[HN Gopher] Athira chief executive resigns as company confirms s...
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Athira chief executive resigns as company confirms she altered
research
Author : perihelions
Score : 40 points
Date : 2021-10-23 08:05 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.statnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.statnews.com)
| herodotus wrote:
| When I was a University prof, I headed a committee to select new
| computers for the undergraduate lab. Even though I preferred
| Macs, at that particular time, PC's turned out to be the better
| choice. This was likely to make some of my colleagues happy, some
| did not like Macs. One of these colleagues came into my office
| for a chat and I told him he would be happy because I would be
| recommending PCs for the lab. I showed him my report. He told me
| to bump up the quote we had received for the Macs "to make the
| case even stronger". I had two reactions:
|
| 1. Stupid - the case was strong enough and I had no doubt that
| PCs would win;
|
| 2. Lie to my colleagues? Never.
|
| Now he was pretty successful at getting grants, although I never
| thought much of his research. But, more importantly, I never,
| NEVER, trusted anything he said from then on.
|
| To me, honesty is a switch that can never be turned back on.
| achow wrote:
| The manipulated data (image)...
| https://pubpeer.com/publications/51C554512CE22267B2E62172DF3...
| [deleted]
| Herodotus38 wrote:
| For a non paywall summary with many of the manipulated western
| blots and other images:
|
| https://forbetterscience.com/2021/06/15/how-to-cure-all-dise...
| perihelions wrote:
| Here are mirrors if there is a site access issue for the OP,
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20211022003342/https://www.statn...
|
| https://archive.md/t01LJ
| epmaybe wrote:
| Note that I don't condone the actions at all by this company or
| individual.
|
| However, this story demonstrates why the publish or perish model
| is so screwed up today. When your promotion, funding, livelihood
| are directly connected to positive research findings and
| publications in high impact journals, deception in the face of
| desperation will certainly happen. Ethics be damned.
|
| Frankly, this is one of the reasons I think I want to only do
| research part time, focusing the majority of my time on clinical
| work as a physician. My salary would not entirely or really even
| remotely be dependent on grants or publications, and I could just
| slowly build up on some projects. Is progress slower, could your
| project be scooped? Certainly, but it sure wouldn't force me to
| falsify results to make publications more appealing.
|
| Who knows, though. Maybe everyone is susceptible to the rat race.
| lumost wrote:
| The trend seems to be that academia is heading towards
| intentionally falsified results and unintentionally falsified
| results created due to common methodological flaws.
|
| The only groups which seem to be partially immune to this are
| the larger research collaborations with 10+ authors per paper.
| However even those struggle with group think and the need to
| push an agenda (tokamaks, amyloid plaques etc.).
| refurb wrote:
| No, this was pure fraud for personal gain, nothing more.
|
| To blame the "publish or perish" model is no different than
| blaming the "its critical we meet quarterly earning" when
| financial fraud happens. Or blaming "if you fail the bar exam
| you can't be a lawyer" when cheating occurs.
|
| This wasn't "I'll round this number down instead of up to meet
| statistical significance", this was creating results out of
| whole cloth by image manipulation.
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(page generated 2021-10-23 23:02 UTC)