For Better Science

A Glassdoor-like site would be a great idea. Kind of related, https://forbetterscience.com reports lots of research frauds.

I was the victim of a pretty bizarre super in-your-face academic theft. Someone snooped a half-finished draft of mine off GitHub and...actually got it published in a real journal: https://forbetterscience.com/2024/05/29/who-are-you-matthew-stephenson… In spite of having a full commit log (with GitHub verified commits!!!) of both the code AND the paper, both arxiv and the journal didn't seem to care or bother at all. Anyhow, I highly recommend reading the for better science blog. It's incredible how rampant fraud truly is. This applies to multiple nobel prize winners as well. It's nuts.

The muckraking blog For Better Science has been sounding the alarm on this for years. Here's a great investigation into a "paper mill industry"[1] which apparently this researcher also traced some of the fraudulent papers to. It gets into some of the economic forces that drive it. P.S. scanned 130 million papers! WTF! [1] https://forbetterscience.com/2021/05/26/the-chinese-paper-mill-industr…

The article talks about the resignation of the president and antisemitism, but that's actually not the only recent trouble at Harvard: there were multiple independent cases of suspected academic fraud: in the business school [0], the Dana-Farber cancer institute [1] and against the now-former president [2]. The latter charges might have been more political, but the other two look pretty serious. Truly not a great year for Harvard. [0] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/4/11/harvard-business-gino-pla… [1] https://forbetterscience.com/2024/01/02/dana-farberications-at-harvard… [2] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/1/3/plagiarism-allegations-gay…

Even worse than that, there's straight up research fraud from labs at big universities. Fraud that slips through peer review and then the journals and reviewers get out the pitchforks when it's pointed out. https://forbetterscience.com/

Is it confirmed, that it was intentional? That is his defence: "Having read many books throughout his career, he may have “assimilated” them and “not always consciously” used them in his own writing, he said." I have never published anything in academic context, but I did write a lot and I often found that phrases of the same topic I read before creep into my own writing, so I could see this happening to me without intention. "the plagiarism report shows that he was rephrasing all of the sentences rather than copying verbatim" On the other hand, this is in fact the standard defence when someone is accused of plagiarism. But sometimes it might actually be correct? (No idea here, my french ain't good enough either) In general the reaction seems out of proportion to me, I much rather would like to have focus on actual fraud in science. I sometimes read this blog for example and there seem to be other things going on with less attention. https://forbetterscience.com/

Actual pre-print paper without an obviously right-leaning website touting the great parts of it: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.28.21258012v1.full-tex… Particularly, the word "zinc" doesn't appear in this paper. Maybe I should publish a news article saying HCQ and Coca-Cola help against Covid-19 and link to this paper? (I'd buy Coca-Cola stock beforehand...). The study done by the French doctor who became the champion of HCQ was deeply flawed, IIRC (don't quote me, I'm too lazy to look it up) he excluded data from patients who got this drug and died, and he was giving them selectively to healthier/younger patients, and in the end there was apparently no advantage to HCQ. Ah the paragraph above is shameful writing, I might've as well written "My aunt heard that Covid-19 is a virus programmed by Bill Gates and spread to 5G towers!". If you google his name (Didier Raoult) you'll get both sides arguing, and you can choose who to believe is telling the truth (sadly we usually choose the people on "our side"), here's one who is critical of this guy: https://forbetterscience.com/2021/03/23/didier-raoult-fraud-je-ne-regr…

Elsevier has a history of 'promoting' successful millers to more or other journals, so they can 'drive growth', as it's sometimes put in IT, there as well. https://forbetterscience.com/2023/10/24/elsevier-choses-papermills-and… This type of corporation is nasty and should not be allowed to exist, but thanks to people like the Maxwell clan, they do. For now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnmFTvlrsOo

They didn't even mention Hari Shankar: https://forbetterscience.com/2023/12/20/in-bed-with-hari-and-aruna/ The field must be rife with fraud and manipulation.

It's not just Dana-Farber and that Alzheimer's lab. This type of fraud is endemic in biology. Occasionally it gets noticed. Behold, another identical thread on the same site about the scientists of the Breast Cancer Research Foundation from four years ago: https://forbetterscience.com/2020/01/20/the-wizard-men-curing-breast-c… Featuring a scientist who was rumbled for image cloning, and then submitted still more Photoshopped images in his corrections (accepted by the journal, of course, because why wouldn't you let a detected fraudster have a second try with higher quality fraud). First comment: "I was at Cornell….you are still missing at least my ex-Boss and collaborators."

