magic1623 t1_j96j09p wrote
Headline is a little misleading. It seems more like people got suspicious because they couldn’t replicate the results of the paper and are looking into it.
>”There have not been any formal investigations, allegations, claims or complaints regarding scientific fraud or misrepresentation involving the Nature 2009 paper,” wrote Susan Willson, a Genentech spokesperson. “The project received a regular review by Genentech’s Research Review Committee (RRC), as is routinely done for Genentech’s drug discovery projects.”
She wrote that “neither the RRC meeting nor the decision to conduct follow-up experiments was due to any concern about fraud in the Nature 2009 paper.” Willson would not answer multiple questions about whether any issues were ever discovered in the paper.
For anyone who isn’t in the science community, when one researcher finds interesting results its common for other researchers to try to repeat the first study in order to see if they also can get the same results (hence replication). If they can also get the same results it sort of ‘confirms’ that the first results weren’t a fluke and that the original findings can be considered supported which means more people will look in that direction when doing future research.
However, there are times when someone tries to replicate a study and it just doesn’t work out. This can be for a lot of different reasons but it’s almost never because someone falsified data.
splork-chop t1_j96m5yt wrote
> However, there are times when someone tries to replicate a study and it just doesn’t work out.
It's exceedingly common, especially in medical research. Experimental protocols are rarely published in full, and labwork requires a lot of individual skill.
TogepiMain t1_j96nzsu wrote
Isn't it like, 1 in 3?
For the folks in the back: just because your experiment hasn't been replicated does not disprove your hypothesis. It might not even mean anything negative for your paper. There's lot of reasons why this can happen.
What matters at the end of the day is you can find multiple studies that show with hard data that your hypothesis carries weight. These days, that doesn't really even need to mean they show "statistical significance", just that the data as a whole all lends weight to the same idea. Lots of studies can even be found hard to replicate because they are pinholed into showing these statistical values that often don't truly represent the data as a whole.
As u/magic1623 is basically saying: failure to replicate comes from loads and loads of reasons, but not from falsified data, really. That's an entirely different problem that anyone reading the paper, or trying to recreate it, would quickly see bad maths, padded sig figs, generous rounding, truly faked stuff just to get the result you want.
There's nothing inherently nefarious about a paper you can't replicate, and there's not even inherently anything wrong with that paper. But if it's noticed that you just straight up lied to show what you needed the paper to show, that's a huge fucking issue.
yxwvut t1_j97u1vl wrote
Are you familiar with p-hacking, or what some statisticians call the “garden of forked paths”? There are so many researcher degrees of freedom that go unreported and unconsidered. So much of academia is essentially encouraged to go on fishing expeditions until their data turns up something “significant”, and they probably don’t even have the statistics training to realize they’re doing unsound analysis.
TogepiMain t1_j984icn wrote
https://www.cos.io/initiatives/prereg
Pre register your paper! Calling your shot in science, so hot right now.
Seriously, millions and millions of dollars are wasted every year on repeated dead ends. Your paper showing hoe the thing you did didn't work? It is just as valuable. Sharing your mistakes is incredibly brave, and incredibly important. Every scientist that comes after you is able to reach further because you showed them where not to stray from the path.
yxwvut t1_j986j0k wrote
Preregistration is great but even pre-registering isn’t a panacea. Pre-registered papers can still be silently dropped from publication so the macro paper-generating process still has an over-abundance of false positives if the negatives are dropped, and there can still be ambiguities in the analysis protocol where researchers can still impart influence over the results.
TogepiMain t1_j9a6btk wrote
True. But even if the paper isn't published the timestamp of the hypothesis is there
smootex t1_j97nzbw wrote
Your comment is a little misleading. Did you read the entire article? You've quoted a statement from a public relations spokesperson but the article speaks of having multiple sources familiar with the situation who contradict that narrative.
> Each of the four senior Genentech scientists was contacted individually by The Daily and was unaware of the others’ accounts. Their independent accounts, given over several hours of interviews, were highly consistent with each other, and also consistent with publicly available information about the research.
Read that and then read what the four scientists had to say about the situation and tell me the headline in misleading.
eldred2 t1_j97mlt6 wrote
Did you read this part too:
> But after several unsuccessful attempts to reproduce the research, the paper became the subject of an internal review by Genentech’s Research Review Committee (RRC), according to four high-level Genentech employees at the time; two were senior scientists and two were scientists who also served as executives. Three spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the allegations and non-disclosure agreements. The scientists, one of whom was an executive who sat on the review committee and all of whom were informed of the review’s findings at the time due to their stature at the company, said that the inquiry discovered falsification of data in the research, and that Tessier-Lavigne kept the finding from becoming public.
SometimesY t1_j971vl5 wrote
Hmm seems like it's not super clear and probably won't be since it's been so long now:
>The scientists, one of whom was an executive who sat on the review committee and all of whom were informed of the review’s findings at the time due to their stature at the company, said that the inquiry discovered falsification of data in the research, and that Tessier-Lavigne kept the finding from becoming public.
trelium06 t1_j96m9aa wrote
And falsified data is usually a “too good to be true” kind of deal
ZoeInBinary t1_j987fvp wrote
I watched a video on another person who falsified data in a famous physics case. Took ages to catch him, and it only happened when they couldn't reproduce his results.
Seems like there's pressure to produce results sometimes that overrides good sense.
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