Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cracking down on research fraud

undark.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 227 posts

Re: Cracking down on research fraud

#101

Post by anonthrowaway3 »

opportune wrote: post #27
logicslave wrote: post #6

The root of the problem is that we allow people with high esteemed credentials to run society. They jumped through a hoop. "You got straight As at 14 - 18 years old and got into an ivy league school as a result? Here run this venture fund." "You got a PhD in Economics with a good publication by P-hacking your secret data? Here take a run at the FED with power over the US Economy. Your Phd shows that you are the man f…

All three of those examples are missing a step of like 5-20 years in the middle. Nobody is running a venture fund as a 22 year old ivy grad (barring someone who's taking over for their family member, but in that case it has nothing to do with being an ivy grad), nobody is running the FED right out of a PhD, nobody is a director at a big corporation right out of a PhD. Presumably once those people are in such high-pow…

Likely they will also fraud the 5-20 years in the middle. These corporations are also highly susceptible to fraud.

Re: Cracking down on research fraud

#102

Post by Gatsky »

gwerbret wrote: post #77

These issues of research fraud come up often, but the root of the problem is a bit more subtle. In North America at least, biomedical research labs operate largely as fiefdoms of the individual principal investigators (PIs). The actual research work falls almost entirely on the backs of grad students and postdoctoral fellows. The grad students need to generate "good" data in order to graduate, the postdocs need the s…

I have to disagree with this 'good people gone bad' analysis. None of the research fraud I have witnessed fits this model.

Re: Cracking down on research fraud

#103

Post by analog31 »

logicslave wrote: post #6

The root of the problem is that we allow people with high esteemed credentials to run society. They jumped through a hoop. "You got straight As at 14 - 18 years old and got into an ivy league school as a result? Here run this venture fund." "You got a PhD in Economics with a good publication by P-hacking your secret data? Here take a run at the FED with power over the US Economy. Your Phd shows that you are the man f…

You forgot a step:

"Your parents are rich, so you have a chance."

Re: Cracking down on research fraud

#104

Post by caterama »

Gatsky wrote: post #102
gwerbret wrote: post #77

These issues of research fraud come up often, but the root of the problem is a bit more subtle. In North America at least, biomedical research labs operate largely as fiefdoms of the individual principal investigators (PIs). The actual research work falls almost entirely on the backs of grad students and postdoctoral fellows. The grad students need to generate "good" data in order to graduate, the postdocs need the s…

I have to disagree with this 'good people gone bad' analysis. None of the research fraud I have witnessed fits this model.

Could you give more details on other causes of research fraud you've seen?

Re: Cracking down on research fraud

#105

Post by jpeloquin »

lettergram wrote: post #40

I think there is outright fraud and subtle fraud. For instance, most mouse studies specifically as it relates to aging, drug safety, and cancer research should be thrown out. This is well covered here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pRCzZp1J0v0 That’s not the only issue, but it’s a known issue, everyone is ignoring as it relates to all studies with the most common mice

The link provided is a three hour video and the speakers are pretty vague about what exactly they're talking about. By 2:20 one of the them is claiming that "we're staring at many scenarios that end in some kind of civil war", which seems extreme if the video really is about mouse studies. Is there really any useful scientific content in there? If so, a timestamp would be appreciated.

Moving on to other sources, are you referring to lab mice having extra long telomeres and thus unusually high capacity for cellular renewal, as in [1]?

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11909679/

Re: Cracking down on research fraud

#106

Post by asciimov »

dasudasu wrote: post #97
gwerbret wrote: post #77

These issues of research fraud come up often, but the root of the problem is a bit more subtle. In North America at least, biomedical research labs operate largely as fiefdoms of the individual principal investigators (PIs). The actual research work falls almost entirely on the backs of grad students and postdoctoral fellows. The grad students need to generate "good" data in order to graduate, the postdocs need the s…

The topic of funding is a recurrent one in these types of discussions. There are always more people wanting to do science than what is available in funding. There needs to be a process to allocate resources that takes into account competency for the job. Just granting it at random or equally is probably very very far from optimal if it means that an exceptional PI cannot even do the things to push his/her research to…

> There are always more people wanting to do science than what is available in funding.

So why not just fund them?

Any process you could create or that currently exists just ends up being gamed by people who understand how to get funding.

Re: Cracking down on research fraud

#107

Post by gwerbret »

martincmartin wrote: post #91
gwerbret wrote: post #77

These issues of research fraud come up often, but the root of the problem is a bit more subtle. In North America at least, biomedical research labs operate largely as fiefdoms of the individual principal investigators (PIs). The actual research work falls almost entirely on the backs of grad students and postdoctoral fellows. The grad students need to generate "good" data in order to graduate, the postdocs need the s…

What do you suggest as an alternative?

