[HN Gopher] Researchers to retract landmark Alzheimer's paper co...
___________________________________________________________________
Researchers to retract landmark Alzheimer's paper containing
doctored images
Author : instagraham
Score : 267 points
Date : 2024-06-05 19:49 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| instagraham wrote:
| > Neuroscientist Karen Ashe plans to retract her team's landmark
| Alzheimer's paper after acknowledging that it contains
| manipulated images. The 2006 study, which suggested that the
| disease could be caused by an amyloid beta protein, has been
| cited nearly 2,500 times. "I had no knowledge of any image
| manipulations in the published paper until it was brought to my
| attention two years ago," Ashe wrote on the discussion site
| PubPeer, adding that she stands by the paper's conclusions.
|
| > Scientists are divided over whether the problems with the paper
| undermine the dominant, yet controversial, theory that beta-
| amyloid plaques are a root cause of Alzheimer's disease.
| GenerWork wrote:
| > Scientists are divided over whether the problems with the
| paper undermine the dominant, yet controversial, theory that
| beta-amyloid plaques are a root cause of Alzheimer's disease.
|
| How could it not at least be a wake up call that studies that
| use this paper as a base could be fundamentally flawed?
| fbdab103 wrote:
| Part of the problem is that studying the brain is _hard_. We
| have lots of in vitro or mouse models that tell a story, but
| nothing is conclusive. There have been many orthogonal
| studies which can replicate some of the associations, but
| nothing that can precisely point out underlying cause and
| effect. Yet people are suffering today, so researchers are
| following the best leads we have.
| desert_rue wrote:
| The best leads we have are faked images?
|
| I get that it is complicated but fraud in one area (images)
| makes the hard data extremely suspect.
| mbreese wrote:
| The problem is that the altered images represent a still
| plausible theory. There is a reason why they were
| believed in the first place. It isn't that these false
| images are negative evidence. Instead, they don't help or
| refute the underlying hypothesis at all.
|
| The real question (that I'm not sure about) is if anyone
| else has been able for replicate the original experiment.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| There have been many subsequent studies which generate
| evidence in support of the underlying idea.
|
| As they say, it only takes one result to disprove a
| theory, but nobody has been able to do so to date.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| Karen Ashe attended Harvard for both her undergrad and MD. With
| all the academic fraud committed by Harvard connected people that
| has come to light in the past few years, one really has to wonder
| what is up with that institution (and higher ed more generally).
| passwordoops wrote:
| Harvard makes the news. Sadly it happens everywhere [1]
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03974-8
| (apologies of you don't have access to Nature)
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| It was her "protege", Sylvain Lesne, that did the dirty work.
| And apparently has been rewarded with continuing employment.
|
| Perhaps it was Ashe's Harvard education that led her to not
| consider double-checking the work...
|
| Edit to add: iirc, it was the University of Minnesota that is
| also responsible for the "food fat is bad" advice that has made
| obesity than American epidemic...
| garciasn wrote:
| It was Harvard.
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
| way/2016/09/13/493739074...
| monero-xmr wrote:
| Harvard wants academic celebrities. It's not enough to do solid
| work, you need awards, plaudits, research that punches through
| the noise, articles in the mainstream press, and so on. Harvard
| is a brand first and foremost. If what you want most in life is
| to be a tenured Harvard professor in your chosen field, you
| need to publish research that makes a big splash.
|
| The most surefire way to do this was to simply commit fraud
| rather than conduct experiments and pray you get lucky and find
| an outlier result worthy of significant rewards. We are
| witnessing the fallout now as people no longer assume honesty
| and integrity, and begin to analyze the actual papers for
| accuracy.
| czl wrote:
| Indeed. Another example of this is Forbes featuring outlier
| successful people on its front cover who have later turned
| out to be involved in criminal activities or scandals. (1)
| Elizabeth Holmes, founder of Theranos, who was once
| celebrated as a tech visionary but later convicted of fraud.
| (2) Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of FTX, who faced multiple
| fraud charges following the collapse of his cryptocurrency
| exchange.
| gnz11 wrote:
| Forbes is just another junk brand looking to turn a profit.
| With Harvard and other higher education institutions there
| is the expectation that they are vehement proponents of
| scientific rigor.
| resource_waste wrote:
| I met a harvard grad the other day. I was astounded how below
| average this person was. They just got their PhD. However, it
| was on a soft science.
|
| I asked him for advice on a problem in his field, and he
| basically couldn't answer. He talked about his degrees.
|
| I think this person must have cheated. Its the only thing I can
| imagine.
| kristianp wrote:
| > published in Nature in 2006
|
| So around 18 years ago. That's a long time for researchers that
| believed in this papar's conclusions to be going down the wrong
| rabbit hole. What a huge waste of effort and the lives of those
| with Alzheimer's.
| wang_li wrote:
| This kind of fraud should carry a prison sentence.
| datahack wrote:
| Absolutely. It's not just a bad path, it's taken researchers
| down a road that robbed approaches that could have helped
| people of resources because they lied.
| hangonhn wrote:
| I wonder what the effects on retractions would be though.
| Some researchers might go down fighting or refuse to
| cooperate with investigators.
| docbrown wrote:
| Retracted and sham papers is actually a major problem.
| Estimated 10,000 papers were retracted in 2023
| (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/03/the-
| situatio...) and that is thought to be only a small percentage.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| That's kinda misleading. Not every retracted paper contains
| doctored results. There just a ton of mistakes as well.
| eviks wrote:
| this isn't a big deal since no one reads most of those
| papers, it's mostly invisible sacrifice to the metrics gods.
| Very prominent papers like the one discussed, on the other
| hand, have much bigger consequences
| btilly wrote:
| Some other fraud in the same subfield lead to an amoral
| douchebag becoming President of Stanford, where he
| destroyed the campus culture (read
| https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/06/13/stanfords-war-on-
| soc... to verify) and then supported DEI run amok (read
| https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2023/01/11/amid-
| backlash... to see some of the fallout from that).
|
| This is in addition to wasting a big chunk of the billions
| spent each year on Alzheimer's research on false leads (see
| https://www.alz.org/news/2024/congress-bipartisan-funding-
| al... for a source on the billions).
|
| Yes, very serious consequences indeed. (Note, I did my best
| to back up my statements with high quality unbiased factual
| references. Please read them before disagreeing with my
| description of the result.)
