Apr 3, 2018 10:23 PM
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...ud/557096/
EXCERPT: . . . The problem, she [Jennifer Byrne] realized upon closer inspection, was that the papers, all of them from China, referred to the wrong nucleotide sequence [...] being used to deactivate the gene and observe the resulting effects in cancer cells. Either the experiments weren’t examining what they claimed, or they hadn’t been done as described. [...] What’s worse, each dubious paper contained the seeds of potentially more bad research.
Shocked by her discovery, Byrne resolved to do what she could to expose academic fraud and junk science within her field. With the help of Cyril Labbé [...] she has managed to identify about 50 suspicious papers since then with only limited time and resources. In response to her efforts, scientific journals have retracted at least 10 papers, with several more retractions confirmed to be in the pipeline. In recognition of her work, the scientific journal Nature named Byrne among its “10 people who mattered” last year.
Despite all this, Byrne [...] is adamant that she has only scratched the surface of a much deeper problem. Certain there is more to expose, she is working to establish a team capable of elevating her side project into a dedicated operation. Fraudulent, plagiarized, or otherwise shoddy research is a problem not just in cancer research, after all, but across all scientific disciplines, and over the last two decades, retractions have exploded. [...] 2016 [...] recorded nearly 1,400 in that year alone.
To be sure, these numbers make up a small fraction of all published studies. But while a report analyzing U.S.-funded research between 1992 and 2012 estimated that the cost of scientific misconduct amounted to just a fraction of a percent of the National Institutes of Health budget during these years, its authors also noted that “the greatest costs of misconduct—preventable illness or the loss of human life due to misinformation in the medical literature—were not directly assessed.”
MORE: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...ud/557096/
EXCERPT: . . . The problem, she [Jennifer Byrne] realized upon closer inspection, was that the papers, all of them from China, referred to the wrong nucleotide sequence [...] being used to deactivate the gene and observe the resulting effects in cancer cells. Either the experiments weren’t examining what they claimed, or they hadn’t been done as described. [...] What’s worse, each dubious paper contained the seeds of potentially more bad research.
Shocked by her discovery, Byrne resolved to do what she could to expose academic fraud and junk science within her field. With the help of Cyril Labbé [...] she has managed to identify about 50 suspicious papers since then with only limited time and resources. In response to her efforts, scientific journals have retracted at least 10 papers, with several more retractions confirmed to be in the pipeline. In recognition of her work, the scientific journal Nature named Byrne among its “10 people who mattered” last year.
Despite all this, Byrne [...] is adamant that she has only scratched the surface of a much deeper problem. Certain there is more to expose, she is working to establish a team capable of elevating her side project into a dedicated operation. Fraudulent, plagiarized, or otherwise shoddy research is a problem not just in cancer research, after all, but across all scientific disciplines, and over the last two decades, retractions have exploded. [...] 2016 [...] recorded nearly 1,400 in that year alone.
To be sure, these numbers make up a small fraction of all published studies. But while a report analyzing U.S.-funded research between 1992 and 2012 estimated that the cost of scientific misconduct amounted to just a fraction of a percent of the National Institutes of Health budget during these years, its authors also noted that “the greatest costs of misconduct—preventable illness or the loss of human life due to misinformation in the medical literature—were not directly assessed.”
MORE: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...ud/557096/