1) I think the idea of funding "people, not projects" (the Howard Hughes Research Institute's byline; I'm not affiliated with them in any way) is a great one. It would probably involve changing the structure of research programs in other fundamental ways, such as by

2) Limiting the number of graduate students. The current relatively-low barrier of entry into grad school provides cheap, motivated labor for PIs who are trying to stretch their research dollars to the limit. The outcome today is far more PhD graduates than jobs, and for those who get jobs, far too many of them for the research funds that are available. The overall quality of research drops when PIs focus what is fundable, rather than what is important.

3) Shifting the burden of the bulk of research work from trainees to salaried research associates/assistants/lab techs.

4) Change the focus of research output from novelty and volume (of papers published) to quality and significance of work done. Good research is often slow and careful, and doesn't fit well with the demands of grant funding agencies.

Fewer grad students means more resources available for their training, and better career prospects. Shifting the bulk of the research benchwork to salaried professionals removes the incentive to commit fraud. None of this has to come at the expense of research quality; as an example, the NIH/HHMI already have approaches to vetting research programs for quality, even if the PIs aren't competing for grant funding.

Re: Cracking down on research fraud

#108

Post by an_opabinia »

gwerbret wrote: post #107
martincmartin wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you suggest as an alternative?

1) I think the idea of funding "people, not projects" (the Howard Hughes Research Institute's byline; I'm not affiliated with them in any way) is a great one. It would probably involve changing the structure of research programs in other fundamental ways, such as by 2) Limiting the number of graduate students. The current relatively-low barrier of entry into grad school provides cheap, motivated labor for PIs who are…

> Limiting the number of graduate students.

Isn't a lot of the graduate school product providing a way for people to immigrate to the United States?

The economy around it is pretty complicated and definitely there's way more pressure to supply more, not fewer, spots.

Re: Cracking down on research fraud

#109

Post by Gatsky »

caterama wrote: post #104
Gatsky wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to disagree with this 'good people gone bad' analysis. None of the research fraud I have witnessed fits this model.

Could you give more details on other causes of research fraud you've seen?

One was a post-doctoral scientist, called X. The lab I was in was asked to take X on by the institute because they had a falling out with another lab, the details of which were not disclosed. A year later, after very poor productivity and various petty issues with other people in the lab, someone checked X's data collection where the original data was available on the instrtument, and found that it was all made up. Subsequently the previous lab investigated, and a paper X published as first author was retracted. Turns out in the previous lab there were also concerns about data fabrication and many other problematic interactions before the fraud was discovered. Also turns out X left another lab before this under similar circumstances.

Another was a well established Professor 'P' with a very large number of published papers, who continued to publish multiple papers at a high rate. There had been doubts for years due to data that seemed too cute and the fact that P always took the data and made the final figures in the paper themselves. P was finally caught out when a paper included data which could not possibly have been collected, and was outright fabricated.

It is worthing nothing that both P and X left the institute without disciplinary action beyond employment termination and signing an NDA. One of them is in another city, getting government grants and doing just fine. Everyone in the know doesn't trust any of their papers of course, but I guess that doesn't include whoever reviews their grants.

None of these are 'good people gone bad'. They are are flawed individuals with no integrity and sociopathic personality traits, and they waste a lot of decent people's time dealing with their actions.

Re: Cracking down on research fraud

#110

Post by dasudasu »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #100
cscurmudgeon wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Research publication, funding, and jobs should not be tied to outcomes of research. They should be tied to how systematic, logical, and well-documented the research is. We need a system wide change from funding bodies, job committees to publishing criteria.

Along the same lines, “what question to ask” or “what idea to try” should never generate credit or fame for individuals. This incentivizes Indiana Jones style research, results at all costs. As a researcher you should be desiring to get jobs or rewards based solely on the care of methodology, clarity of communication and ease of reproducibility. If you do those things well and the papers turn up negative results, tha…

It can be argued that part of being a good researcher is developing an intuition and taste for interesting and promising research questions. Of course, the counterpart to this is that you see hype and fads developing very easily. But overall it is very easy to come up with experiments that any experienced researcher would have told you beforehand had no chance of producing interesting / impactful / positive results. The system must discriminates against researchers that are able to come up with interesting (positive) results with greater probability, since it represents every time an expense of finite resources. If your only contribution as a researcher is to be able to make conscientious and well realized experiments, then sadly your place is much more as an assistant than a PI.

I've never seen it argued in serious research circles that grants should be given this way, but I did find the non-research community to be overly obsessed over negative results not being published or rewarded. It is simply a consequence of the set of possible experiments being infinite, the same way you can come up with an infinite number of startup ideas, but not all of them are equally good even before implementation. Should we reward startup founders with failed startups because they tried their best and really did the best they could given the circumstances?

Post reply on HN