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Not everything gets retracted either. There's a surprisingly
| deep rot in many parts of science. There are strong
| incentives to publish, and a lot of the methods you can use
| to inflate statistical significance (i.e. p-hacking) are hard
| to distinguish from publication bias and other innocent
| explanations for falling outside of statistical expectations.
|
| Preregistration might help, but it doesn't really address the
| misaligned incentives that are at the heart of academic
| fraud.
| nextos wrote:
| Even articles that publish legit findings tend to embellish
| data. I do this for a living, I often try to reproduce
| prominent results, and I regularly see things that are too
| good to be true. This is bad because it pushes everyone to
| do the same, as reviewers are now used to seeing perfect
| and pristine data.
|
| I have been asked to manipulate data a few times in my
| career. I have always refused, but this came at the cost of
| internal fights, getting excluded from other projects for
| being "too idealistic", or missed promotions. Incentives
| are just perverse. Fraud and dishonesty are rewarded,
| pretty depressing.
| thwarted wrote:
| Tragedy of the Commons Ruins Everything Around Me.
|
| Everyone wants answers, so anyone that provides an answer
| is elevated, independent of if the answer is right or
| not. To wit: the current AI push.
|
| Clips from The Big Short surfaced in my YouTube feed
| recently, and they way you worded this reminded me of the
| scene with the rating agency.
|
| Is scientific research and publishing headed for it's own
| CDS/MBS-esque implosion?
| nextos wrote:
| I think academic research is becoming very inefficient,
| and traditional Academia might eventually become
| stagnant. If you don't play the game I described above,
| it is really hard to stay afloat. I guess industrial
| labs, where incentives are better aligned, might become
| more attractive. I have seen lots of prominent scientists
| moving into industrial labs recently, which would be
| something hard to imagine even a few years back.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| Thank you for doing the right thing.
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| Yep. Worse, p-hacking can be done by accident. I mean, the
| term implies intent, but a dogshit null hypothesis is
| problematic regardless of whether it is dogshit on purpose
| or merely due to lack of skill on the part of the
| researcher. Either way, it pumps publication numbers and
| dumps publication quality. If 100% of researchers were 100%
| honest, we would still see this effect boost low-quality
| research.
| blackbear_ wrote:
| That number alone doesn't say much. Yes it sounds like a lot
| in absolute terms, but consider that four million papers were
| published in 2023 alone, and a bit less than 70 millions
| since 1996 [1].
|
| [1] https://www.scimagojr.com/worldreport.php
| scotty79 wrote:
| Maybe retraction is something that should be something done
| in competitive fashion with negatve points awarded to
| researchers, universities and journals.
| nxobject wrote:
| Not only effort: millions and millions of public and private
| dollars wasted on followup research on a false premise, all so
| that an author could get citations. What a cost.
| xnickb wrote:
| Playing devil's advocate: perhaps the authors strongly
| believed in the method but have failed to produce strong
| enough evidence. Then the goal was to renew financing in
| hopes of getting somewhere with the research, not to just get
| citations.
|
| This of course is pure speculation
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| I think the point you're making is that there need not have
| been any malicious intent, and I accept that, but I don't
| really consider this a devil's advocate position, since
| strongly believing something will work is still not grounds
| enough to lie about outcomes.
| gorlilla wrote:
| Fraud is still fraud no matter what color you paint it.
| nxobject wrote:
| I'm sympathetic to that: the pressure to have produced
| results must have been very, very heavy.
| misnome wrote:
| I don't think "Fraud" counts as a devil's advocate
| position?
| nkrisc wrote:
| What's the difference?
| chrisBob wrote:
| Not so bad because they were just trying to secure funding
| that might have gone to research not based on fraud?
| rybosworld wrote:
| It's really not an excuse. This has directly led to decades
| of wasted time/money/effort searching for a cure of a very
| prevalent disease.
|
| It does lend to an interesting thought experiment, though.
|
| Imagine the researchers were right after all. They just
| needed more time, and so they faked some results. We might
| have ended up with an underdog/feel-good movie about how
| the researchers bravely persevered in spite of the drying
| up of their funding.
| tommiegannert wrote:
| Google Scholar says it's been cited 3,455 times. (Having a
| quick look at the top three results showed the paper was cited
| together with other papers in the same area, though.)
|
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1621513420842042156...
| zosima wrote:
| This paper is certainly shameful.
|
| But one should not exaggerate the impact it had. The strongest
| support for the amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimer's comes from
| multiple sources of evidence that are completely unrelated to
| this paper.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| The problem is we don't know how many of those other lines of
| evidence are also fraudulent.
|
| What we do know is that finding academic fraud is like
| shooting fish in a barrel. It's way too easy even for totally
| unfunded volunteers. The situation in science right now is
| reminiscent of the situation in computer security circa 1999.
| Back then there were so many easily exploited RCE vulns in
| foundational infrastructure that "hacked by teenagers" became
| a TV trope. Almost anyone could sit down and find a way to
| hack into a network without much effort. Vendors engaged in a
| lot of screaming and denial, sometimes even attacking the
| people who found exploits for them.
|
| But, the industry changed. White hats became widespread,
| companies hired those ex-teenage hackers in their thousands.
