kaiboshed a grant idea in (secret) committee and subsequently stole it - and got a 5 year suspension of grants. This was an affront to the rules of granting, not science itself; and yet got a harsher pushishment; shows where the priorities of the authorities lie.

> the taxpayer is forced to pay for this

Are you suggesting that science would advance at a comparable pace with only private funding? Why do you point to a single example (remember, there are several Nobel prizes given every year) as if it proves that it would?

Alternatively, do you think publicly funded science doesn't produce useful results? Remember that the market automatically assigns a value of $0 to almost every useful research result due to the fact that they are not effectively excludable -- you can't use a university's (or lab's) income statement to judge value creation.

> the agreement to get only three years is awful

As with all punishments, the official sentence is only the beginning. He has been fired from his position and given the insanely competitive environment in the biosciences (often hundreds of applicants for a single professorship), he will almost certainly never find professorial work again.

Are you suggesting that science would advance at a comparable pace with only private funding?

Maybe he's not saying that. But I worked in a government-funded research lab for two years, and I have no choice but to say it: science would advance faster if it were privately funded.

Given the number of papers I've read from industry, I doubt we'd have anything resembling science without public funding. Some private engineering perhaps, but not science.

The governments of yore were truly visionary, to provide public funding for science before the concept even existed.

Counterexamples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_D._Mitchell

http://www.janelia.org/

If the amount of funding somehow remained the same... Which I find highly unlikely. It would definitely cut down on the bureaucracy and make things significantly faster.

Maybe a YC for science is in order?

I don't know much about how the science industry works, only that a lot of medication/drugs are patented, so the suppliers make the money by being the guys who can produce said drug, until the patent expires, then everything becomes cheap. Afterwhich they make a new drug and do the same thing?

"YC-backed FizzleBit Labs founder Jonas Salk announces his Polio Vaccine as a Service, currently in closed private beta, has been acquired by Facebook for an undisclosed amount. Insiders are calling this an 'acquihire', and it's likely that Dr. Salk's polio vaccine product will be shut down by the end of the year."

You choose a particularly bad example, since Salk's effort was run as a completely private effort, aka "the march of dimes" (although it did enjoy FDR's bully pulpit). It was a nonprofit, too, so would you say the same thing about Watsi?

Science with short-term commercially exploitable goals might.

private != for profit.

Learn some history:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_D._Mitchell

You would think, but this guy:

http://www.scu.edu/engineering/bioengineering/Zhang.cfm

Was involved in several retractions that were almost certainly fraudulent. Officially. Unofficially, they were fraudulent (I worked fairly closely with several of the prinicpals in the situation - minus Zhang and Schultz, of course, although Schultz was on my committee - who are convinced the material were made up):

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/01/07/extortion_re...

It's not as prestigious as the place he was before, but he seems to be doing okay. The system protects its own.

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