I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go? • Hacker News Board

Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?

#121

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 9:55 AM UTC

OscarCunningham wrote: post #91

thaumasiotes wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do that, but it requires all of the assignments to be done simultaneously at the beginning of the study, which will cause problems for e.g. medical trials where not everyone enrolls at once. But why bother? There's no special statistical value in having two exactly equal buckets as opposed to one bucket with 1,621 people in it and another with 1,427.

If you did want an exactly even split, you could assign every even numbered student randomly and every odd numbered student to the opposite group of the student before them. That guarantees an even split and doesn't require all the participants to be known in advance. It also guarantees that you split evenly any group of people arriving at similar times, so no correlation between arrival time and outcome will affect…

[deleted]

Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?

#122

Post by dnautics » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 9:56 AM UTC

cryptica wrote: post #101

dnautics wrote: post #31

In graduate school, in my lab there was a grad student who was kind of an unlikely "professor's pet". He was tall and had surfer's long hair with a bit of a hippie aesthetic. Anyways, he was also really completely clueless about how to do science correctly, but also, I guess, really good about playing politics (there was a time when he asked me to put some bacterial plasmid DNA on my mammalian cells. I told him "it d…

The modern financial system is making a butchery out of honest people. I've seen it happen over and over at many different companies and industries. Educational institutions are rotting from the inside. Idiots were being rewarded at the expense of intelligent people and now the idiots have taken over control and rewarding other idiots. If you want to know what happens next, watch 'Idiocracy' or 'Planet of the apes'.…

> Most of the ones that get attention are BS

Arsenic life was the big one when I was a postdoc

Tardigrade DNA is a new one, so popular that it became a major plot point in Star Trek. Turned out it was probably just a sloppy grad student not being careful with their samples/not taking into account microbes physically hitching a ride on the tardigrade

Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?

#123

Post by TeMPOraL » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 9:56 AM UTC

op03 wrote: post #66

dnautics wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't particularly care about him per se (though i'm sorry to burst your model of society, from what I hear over my residual science network, I'm pretty sure he's oblivious or doesn't care), I'm a bay area dev, and I'm making enough money and have made good investments in friend's startups that my only regret is not having started sooner. Hopefully I'll be able to cash out with enough to do my own biotech, so I'm j…

We hear it all the time. Its an ancient story. The history of science is full of these stories. Misguided/driven/ambitious people are always looking for shortcuts and they will find them. Its like dealing with mosquitos, cockroaches, weeds, software bugs and cancer. It never ends.

I think the point of GP's story is that this isn't just one or two bad apples here and there, but it's endemic in that domain - and most likely in others too (I'm leaning to believe that; it's not the first story like this I've read in recent years).

Being an endemic problem means you have to switch your assumptions; when reading a random scientific paper, you're no longer thinking, "this is probably right, but I must be wary of mistakes" - you're thinking, "this is most likely utter bullshit, but maybe there's some salvageable insight in it".

Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?

#124

Post by candiodari » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 9:57 AM UTC

winstont wrote: post #85

dnautics wrote: post #31

In graduate school, in my lab there was a grad student who was kind of an unlikely "professor's pet". He was tall and had surfer's long hair with a bit of a hippie aesthetic. Anyways, he was also really completely clueless about how to do science correctly, but also, I guess, really good about playing politics (there was a time when he asked me to put some bacterial plasmid DNA on my mammalian cells. I told him "it d…

> a super sketchy foreign postdoc I'm unsure of how the term "foreign" is being used above. Is it implied as a pejorative there? For example, if OP had written "a super sketchy white postdoc", or "a super sketchy black postdoc", would the HN community tolerate that?

I think in this case it's probably relevant as it does not exactly make fixing these things easier. For example, later he points out he can't talk the language of the institution this person works at. I don't think it's meant to accuse foreigners of fraudulent science here.

Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?

#125

Post by twic » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 9:57 AM UTC

dnautics wrote: post #31

In graduate school, in my lab there was a grad student who was kind of an unlikely "professor's pet". He was tall and had surfer's long hair with a bit of a hippie aesthetic. Anyways, he was also really completely clueless about how to do science correctly, but also, I guess, really good about playing politics (there was a time when he asked me to put some bacterial plasmid DNA on my mammalian cells. I told him "it d…

A friend joined a group studying some cell behaviour. They had previously had a big result that they could stimulate this behaviour in defined, serum-free culture by adding a specific factor.

Friend was to work on characterising this effect, so his first job was to reproduce the result as a base case. He couldn't. The factor didn't stimulate the behaviour.

He asked around, comparing his execution of the protocol with that of the the postdoc who had done the original work.

The method involved growing a feeder layer of cells, in serum, then lysing them and washing the plate, leaving a serum-free layer of extracellular matrix behind, as a foundation for the serum-free cell culture (this is a pretty standard technique).

Turns out the previous postdoc's idea of washing a plate was a lot less thorough than my friend's. Couple of quick changes of PBS. So they were almost certainly leaving a lot of serum factors behind on the matrix. Their serum-free culture was nothing of the sort.