| They put every employee through trainings. Then when that
| wasn't enough they started paying out millions in bug
| bounties, buying sandboxing companies (like Google did for
| Chrome) and more. Companies did this because bad security was
| hurting their reputations and in a competitive market that is
| an exploitable weakness. It was a form of self defense.
|
| Academic science is excluded from market mechanisms by legal
| fiat, supposedly on the basis that this will yield better
| research outcomes. What it's actually done is shield
| universities from any need to make hard changes. Their
| reputation is tanking but they just don't seem to care and
| why should they? They'll get grants from the NIH anyway
| because they're all as bad as each other, and nobody in
| politics is talking about a total defunding of the sector
| yet.
|
| Unfortunately even if the grants were cut off tomorrow they
| probably would still find it hard to change. It's becoming
| apparent that if a culture tolerates fraud for decades then
| eventually the leadership of these institutions are people
| who got there through fraud. How are universities or journals
| going to reform when the people who run them know full well
| they can't crack down on fraud without exposing their own
| career to audit risk?
| dbspin wrote:
| You've diagnosed the issue then recommended leaches and
| bleeding.
|
| 'Market mechanisms' already exist - no company is precluded
| from doing research. We can discuss the deficit in research
| investment that short termist 'market mechanisms' have led
| to in contemporary corporations, but its absurd to claim
| that the market can or should replace academic research.
|
| It's pretty clear that in practice the 'publish or perish'
| academic culture fostered by the financialisation of the
| university, the rise of the adjunct and the death of tenure
| have contributed heavily to the falsification of research.
| In practice encouraging replication, self directed research
| and significantly more 'pure' 'blue sky' research than
| governments and universities are inclined to do, would
| significantly alleviate this problem.
|
| Academia needs far less exposure to 'market mechanisms'.
| They're perverse incentives for good science.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| To say there's a deficit in research spending pre-
| supposes there's a correct absolute level of resource
| allocation that is easily discoverable. But the reason we
| need markets in the first place is that governments
| aren't able to discover the right levels of resource
| allocation on their own. That's why the USSR ended up
| with lots of steel foundries but no software companies,
| nor even any competitor to the internet.
|
| If anything research is clearly over-funded right now,
| especially in some fields like medical research. That's
| why so many scientists turn to fraud in desperation.
| There just aren't enough genuine discoveries to go round.
|
| _> encouraging replication, self directed research and
| significantly more 'pure' 'blue sky' research_
|
| Replication is the opposite of self directed blue sky
| research, so how do you suggest it be encouraged whilst
| simultaneously reducing the power of the money givers
| even further? BTW, many bogus papers will replicate
| whilst still being wrong. Replicability is not a synonym
| for good science.
|
| Really, this is a very common claim that needs to go
| away. The solution to fraud and incompetence is not to
| give incompetent fraudsters even more freedom and money.
| nyssos wrote:
| > But the reason we need markets in the first place is
| that governments aren't able to discover the right levels
| of resource allocation on their own.
|
| Markets don't discover "the right" (i.e. social welfare
| maximizing) resource allocation, they discover, under
| ideal conditions, _a_ pareto-optimal allocation. This is
| a very weak condition: "Jeff Bezos owns everything" is
| pareto-optimal. You need redistribution if you want to
| turn that into a socially optimal one.
|
| In realistic conditions, they don't even do that: market
| mechanisms will reliably underinvest in things with
| positive externalities, and the larger the externality
| the greater the degree of misallocation. The positive
| externalities of research are _enormous_ compared to the
| value captured by the researchers.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| No market system anywhere ends up with one person owning
| everything. That is the standard under non-market
| systems, though.
|
| _> The positive externalities of research_
|
| ... are only relevant if it 's actually research, and not
| something that looks a lot like research without actually
| being so.
| mistermann wrote:
| > Academic science is excluded from market mechanisms by
| legal fiat...
|
| And a world class propaganda game. Go onto mainstream
| social media, pick a science fan at random out of the crowd
| and pick an argument with them about science. The average
| fan would have you believe that science is just short of
| perfect.
|
| In a sense it's hard to blame these people, considering
| what two years of the media machine's full court press of
| pro-science culture war propaganda during a global pandemic
| does to a mind of average intelligence.
|
| I mean, I suppose "winning" is important folks, but is
| losing your soul in the process worth it?
| pocketsand wrote:
| > Academic science is excluded from market mechanisms by
| legal fiat.
|
| This to me just seems untrue. What is your basis for this
| claim? There is plenty of research privately funded by
| corporations, some of which is very influential. Often this
| work is published by university researchers. Ask any
| university researcher about the numerous compliance courses
| we all have to take about funding and conflict of interest.
|
| It is true that the biggest funders (NSF, NIH) are not
| market-focused, but for good reason. The market does not
| prioritize the public good. I know first hand -- my son has
| a rare disease (1 out of 20,000 people). There are many
| drug companies putting vast resources into drug development
| in the hopes of a huge payoff. In reality this benefits a
| small number of people (I remain grateful for how
| improvements have helped us). I'm grateful our major
| scientific funding bodies are not swayed entirely by market
| influences because it would lead to us focusing on a narrow
| set of scientific problems which would ultimately limit the
| way it helps the public good.
|
| Im any event, I work in biomedical research. I think your
| diagnosis (incentives, process) is correct, but the way you
| discuss the attitudes and motives of researchers is wrong-
| headed.
|
| You say:
|
| > Their reputation is tanking but they just don't seem to
| care and why should they? They'll get grants from the NIH
| anyway because they're all as bad as each other, and nobody
| in politics is talking about a total defunding of the
| sector yet.