David Sabatini was anointed a future Nobel Laureate by the university-academic complex. What's astonishing is that when his work was discovered to have silly photoshop manipulations, he reacted by calling (on Twitter) the people who caught him "steaming turds". https://forbetterscience.com/2020/01/29/david-sabatini-tormented-by-st…

The original blog post alleging falsified data was published by Sholto David earlier this month: https://forbetterscience.com/2024/01/02/dana-farberications-at-harvard…

Original blog post claiming the flaws: https://forbetterscience.com/2024/01/02/dana-farberications-at-harvard…

A recent high profile case of rampant/repeated photoshopping came from David Sabatini's lab, for reference: https://forbetterscience.com/2020/01/29/david-sabatini-tormented-by-st…

This story lacks a lot of context. This linked article provides some of it: https://forbetterscience.com/2020/10/07/gregg-semenza-real-nobel-prize… There's a big range between "grad student loaded the wrong file when making sub-panel 3d" and "explicitly falsified images to support an hypothesis". This article certainly makes it seem like the latter. Science is a human endeavor and there will always be people trying to game the system The good news is, an awful lot of cheaters get caught these days and it's getting riskier all the time.

For a non paywall summary with many of the manipulated western blots and other images: https://forbetterscience.com/2021/06/15/how-to-cure-all-diseases/

It's pretty easy to set things up to overcome this hurdle: say either the institute handles your enquiry in a scientifically honourable manner or you will contact one of the high profile muckrakers. The most entertainingly written such blog to my taste is Leonid Schneider's: https://forbetterscience.com/author/leonidschneider/ Most university administrators can see avoiding coverage like this is a good thing: https://forbetterscience.com/2020/06/04/michael-hottiger-of-zurich-pat…

More background on this case, https://forbetterscience.com/2021/01/21/communist-party-gives-xuetao-c… Thanks to Dr Elisabeth Bik(@MicrobiomDigest). She is a hero.

Rest assured it’s not just North America. https://forbetterscience.com/2020/03/26/chloroquine-genius-didier-raou…

There is more and more evidence that the only proper trial where it worked was a "nothingburger" https://forbetterscience.com/2020/03/26/chloroquine-genius-didier-raou… https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/03/29/more-on-clor… EDIT: Hmm I haven't seen this one before, that actually looks better https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.22.20040758v1

I think they the article is implying that because of all the attention that Trump gave the article, they decided to put it on the fore front of their approach. And also raoult is a major liar. If you look at the study he omits a lot of information and refuses to release 14 day endpoint data. Plus he's been a co-author to several papers which have had their results manipulated [1] https://forbetterscience.com/2020/03/26/chloroquine-genius-didier-raou…

Still no control group, though. Isn't the author of this study the same individual whose history of faking data was discussed on Twitter earlier today? https://forbetterscience.com/2020/03/26/chloroquine-genius-didier-raou… Yep, it's him. I'll wait for a reproduction from an independent group before believing this. If I may say: be especially wary of people who tell you that what you want to believe is true. It's not necessarily that they're more likely to lie. It's that your guard is more likely to be down against mistakes in their reasoning. Doubt is the province of the wise.

More details from the tweet author: https://forbetterscience.com/2020/03/26/chloroquine-genius-didier-raou…

Oh wow, the woman in the video had to undergo a lung amputation in 2016, and everything shown in the video seems to be the culmination of a crazy amount of unscientific experimentation on a patient: > Macchiarini admitted that one year after the operation Claudia had to be repeatedly saved with a stent in her airways, a method which worked so badly for her before. Macchiarini and his team also claimed in 2014 to have been watching over his patient “every 3 months”. >It was however too late. In July 2016, Claudia underwent a lung amputation. Luckily, she was Macchiarini’s only trachea transplant patient in Barcelona, a second operation was stopped due to technical formalities. Here is the full, horrifying article. https://forbetterscience.com/2016/11/02/claudias-trachea/

The Taleb thing (going furter off topic) seems too reliant on an “efficient market.” I bet bad surgeons harm patients at a higher rate than good surgeons throw bad suregons out of the boat. https://forbetterscience.com/2016/02/21/macchiarini-and-karolinska-the…

> or maybe it just appears that way because these are media reported When thinking about it more, I think that is also highly likely. It many of these cases the most "famous" author is the last one on the paper, but is the first to be highlighted in the media. That is, oftentimes the work was just done in their labs but they did little more than review. But there is such pressure for those toiling in the labs to make a "big" splash that it's not hard to think that some small number of them would be willing to cheat. This line from the original blog post (https://forbetterscience.com/2024/01/02/dana-farberications-at-harvard… reporting on the findings is telling: > “You should reach out to Dr. Hidde Ploegh- the first author, Dr. Boaz Tirosh was in his laboratory.” > Well Laurie, it’s your paper, if you care about it being correct, you could very well reach out yourself! While I agree that Laurie Glimcher should be very concerned about any research misconduct done under her authorship, I think it's premature to get out the pitchforks when there are potentially many levels of indirection here.

