Article  The academic culture of fraud

#1
C C Offline
https://www.palladiummag.com/2024/08/02/...-of-fraud/

EXCERPTS: Lesné’s apparent fraud is not an isolated incident. In 2023, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, then the President of Stanford University, was forced to resign after the revelation of falsified data in his earlier research at drug developer Genentech, including a now-retracted paper on the amyloid hypothesis which has been cited over 1,000 times. [...] Once again, there is no effort to find the supposed true culprits...

[...] Medical fraud may be the most evil form of academic fraud, but it is not the only one, or even the most common. More famous is the “replication crisis” in academic psychology...

[...] If bureaucratized peer reviewers or even a paper’s own coauthors aren’t expected to pay enough attention to notice blatant fraud, if fraud is only revealed by third-party investigators when they choose to make a years-long personal crusade in the face of institutional headwinds, if those frauds which are uncovered don’t come to light until decades after the fact, then we can be confident that almost all of the frauds have gotten away with it...

[...] The U.S. financial system is hardly the greatest edifice of justice in the world. Yet, it demonstrates a basic level of self-policing, effort to uphold professional standards, and accountability to the rest of society. Academic institutions fall far short of these minimal standards...

[...] Fraud is certainly not the only problem in academic science. Lesser crimes such as massaging data to create false positives and “HARKing” (hypothesizing after the results are known) are even more common...

[...] With some honorable exceptions, most academics don’t care very much about the capital-T Truth. Oh, they’d prefer Truth to lies, if Truth only cost two dollars. But if the cost is at all serious, they won’t pay it. It is a fault in the institutions that academics must choose between wealth and prestige and career success on the one hand, and pursuit of Truth on the other...

[...] I have little hope that academic science can be reformed from the inside. Frankly, it seems too far gone...

[...] One conviction per decade is not nearly enough to solve the problem, but it shows that the legal tools already exist. ... More likely, reform will come through circumvention from outside the academic system... (MORE - missing details)
Reply


Possibly Related Threads…
Thread Author Replies Views Last Post
  These new scientific fraud cases worry me: Now also in material science. (Sabine) C C 0 92 Oct 12, 2024 08:28 PM
Last Post: C C
  Article A scientific fraud. An investigation. A lab in recovery. C C 0 97 Oct 7, 2024 09:57 PM
Last Post: C C
  Article The lasting impacts of scientific fraud C C 0 129 Feb 14, 2024 08:53 PM
Last Post: C C
  How journals & academic enablers are corrupting reporting on crop biotechnology C C 0 144 Feb 2, 2024 04:33 AM
Last Post: C C
  Why research fraud is getting worse + Trust in sci & vaccines still declining. Why? C C 0 98 Nov 28, 2023 06:29 PM
Last Post: C C
  Article WHO promotes quackery again + AI use seeps into academic journals C C 1 148 Aug 26, 2023 11:39 PM
Last Post: confused2
  Article There’s far more scientific fraud than anyone wants to admit C C 0 99 Aug 12, 2023 04:05 PM
Last Post: C C
  Article Corruption of the academic peer-review process (climate science) C C 4 237 Aug 5, 2023 05:29 PM
Last Post: C C
  Article Shaky evidence for medical cannabis + The fraud behind the “discovery” of element 118 C C 0 100 Jun 13, 2023 02:24 PM
Last Post: C C
  Article Research finds no gender bias in academic science + WHO's pseudoscience problem C C 0 109 Apr 29, 2023 06:44 PM
Last Post: C C



Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)