|
| You're talking about hundreds of thousands of researchers
| as if they're all psychotic citation fanatics with no care
| for truth. That is not reality. I think the kind of
| psychotic, data-manipulating researcher who would put
| people's health and lives at risk for citations -- or
| fabricate data sets out of thin air -- are vanishingly
| small. We can point to a handful of them -- the author of
| this paper, and the Daniel Ariely's and Francesca Gino's of
| the world -- but there are tens of thousands of people in
| every field working on research in good faith, with utmost
| care. The vast, vast majority never have any scandal, never
| get caught up in data manipulation, and so on.
|
| No field I know of out-right tolerates fraud (and I follow
| all the retraction stories fairly closely). I think the
| closest we get to "toleration" is researchers dealing with
| scientific problems who more or less say "we're not going
| to publicly flay you but behind your back we're all going
| to know what you did and your future is limited when it
| comes to big grants, prestigious invitations, and so on."
| People who are credibly accused of fraud become pariahs and
| often targets of scorn not only within the research
| community but in the press and wider community.
|
| The most serious issue IMO is not outright but poor norms
| around scientific practice, leading to p-hacking, harking,
| and other "forking paths" problems. Calling that type of
| behavior "fraudulent" is perhaps justifiable under some
| ways of thinking, but I think the word fraud
| mischaracterizes what is going on. There are, in fact, many
| serious efforts to root out this type of behavior and put
| in transparency rules to open up research to scrutiny,
| including among funders like the NIH.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| _> What is your basis for this claim?_
|
| Well you answered your own question: _It is true that the
| biggest funders (NSF, NIH) are not market-focused_. A lot
| of research is funded by taxes. That 's an exclusion from
| market mechanisms. They don't have to convince the actual
| consumers of the research to buy it, we are all
| collectively forced to buy it by law.
|
| _> No field I know of out-right tolerates fraud_
|
| I know quite a few such fields, so we might have a
| different definition of "tolerate". After all this story
| contains the following paragraph:
|
| "It's unfortunate that it has taken 2 years to make the
| decision to retract," says Donna Wilcock, an Indiana
| University neuroscientist and editor of the journal
| Alzheimer's & Dementia. "The evidence of manipulation was
| overwhelming."
|
| We're talking about a retraction here, which is the
| weakest response possible. So ... it took two years of
| "investigation" to do nearly nothing, after other people
| did all the investigative work for free, and one of the
| authors continues to be employed with no consequences
| whatsoever even though his co-author admitted the figures
| were tampered with. I'd argue this is what institutional
| tolerance of fraud looks like.
| kylebenzle wrote:
| A lot of science is fake, if not most of it. I learned the hard
| way in academia that it really seems the majority of PhD level
| researchers are there because they are willing to stretch the
| truth to "tell a good story".
| eigenschwarz wrote:
| Talk about a sweeping conclusion based on n=1! Very
| unscientific ;)
| Fatnino wrote:
| Sounds ready to publish
| bhk wrote:
| I'm amazed at how this one specific easily detectable type of
| fraud is so common. One has to wonder about all the other, less
| obvious, ways of comitting fraud and how common they must be.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Was it as easily detectable in 2006?
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Sure. They're not using advanced ML to find these. Just
| visual inspection and the kind of transforms you could do in
| Photoshop in 1991.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| This is why you're going to see an explosion of fraud cases
| stemming from the 90s and early-to-mid 00s. That was the period
| where PCs were widespread so it was pretty easy to _copy_ words
| and images, but actually looking at any individual set of words
| or images and asking "Were these copied from somewhere?" was
| much more difficult. A lot of people copied/manipulated then
| because they thought it would be too hard to catch them. Well,
| technology caught up.
|
| Just look at the multiple plagiarism cases against the former
| Harvard president. It was clear, at least to me, she copied
| liberally more out of laziness/lack of confidence because she
| didn't think she would get caught for small phrases here and
| there. I mean, who goes through all of the trouble to write a
| dissertation and then plagiarizes _the acknowledgements_???
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| In the Claudine Gay case, she didn't actually steal anyone's
| work in any of the publicized examples I saw. She clearly
| attributed the ideas and statements she was using, but then
| sometimes proceeded to paraphrase them too closely, without
| using quotation marks. You could argue that it's technically
| plagiarism, but morally, it isn't. The reason she got nailed
| was because billionaire donors were upset that she wasn't
| cracking down on pro-Palestinian student protesters.
|
| Ironically, the guy who led the charge against Gay, Bill
| Ackman, is married to a celebrity academic who committed
| real, bona fide plagiarism. Once that came out, Ackman
| suddenly had all sorts of excuses for his wife's actual
| misconduct, which makes it clear that he never actually cared
| about the issue of plagiarism. He just wants kids who protest
| against the war in Gaza to get expelled.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I agree with everything you've said about Ackman's
| rationale and actions.
|
| I don't necessarily agree with your overall
| characterization of Gay's plagiarism. While some of it is
| clearly of the kind you site (e.g. she's clearly
| referencing other work in a lot of her analysis, so the
| fact that she doesn't just reword some phrases a little
| more seems like a very minor transgression to me), there
| are other cases that are more than just sloppiness and are
| outright weird, like the acknowledgements issue. This
| opinion article from Ruth Marcus (a generally left-leaning
| writer) of the Washington Post highlighted the issues very
| well IMO: https://archive.vn/h8lqM
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| I don't think anyone cares what is written in
| acknowledgment sections. That's where people thank their
| mom and dad. If they thank their mom and dad in exactly
| the same way as someone else, who cares?
|
| Ruth Marcus may be liberal, but she's also extremely pro-
| Israeli. The entire motivation for going after Claudine
| Gay was that she didn't stop students from protesting
| against Israel's war in Gaza, so Marcus' political stance
| on that issue likely colors her view on the plagiarism
| accusations.
