I'm the furthest thing from a scientist unless you count 3,000 hours of PBS spacetime, but I love science and so science/academia fraud to me, feels kinda like the worst kinda fraud you can commit. Financial fraud can cause suicides and ruin in lives, sure, but I feel like academic fraud just sets the whole of humanity back? I also feel that through my life I've (maybe wrongly) placed a great deal of respect and trust in scientists, mostly that they understand that their work is of the upmost importance and so the downstream consequences of mucking around are just too grave. Stuff like this seems to bother me more than it rationally should. Are people who commit this type of science fraud just really evil humans? Am I over thinking this? Do scientists go to jail for academic fraud?
Fraud, so much fraud
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Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#12In the future those who commit fraud are not likely leave trace in Western blot and photomicrograph audit.
When the experiments are significant, double blind is not enough. You need external auditors when conducting experiments. Preferably separate team making experiments from those who design them.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#13For all the complaints about AI generated content showing up in scientific journals, I'm exited for the flip side, where an LLM can review massive quantities of scientific publications for inaccuracies/fraud.
Ex: Finding when the exact same image appears in multiple publications, but with different captions/conclusions.
The evidence in this case came from one individual willing to volunteer hundreds of hours producing a side by side of all the reports. But clearly that doesn't scale.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#14Interestingly this and other cases like it suggest that one of the most valuable skill some scientists have is photoshop.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#15Why worry about fraud, deception and misleadings using AI when we have the old kind of fraud?
Or, in the other hand, now you don't have to manipulate images, you can just generate the ones you need.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#16If you are familiar with academia you'll realize the academic dishonesty policy is essentially the playbook by which academics behave. The author is surprised that Eliezer Masliah purportedly had instances of fraud spanning 25 years. I bet the author would be even more surprised to find out that most academics are like that for the entire duration of their career. My favorite instance is Shing-Tung Yau, who is still a Harvard professor, who attempted to steal Grigori Perelman's proof of Poincare's conjecture (a millenium prize problem https://www.claymath.org/millennium-problems/> that comes with a $1MM prize and $10k/mo for the rest of one's life; Perelman rejected all of it.)
I mean, get this: an extremely gifted Mathematician living on a measly salary in Russia had had his millenium prize almost stolen by a Harvard professor. What more evidence do you need?
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#17[flagged]
Unfortunately, sometimes someone becomes a bad example. That doesn't make them a "scapegoat", the favored defense of people like that.
A scapegoat is something that takes on all the sins of a lot of others who skate free. If Masliah is the only one who ever suffers, then he IS a scapegoat, but if this article serves to uncover a lot of other bad actors, then he's not. And if his example serves to warn a lot of other scientists to clean up their acts, then his suffering is a benefit.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#18The amazing part about this to me is that the only reason the authors were caught is image manipulation. The fraud in numbers and text? Not so easy to uncover. Prediction: papers stop using pictures entirely
GenAI will make faking western blots fantastically easy
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#19I'm a recovering academic, and have not published since not long after defending my dissertation.
I blame this behavior entirely on "publish or perish". The demands for novel, thoughtful and statistically-significant findings is tremendous in academe, and this is the result: cheating.
I left professional academia because I resented the grind, and the push to publish ANYTHING (even reframing and recombining the same data umpteen times in different publications) in an effort to earn grants or attain tenure.
The academia system is broken, and it cannot be repaired with minor edits, in my opinion. This is a tear out and do over scenario for the academic culture, I'm afraid.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#20For all the complaints about AI generated content showing up in scientific journals, I'm exited for the flip side, where an LLM can review massive quantities of scientific publications for inaccuracies/fraud. Ex: Finding when the exact same image appears in multiple publications, but with different captions/conclusions. The evidence in this case came from one individual willing to volunteer hundreds of hours producin…
How would that be possible? Novelty is a known weakness of the LLMs and ideally the only things published in peer-reviewed journals are novel.