> I really need someone to bring me down a notch. This is too exciting! It's on arXiv, which is a preprint journal, which means it has no peer-review; and is therefore generally less trustworthy (especially when the paper has no connection to a technical conference or is not being published elsewhere, and is in a non-computer science or mathematics field). In addition to this, claims of room-temperature superconductors have been mired in controversy or otherwise proven false: - http://www.superconductors.org/roomnano.htm (2004) - https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11443 (2012) - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-superconductor-scandal-sc… (2018) - https://www.quantamagazine.org/room-temperature-superconductivity-clai… (2020) - https://forbetterscience.com/2023/03/29/superconductive-fraud-the-sequ… (2022-2023) Considering that many fraudulent claims of room-temperature superconductivity have gotten into Nature and other top-tier publications, why would a real, true claim of room-scale superconductivity be on only arXiv and not at least a peer-reviewed journal.

I somehow missed the thread a few months back[1], but this article is woefully one-sided. - As someone who worked in cancer bio and shared a campus with Sabatini, his sexual conduct was always a bit borderline and there were rumors floating about him well before Knouse came forward. It's strange to me that Weiss did not interview any of those people or anyone who could speak to those rumors. It's important to note that Knouse was only one of multiple accusers. - Perhaps an even more glaring omission, however, is that the article repeatedly bragged about Sabatini's publication record without any mention of the series of controversies he had BEFORE the sexual harassment controversy. Several high-profile papers from the Sabatini lab were found to have fraudulent data and manipulated figures [2]. Some of these "mistakes" would have been career-ending to a student or postdoc in a smaller lab, but since it's the Sabatini lab, well, "it doesn't change the conclusions of the paper". We can certainly speculate about whether or not Knouse had ulterior motives and whether or not Sabatini really got due process in the court of public opinion. There's definitely some perverted social and institutional processes at play here. However, omitting the two points above make me question this article's motivations. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31436202 2. https://forbetterscience.com/2020/01/29/david-sabatini-tormented-by-st…

> with good levels of vitamin D which is not proven to have any relevance to Covid-19, unfortunately. > I'm prepared to treat any Covid infection I do get with a protocol including ivermectin and various vitamins which has proven effective where it has been tried in India in Mexico. Please do not spread potentially dangerous health misinformation and false hopes, even in good faith. If there was such a protocol that worked, the world would know. Now that Hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19 has been thoroughly debunked, snake oil peddlers have apparently moved on to Ivermectin. Efficacy-wise it seems to be taking the exact same path as HCQ, unfortunately. Hopefully this time around, no more precious research time and resources than strictly necessary will be wasted trying to prove again and again that the "Internet's miracle cure" does. not. work. More here : https://forbetterscience.com/2020/12/15/ivermectin-now-against-covid-1… > The long haul risk is a little bit more substantial Between one in six and one in three people, to be precise. A "little bit more" indeed. > in the vast majority of cases it is not debilitating 76% of hospitalised patients still have symptoms after 6 months. https://theconversation.com/how-many-people-get-long-covid-and-who-is-…

You're right that we could already re-seed decellularized pig ECMs with human stem cells, but we have also already been able to derive stem cells from the stomach. I think the main claim that they're making is that by deriving both the ECM and the Stem cells from the patient, the resulting tissue engineering scaffold is less immunogenic than other methods. While this is somewhat interesting, they get into trouble by going on to claim that they've been able to generate "functional cardiac, cortical, spinal cord, and adipogenic tissue implants". From what I can see in the paper they saw increased expression of a few markers associated with those cell types and some minor electrical activity, etc. The idea that differentiating stem cells into vaguely tissue-like phenotypes is equivalent to being able to manufacture organs brings back memories of the shenanigans that went down at UCL a few years ago [1]. 1. https://forbetterscience.com/2016/12/21/birchalls-trachea-transplant-t…