| dekhn wrote:
| I disagree; I inspected Gay's writing closely and compared
| it to the original and from what I can tell, she had
| specific intent to spend the least amount of effort and
| skill to make something that barely passed the threshold
| for being publishable, or she lacked the skill entirely to
| write her own unique text.
|
| I expect somebody who reaches her level of achievement to
| adhere to the rules of academic plagiarism to the letter.
| bagels wrote:
| Elisabeth Bik has a twitter where, at least in the past, she
| exposed a bunch of questionable things in papers (lots of
| manipulated images or images copied from other papers)
|
| https://x.com/MicrobiomDigest
|
| https://x.com/MicrobiomDigest/status/902016709019672577
|
| These efforts are just going to accelerate with AI applied, new
| and exciting frauds will be discovered.
| etrautmann wrote:
| Yes, but AI tools also make it easier for bad actors to
| generate false images that are harder to detect as false going
| forward. The ones that get caught now seem to be incredibly
| simplistic manipulations.
| bagels wrote:
| That is also true. There are decades of fraudulent papers out
| there to find from the before times, so it'll still be
| useful.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| Ehh maybe, the images will be too perfect. I don't think they
| can model every source of bias, that would be a huge training
| problem.
| blindriver wrote:
| I know 2 people including my own mother who died of Alzheimer's
| and one who has it right now. Who knows where would we be right
| now if we didn't go on the wrong track with this fraudulent
| paper? Things like this is why trust in scientists are at an all-
| time low. There's corruption at every single layer of our society
| and I don't know what we can do to get honor and honesty back as
| top moral goals for citizens.
|
| This amyloid theory has been completely debunked at this point
| but has wasted almost two decades of progress because of it. It's
| so infuriating, but I don't see this stopping because there's no
| accountability.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| Everyone in power is in on it for revenue maximization.
| Treating someone at an early stage is never the goal; making
| money and winning awards is the goal. The FDA is 100% in on it.
| pvaldes wrote:
| > Treating someone at an early stage is never the goal
|
| This claim is just an opinion. I bet that if we check the
| real statistics there are lots of cases that show exactly the
| opposite behavior.
|
| > making money and winning awards is the goal
|
| We should remind that making money and winning awards are
| perfectly legit goals, as long as the work is done honestly.
|
| Working with Alzheimer patients rank probably among some of
| the most emotionally hardest and more depressive works that I
| could imagine. We should stop treating scientists as
| missionary figures that were born to save all of us for free.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| Those who don't even see the problem are already corrupted.
| Early stage treatments at scale can be very possible with
| cheap preventative bloodwork and inexpensive small
| molecules. Instead, we have no diagnostics until it's
| already too late, and then we have 50K/year "treatments"
| that don't even work. The ones you referred to are not
| scientists; they're scientific mercenaries.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Billionaires and powerful politicians (and their parents and
| other loved ones) die of Alzheimer's too.
|
| If it was just a big cartel conspiracy, you would see a
| different disease pattern when comparing the elites to
| everyone else.
| DarknessFalls wrote:
| I think we're already well into looking at Alzheimers as an
| auto-immune response by the brain.
| hi-v-rocknroll wrote:
| So far, it appears to be a degenerative process with manifold
| causes still to be elucidated. Perhaps in ~50 years, there
| will be a wider corpus of knowledge and treatments to attack
| more of them.
|
| Of note: _Cancer and Alzheimer's disease inverse
| relationship: an age-associated diverging derailment of
| shared pathways_ Molecular Psychiatry vol. 26, pp. 280-295
| (2021)
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-020-0760-2
| pvaldes wrote:
| > this is why trust in scientists are at an all-time low
|
| People needs to stop making excuses to avoid science, use their
| brain cells and grow some critic sense. When you feel afraid of
| science, stop and think that the other option is worse.
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| If one wants less fraud change incentives.
|
| 1. Grants and faculty positions should be less dependent on
| number of publications, and more on the quality of publications.
|
| 2. Place more emphasis on basic research and less on
| translational research. The latter encourages hyperbole and
| p-hacking. In the late 90s, the NIH initiated a strong emphasis
| that all research should have an immediate practical value. This
| is not reasonable and as a result, researchers grossly exaggerate
| the impact of their work, and some even engage in an outright
| fraud.
| nradov wrote:
| How do we measure quality of publications? I know there have
| been attempts to do so based on journal impact factor and
| quantity of citations but those metrics are also manipulated.
| desert_rue wrote:
| I know we would have to change a lot from how it is set up
| today, but here are some ideas:
|
| - How many times has the results been reproduced by others? -
| Add another layer of blindness: the person doing the lab work
| is not the person crunching the results. It could even be
| where two different groups crunch the numbers, and all groups
| are unknown to the others. - Avoid p hacking with pre
| determined (and registered!) p values - Register the
| experiment with hypothesis before the start of the experiment
| - Register authors as they are added and removed, and have
| that history be publicly available - All results have to be
| uploaded to a website before publication - The method of
| calculation has to be public on a website before publication.
|
| So a high quality paper is one where - the experiment was
| logged in advance - the history of authors is known - there
| is a distinct separation of experimenter and cruncher - the
| public can get the results themselves and run the same
| analysis to confirm (or not!) the results - the experiment is
| repeated and confirmed by others. Even if the first
| experiment is bad or a fraud, and the second one doesn't
| confirm it, a third experiment could be the tie breaker. It
| would be more traceable to understand if it was the lab or
| the cruncher that made a mistake or was committing fraud.
|
| Overall, we have to incentivize good science.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Many of these ideas have been tried already. Unfortunately
| they don't work.
|
| 1. Pre-registration. Great idea, it's often being done.
| Doesn't work because universities don't enforce it. They'd
| have to proactively check that papers match their pre-
| registrations and then fire people when they don't.
