Fraud, so much fraud

These sorts of articles raise so many thoughts and emotions in me. I was trained as a computational biologist with a little lab work and ran gels from time to time. Personally, I hated gels- they're finicky, messy, ugly, and don't really tell you very much. But molecular biology as a field runs on gels- it's the priimary source of results for almost everything in molbio. I have seen more talks and papers that rested entirely a single image of a gel which is really just some dark bands.

At the same time, I was a failed scientist: my gels weren't as interesting, or convincing compared to the ones done by the folks who went on to be more successful. At the time (20+ years ago) it didn't occur to me that anybody would intentionally modify images of gels to promote the results they claimed, although I did assume that folks didn't do a good job of organizing their data, and occasionally published papers that were wrong simply because they confused two images.

Would I have been more successful if fewer people (and I now believe this is a common occurrence) published fraudulent images of gels? Maybe, maybe not. But the more important thing is that everybody just went along with this. I participated in many journal clubs where folks would just flip to Figure 3, assume the gel was what the authors claimed, and proceed to agree with (or disagree with) the results and conclusions uncritically. Whereas I would spend a lot of time trying to understand what experiment was actually run, and what th e data showed.

The problem with putting the onus on the journals is there is no incentive for them to reward replications. Journals don't make money on replicated results. Customers don't buy the replication paper they just read the abstract to see if it worked or not.

I do like the idea of institutions giving tenure to people with results that have stood the test of time, but again, there is no incentive to do so. Institutions want superstar faculty, they care less about whether the results are true.

The only real incentive that I think can be targeted is still grant money, but I would love to be proved wrong.

Like all things in life that have risks of fraud, negligence or potential failure, insurance could be the answer.

Want to publish in a peer reviewed paper? Well then your institution or you should take out a bond or insurance policy that guarantees your work is accurate. The insurance amount would fluctuate based on how big of impact this study could have. Is it a drug that will be consumed by millions? Big insurance policy. Is it a behavioral study without much risk... small insurance policy.

Is a a person in an institution found caught committing fraud, well now then all papers from that institution now have higher premiums.

Did you sign off on a peer reviewed paper that was fraud? Well now your premiums are going up also.

Insurance costs too high to publish? Well then keep doing research until the underwriters are satisfied that your work isn't fraud and adjust the premiums down.

It adds a direct near-term economic incentive to publish honestly and punishes those that abuse the system.

Of course, but increasing the difficulty of committing fraud is still good. Fraudsters learn to bypass captchas as well, but they still block a ton of bad traffic.

I believe that tech and finance also have a drug problem. Those that sell expensive drugs like cocaine go after rich clients. You work in Hollywood, but have you been attending wild private parties? I've worked in academia and I was in the thick of it, I've experienced first hand the fraud I'm talking about, and it was a large part of my experience, not some side note. Perhaps it's an uncomfortable truth that academia is in the state it is in, but again, it is of utmost importance to warn younger people to its perils. (Act as if you're at a poker table at all times.) In any case, how do you know that it isn't your biases that prevent you from considering what I describe? What is so surprising with the claim that people who are very incentivized to steal and commit fraud do so if they are not punished for it?

edit: and it's not things I've heard, instead it is direct experiences, i.e. people stole my work, and things like that. As a graduate student to watch professors come to you with problem X, take what you've said (an actual solution) and publish a paper without attribute, that sort of thing; to report it and have nothing be done about it, et cetera, and on it goes, it's just instance after instance of such behavior, or the million ways in which they are careful to trick you into working on their problems without receiving attribute. One such trick for example, that again happened to me, is that after a conference talk I got into an e-mail discussion where I explained my approach; I was told that "they already have these results" (the trick here was to divulge less in the talk than what was currently known in order to be able to avoid "significant progress by another person" in the case another person does share new progress that they have already established, and hence not having to share attribution.) It turned out that our discussion was enough for them to go from n=3,4 to a general formula involving primes, because I pointed out a certain property they had not noticed. This is just a single example of the sorts of tricks, aside from total fraud, that happen, and one of the milder incidents I had happen to me.