The supervisor insisted that the previous postdoc's work was fine, and that my friend just didn't have good technique. The supervisor had him repeat this work for months in an attempt to make it work. But he's a careful worker, so it never did.

Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?

#126

Post by dnautics » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 9:59 AM UTC

fireattack wrote: post #89

winstont wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a super sketchy foreign postdoc I'm unsure of how the term "foreign" is being used above. Is it implied as a pejorative there? For example, if OP had written "a super sketchy white postdoc", or "a super sketchy black postdoc", would the HN community tolerate that?

I agree that's unnecessary detail.

Sure, I guess i should have been more specific, he was a postdoc who was from a country where getting one really awesome paper in a lab with a moderately good name (which ours was) would be an instant ticket to tenured professorship at the top academic facility in the country. That should give you an idea of the incentives at play. That doesn't necessarily make him sketchy. But he was also a sketchy human.

Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?

#127

Post by renewiltord » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 10:05 AM UTC

fareesh wrote: post #82

What if you had a webpage with the paper at the top and a comments section at the bottom where anyone in the world could post a rich-media post of their findings that cast doubt on some findings with regard to the original paper. We currently treat academic research by a metric of "citations", why not have a new metric where the world can be cautioned of potential issues with the result. You could use the bug bounty…

Well, I suspect that comments section could be autogenerated by a bot that randomly generates comments that say "Correlation != causation" and "Sample size only 11". The bot needn't even parse out the true sample size. It can always use a constant number.

Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?

#128

Post by dnautics » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 10:08 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #123

op03 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We hear it all the time. Its an ancient story. The history of science is full of these stories. Misguided/driven/ambitious people are always looking for shortcuts and they will find them. Its like dealing with mosquitos, cockroaches, weeds, software bugs and cancer. It never ends.

I think the point of GP's story is that this isn't just one or two bad apples here and there, but it's endemic in that domain - and most likely in others too (I'm leaning to believe that; it's not the first story like this I've read in recent years). Being an endemic problem means you have to switch your assumptions; when reading a random scientific paper, you're no longer thinking, "this is probably right, but I mus…

it's endemic in biology, and it's endemic in chemistry (I had feet in both sides). The sentiment you wrote in the last sentence is exactly what I feel whenever I read a paper, hit it on the nail.

The crazy thing, is that the honest scientists are working at middling university. It is worse the higher up you go. I have had the opportunity to work in a upper-midrange research university [time-] sandwiched between two very high profile institutes. The institutes were way more corrupt. Like inviting the lab and the DARPA PM to hors d'oeuvres and cocktails at the institute leader's private mansion type of stuff (it turned out that that DARPA PM also had some wierd scientific overinterpretation skeletons / PI railroading the whistleblower stuff in her closet, and for a stint was the CTO of a microsample blood diagnostics company, I can't make this shit up, I guess after Theranos it got too wierd, she's now the CEO of another biotech startup -- how TF do people like this get VC money, and yet I can't get people to raise for some buddies with a growth industry company, and had to make the entire first investment myself?).

Of course working at a upper-midrange university sucks for other reasons. Especially at state universities, the red tape is astounding. And support staff is truly incompetent. Orders would fail to get placed or would arrive and disappear (not even theft, just incompetence) all the time.

Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?

#129

Post by sn41 » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 10:09 AM UTC

raister wrote: post #34

What about Editor's ethics or lack thereof? I got accepted in a Chinese-oriented journal (i.e. most of the Editorial Board were Chinese) - I am not just 'saying' this, I'm saying because the OP mentioned "it's a Chinese thing" over results and datasets, whatever, I digress. On the last revision round, the Editor told me that I was lacking some references, which he promptly send me. Turned out that 6 out 6 of his 'rec…

Oh boy, this is very common. This is not specific to a country or ethnicity, unfortunately. You also see grad students shilling for their guides.

Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?

#130

Post by refurb » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 10:13 AM UTC

twic wrote: post #125

dnautics wrote: post #31

In graduate school, in my lab there was a grad student who was kind of an unlikely "professor's pet". He was tall and had surfer's long hair with a bit of a hippie aesthetic. Anyways, he was also really completely clueless about how to do science correctly, but also, I guess, really good about playing politics (there was a time when he asked me to put some bacterial plasmid DNA on my mammalian cells. I told him "it d…

A friend joined a group studying some cell behaviour. They had previously had a big result that they could stimulate this behaviour in defined, serum-free culture by adding a specific factor. Friend was to work on characterising this effect, so his first job was to reproduce the result as a base case. He couldn't. The factor didn't stimulate the behaviour. He asked around, comparing his execution of the protocol with…

This is the worst situation when the supervisor (professor) “sees no evil, hears no evil”.

In a similar situation a prior students work couldn’t be repeated and it was pretty clear the student made up the results. “Water under the bridge, let’s move on”. Of course the publication still counted for the prof.