|
| 2. Reproducibility. Nobody gets funded to do this but even
| if they did, there are lots of bogus studies that can
| easily be reproduced. The problems are in the methods
| rather than the data. If you specify a logically invalid or
| unscientific method, then people following your
| instructions will calculate the same results and still be
| wrong.
|
| 3. Blindness/splitting work up. This is already how many
| papers are made and academics turn it around as a defense.
| Notice how in _every single case_ where this stuff happens,
| the people whose names are on the paper claim the fraud was
| done by someone else and they had no idea. Universities
| invariably accept this claim without question.
|
| 4. All results have to be uploaded before publication. Did
| you mean raw data? Results are the primary content of the
| paper, so it's unclear what this would mean. Researchers in
| some fields heavily resist publishing raw data for various
| (bad) reasons, like academic culture rewarding papers but
| not data collection efforts, so they're incentivized to
| squeeze as many papers out of a dataset as possible before
| revealing it to competitors. In a few fields (like
| climatology) they often refuse to publish raw data because
| they're afraid of empowering people who might check their
| papers for errors, who they see as a sort of shadowy enemy.
|
| 5. Authorship history. Which frauds are you thinking of
| that this would fix?
|
| I spent a lot of lockdown time looking at this question.
| You've listed five ideas, I churned through maybe 15-20.
| None of them work. On investigation they've usually been
| tried before and academics immediately work around them.
| Science is littered with integrity theatre in which systems
| are put in place in response to some fraud, and they appear
| to be operating on the surface, but nothing is actually
| being checked or enforced.
|
| _> Overall, we have to incentivize good science._
|
| I'm by now 95% convinced the only way to do this is for
| scientific research to be done commercially. No government
| or charitable funding of science at all. As long as science
| is being firehosed with money by people who don't actually
| use or consume the resulting papers, the incentive will
| always be to provide the appearance of doing science
| without actually doing it. It's just so much more effective
| for fundraising. Commercial science that's purchased by
| someone has a customer who will actually try to check they
| got what they paid for at some point, and can vote with
| their wallet if they didn't. Also legal protections and
| systems to stop fraud in markets are well developed. Notice
| that Elizabeth Holmes went to prison for defrauding
| investors. If she'd done the same thing at a university
| she'd have gotten away with it scot free.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > If she'd done the same thing at a university she'd have
| gotten away with it scot free.
|
| But she didn't though. She was rejected from academia,
| which is why she turned to private capital. Her fraud
| worked on private investors, not government funding
| agencies. She couldn't even convince her professor to get
| behind her idea, but private funds threw millions of
| dollars at her.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| I haven't read her bio, so would be interested to know
| more about her being rejected from academia. The official
| story is that she dropped out during her undergrad and
| immediately formed a company. Or are you referring to her
| professors telling her they didn't think her idea would
| work? If so then they were right, but her profs are not
| the people handing out grants. There's no sign she
| wouldn't have got a grant for such a thing given that
| government funding is justified by the fact that it can
| fund long shot ideas that some say won't work, and people
| doing things that clearly can't work regularly get
| grants.
| otherme123 wrote:
| How do you determine quality? Right now, publishing below Q2 or
| even below Q1 in some cases is the same as not publishing at
| all. I've seen grants that only accept D1 papers. As a
| curiosity, Gregor Mendel original work was published in a small
| and newly created local Brno journal. It was cited three times
| in the following 35 years. By all metrics, it was a low quality
| work. Only 40 years after being published it was rediscovered
| as a fundamental work.
|
| That on the clean part. I've also seen papers published well
| above its merit just because the authors know the editors, or
| the paper comes from a reputable lab so it must be good. Also,
| the opposite is true: your work is from a small or unknown lab,
| or goes against the grain, and you'll be lucky if you get
| published at all.
| kergonath wrote:
| > How do you determine quality?
|
| Certainly not by citations counts. Citations have more to do
| with the authors social or scientific network than the worth
| of the papers.
|
| > It was cited three times in the following 35 years. By all
| metrics, it was a low quality work.
|
| It was not low quality work (although it did spark quite a
| bit of controversy due to its perceived or actual issues). It
| was just an article written by an unknown author in an
| unknown journal.
| czl wrote:
| FYI: Some have suggested that Mendel's data might be too
| perfect, indicating possible manipulation or fraud. (1)
| Mendel's results are unusually close to the expected ratios
| of 3:1 for dominant and recessive traits. Some argue that
| real-world data often show more variation. (2) In 1936,
| statistician Ronald A. Fisher analyzed Mendel's data and
| suggested it was "too good to be true." Fisher believed the
| results might have been altered or selectively reported to
| better match Mendel's hypothesis. (3) Despite these concerns,
| many of Mendel's experiments have been replicated, and his
| fundamental findings remain valid. Most scientists believe
| any discrepancies in Mendel's data were not due to
| intentional fraud but possibly unconscious bias or error.
| admissionsguy wrote:
| > Also, the opposite is true: your work is from a small or
| unknown lab, or goes against the grain, and you'll be lucky
| if you get published at all.
|
| Unfortunately, many papers that come from obscure labs and go
| against the grain are both bad and wrong. It's a hard
| problem.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| If money is the problem, maybe money is the solution?
|
| Like open a betting market for study replication. If no
| methodological errors are found and the study can be
| successfully replicated the authors get a percentage of the
| pool, replication effort is run by a red team that gets paid
| the same percentage of the pool regardless of outcome making
| their incentive to find bets that just attract a lot of bets.
|
| This would incentivize scrutinizing big findings like the one
| in the OP where a failure would be big, but also act as a
| force for unearthing dark horse findings in journals off the
| beaten path where replication success would be big.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Why not criminal charges for fraud? Besides the fact that this
| kind of stuff is used to obtain funding in the first place
| (defrauding the funding agency), it's theft (stealing funds
| that would otherwise be allocated to competitors), and breaking
| the public trust since usually these kinds of funds are
| allocated by government agencies.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Are you arguing that Alzheimer's research isn't basic research?
| That it's got so much fraud because people demand immediate
| practical value from it? How does that square with the fact
| that they've been researching it for decades, haven't found a
| cure or even a solid understanding of the cause, and still get
| funded? Surely this is an exemplar of basic research?
| AceyMan wrote:
| 'Basic research' has a specific meaning in the natural
| sciences, which, I suspect, is how the OP was using the
| phrase.
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| If the authors are pushing a novel or shaky hypothesis that
| purports to provide a potential cure (as they often do), yes
| this might not fall under basic research. For instance,
| arguing a particular pathway is the cause of AD without first
| characterizing the pathway and how it affects humans can
| waste tens of million dollars and cost years.
|
| In the balance between trying to quickly develop a
| therapeutic and understanding the basic mechanisms driving
| the disease etiology, we see a lot of research groups with
| under powered studies playing fast and loose and hyping their
| research. Is it outright fraud? Rarely. But it's not good
| science either.
| hi-v-rocknroll wrote:
| E.g., return to the rigor and quality-aspects of research
| standards c. 1940 before it declined into the Sears, Roebuck
| and Co. model we find today.
|
| The commercialization of academia rewards churn and volume
| rather than $upporting (a semi-orthogonal constraint) and
| promoting landmark hard-work that takes longer to gather data
| or develop.
|
| Perhaps data-oriented research needs to consider extraordinary
| rigor as the new normal, perhaps with internal and external
| audits to assure standards and practices are sound.
| kylebenzle wrote:
| As it is now, bad researches get rewarded and good researches
| who speak up get pushed out. One of the most despicable people
| I've ever met is a long term "successful" academic researcher
| at a major university.
| elefanten wrote:
| > Lesne, who did not reply to requests for comment, remains a UMN
| professor and receives National Institutes of Health funding. The
| university has been investigating his work since June 2022. A
| spokesperson says UMN recently told Nature it had reviewed two
| images in question, and "has closed this review with no findings
| of research misconduct pertaining to these figures." The
| statement did not reference several other questioned figures in
| the same paper. UMN did not comment on whether it had reached
| conclusions about other Lesne papers with apparently doctored
| images.
|
| Horrifying. 2 years investigating and they've commented on two
| images?
| mike_hearn wrote:
| It's standard. Universities always drag these things out for
| years, and often acquit either without explanation or with an
| explanation like "this unfortunate event was caused merely by
| enormous incompetence", even when that can't possibly be true.
|
| Universities cannot/will not investigate their own staff
| properly.
| LgWoodenBadger wrote:
| No one (institutional or human), anywhere, can investigate
| themselves competently.
|
| It should never be acceptable.
| jl6 wrote:
| This article contains the actual alleged doctored images:
|
| https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabricatio...
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Too late, the tens of thousands of papers citing this paper and
| drawing conclusions based on it won't be retracted. Nor would be
| retracted papers based on papers based on this paper.
| midtake wrote:
| There should be some sort of "taint" checking that will
| indicate how many retracted papers any given one is based on.
| It shouldn't be too difficult since publications are highly
| structured.
|
| With LLMs we can read all the papers at once and flag the most
| strongly derived for further review.
| jcranmer wrote:
| It's dubious that a lot of the papers citing this paper are
| actually drawing conclusions based on this paper. Per Derek
| Lowe [1]:
|
| > I could be wrong about this, but from this vantage point the
| original Lesne paper and its numerous follow-ups have largely
| just given people in the field something to point at when asked
| about the evidence for amyloid oligomers directly affecting
| memory. [...] The expressions in the literature about the
| failure to find *56 (as in the Selkoe lab's papers) did not de-
| validate the general idea for anyone - indeed, Selkoe's lab has
| been working on amyloid oligomers the whole time and continues
| to do so.
|
| [1] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/faked-beta-
| amyloid...
| dekhn wrote:
| It's interesting that Lowe said this: >When I review a paper,
| I freely admit that I am generally not thinking "What if all
| of this is based on lies and fakery?" It's not the way that
| we tend to approach scientific manuscripts. Rather, you ask
| whether the hypothesis is a sound one and if it was tested in
| a useful way: were the procedures used sufficient to trust
| the results and were these results good enough to draw
| conclusions that can in turn be built upon by further
| research?
|
| I have, over time, come to treat every paper I read as being
| based on lies and fakery (or incompetence, unconscious bias,
| or intentional omission of key details), and I work to
| convince myself that the paper is not fradulent or false.
| That is, my null hypothesis is that published work is wrong.
|
| After chattiing with many people about this, I've found that
| most people default ot believing a paper is right and if the
| figures and conclusion agree with their bias, they just move
| on, beliving the paper to be true. I've been guilty of this
| in the past as well.
| RevEng wrote:
| The only papers that are likely to draw conclusions directly
| from the cited papers are meta-analysis and reviews. Any pure
| research will have its own hypothesis, its own experiments, its
| own results, and its own conclusions. Most papers will simply
| cite it as background or related works. Even if the evidence in
| the cited work is doctored, the hypothesis can still be true
| and future papers based on it can still find valid, positive
| results.
|
| This paper being manipulated doesn't imply anything about the
| hypothesis or any subsequent studies - it simply fails to be
| useful as any form of evidence.
| seydor wrote:
| People have been using these mice as mouse model of alzheimer's
| for decades, so there must be something here. It's not like the
| whole research direction was "wrong"
| gnicholas wrote:
| There's a strong incentive to get a high citation count for your
| papers. This encourages behavior like the manipulations we're
| seeing here, on the part of fraudsters. But it also fails to
| incentivize caution on the part of researchers who cite existing
| works. If there were a "bamboozled count" that showed how many
| times a researcher cited a work that was later retracted, that
| would incentivize people to be a little more cautious, and
| perhaps avoid citing work of people who are suspected to be
| fudging the numbers.
| graemep wrote:
| Making the system more elaborate would also make it more
| complex, and people would just find more complex ways to game
| it. it might even make things worse.
|
| I am sure most citations are not by people who suspected the
| numbers were fudged.
|
| If anything, the way to go is to stop using flawed metrics.
| Most people want to do a good job and build a good reputation.
| Incentives just distort this.
| F-Lexx wrote:
| While we're at it, let's also add a "rickrolled counter" for
| people who open the link and close it in less than 10 seconda.
| That should incentivize people to be a little more cautious,
| and perhaps avoid clicking on links without first
| doublechecking the URL.
| gnicholas wrote:
| This is basically the academic version of that.
| phromo wrote:
| One red flag should be that nowhere in this news article is the
| reader made aware of the exact nature of the manipulated images
| or their implications. If you go to the linked pubpeer review
| page you'll find why -- it's much less dramatic and all the
| findings were also replicated following this inquiry to show that
| any image alteration, that might have been made for editorial
| purposes, does not affect conclusions....
|
| Drama drama drama, feed the people more drama... _sigh_
| el_cujo wrote:
| >One red flag should be that nowhere in this news article is
| the reader made aware of the exact nature of the manipulated
| images or their implications.
|
| Because that was covered in detail when the manipulations were
| first reported and those articles are linked to in the above
| article. This is just reporting on the resulting retraction two
| years after that initial report.
|
| >it's much less dramatic and all the findings were also
| replicated following this inquiry to show that any image
| alteration, that might have been made for editorial purposes,
| does not affect conclusions
|
| Other groups had issues replicating the results with the same
| oligomer (often just chalked up to its instability), it's not
| like someone just happened to stumble upon these manipulations
| casually. This retraction only happened because Nature rejected
| the author's attempt to publish a correction. This whole thing
| is a black mark on Nature's record as well so if it really was
| just some minor change to make a picture look prettier for
| publishing purposes, I doubt they would have insisted on this
| action
| oefrha wrote:
| "All the findings were replicated" is a claim by the accused,
| which is disputed by the researcher who originally found the
| issues, and he detailed all the contradicting claims right in
| that thread https://pubpeer.com/publications/8FF7E6996524B73ACB
| 4A9EF5C0A.... Image alteration "that might have been made for
| editorial purposes" is a laughable euphemism for fraud, even
| the accused didn't dare to use that phrasing. Not sure what's
| in it for you to seriously misrepresent scientific fraud.
| dekhn wrote:
| I disagree with this assessment. If Bik sees "shockingly
| blatant" copying, it's almost certain the author (or one of the
| authors) specifically, with intent, committed fraud. The other
| main explanation is incompetence (it's not impossible to
| misattribute a specific figure if your data handling is poor).
| zxxh wrote:
| I actually know one of the guys who faked this data from a young
| age. He was basically losing his mind because of rage issues due
| to his extreme phobia of being poor/ falling into poverty. It's
| interesting to me how these companies basically played into his
| fear of losing his funding to push this BS.
| eigenvalue wrote:
| This person Lesne shouldn't have a job at a university after
| this. In fact, I strongly believe this person should be behind
| bars for having swindled the government and tax payers out of
| many millions of dollars in wasted grant money. The incentives
| for perpetuating this kind of fraudulent research have to be
| utterly devastating to those who do it to even hope for a
| deterrence against future malfeasance.
| therobots927 wrote:
| They should be sent to prison for this, as should all fraudulent
| researchers big and small.
| oneepic wrote:
| I may be alone in this, but I think these threats like jailtime
| for fraudulent research would have the side effect of
| discouraging researchers that don't even engage in that stuff.
| I think pulling out the pitchforks is a misguided idea, and
| it's a shame that it's so common today.
|
| On one hand, these people have a big responsibility to do good
| work and stay out of trouble for the sake of the ones they're
| helping (i.e. Alzheimer's patients), but on the other hand
| their impact depends a lot on their mental/emotional state --
| if you put more bs in their mental buffer, it's naturally going
| to mess with them and lead to a decline in quality. They have
| to focus.
| therobots927 wrote:
| Does that same reasoning apply to people who work in finance
| or accounting?
|
| Distrust in science is at an all time high and these frauds
| cause incalculable damage to scientific integrity. They are
| literally poisoning the well of human knowledge. That should
| be considered a high crime.
| canadiantim wrote:
| I still firmly believe a large portion of alzheimer cases are due
| to candida or other forms of gut dysbiosis, leading to the
| breakdown of the blood-brain barrier. Candida then enters the
| brain and the glial cells break down the candida producing
| amyloid plaques. But the root cause is from the gut.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| The microbiome is significant. Could it not also be olfactory?
| canadiantim wrote:
| Olfactory in what way? I think toxins could definitely get in
| by breathing it in, e.g. like mold, which is a generally
| underestimated, but in my opinion significant source of
| complex chronic conditions. So for sure those are
| possibilities too.
|
| I suspect alzheimers (which is a subset of dementia), is a
| cluster of diseases similar to cancer. I think a large subset
| is due to candida, but I wouldn't be surprised if mold and
| other environmental toxins cause other subsets.
| waveywaves wrote:
| I have been reading Outlive by Dr. Peter Attia. I believe this
| research is used in the book to talk about Alzheimer's. I'm
| guessing the book will have to be revised. Gonna have to check in
| the acknowledgements of the book now.
| waveywaves wrote:
| This paper is not cited in the book thankfully.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-06-06 23:02 UTC)