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Breaking News: The Ruling-Class Lies

End his career. Obviously he hasn’t learned his lesson. Science has no place for people like him.

Can you even call the president of a college a scientist? The one in my neck of the woods is just a show pony brought out for speeches, photo ops, and schmoozing with entitled assholes. No science in sight. He's a glorified mascot, and his suit is his costume.

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Phony fancy pants whee-ers run the show I guess

Little Sebastian?

That's a really weird comment. Wondering if he's "really a scientist" because he's also a university president doesn't make any sense. One is a professional designation while the other is an academic position.

Whatever else he may be now, prior to this point this guy was a Rhodes scholar and a credentialed physiologist and neuroscientist who spent a decade as the de facto head of a biotech/drug research and development firm. So yes, he's a scientist.

Falsifying data is one of the worst things you can do in the sciences and absolutely calls his entire career into question, but it's absurd to suggest he's not really a scientist because of an academic appointment.

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What’s up with this trend in the neuroscience field? I remember reading about falsified data last year that upended decades of neuroscience research into Alzheimer’s.

https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease

Thank you for calling out poor logic where it stands.

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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.

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> 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.

And falsified data is usually a “too good to be true” kind of deal

Okay, and that's probably true and sucks, but a "scientist" doesn't just become "Jim" when he takes the lab coat off. Which, is already me really really narrowcasting scientists, but thats just more to my point

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.

It's not just the neuroscience field. It's every field. Research is a very feast or famine thing. And the sad part is, research that doesn't reach some groundbreaking conclusion is good, it's essentially the basis for the scientific method. But that doesn't get you funding nor does it keep your job, so there's a perverseness to it where it's incentivised to falsify data to keep your career.

Think about this. How much mo ey was invested, not just the company he worked for, but all the other science research across the globe that was wasted due to him. He is a fraud.

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.

People constantly rise higher and higher in their fields just because they landed a prestigious job once. I've seen this play out many, many times in business, academia, major non-profits, etc. People are so impressed with a candidate's past position that they just accept that the person earned it, instead of just being in the right place at the right time. So this fraud is now president of a world-renowned university.

“given that these events happened many years ago … our current records may not be complete.”

Complete bullshit. Pharma companies have restrictions on data and document retention.

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I'm not going to name names, but I've known cases where someone has done something really awful like this, but they rehabilitate themselves. I'm thinking plagiarism, embezzlement of research funds, stuff like that. I'm not as sure about data fraud.

What happens is they move somewhere else far away out of the country and lie low for a few years, in a lower profile job. If they can keep their noses clean, they may be able to slide back into polite academic society in a surprisingly short time.

In this fellow's case, he has international connections and a lot of friends who can lubricate his redemption. Really, the whole world would be open to him unless he's pissed too many people off in his scramble to the top. It would probably mean a private sector job. The other big advantage he'll have is that he's certainly rich; I'd guess a guy like him would have a net worth in the high seven figures, maybe more.

Of course, the other option is simply that he retires. He's 64, and it may be time to pack it in.

Rich, connected people rarely suffer consequences

The whole of Stanford University was founded in order to perpetuate Leland's ability to steal money from the public, which is funny considering the Trustees today are facing allegations of tax fraud and money laundering.

Stanford has always been a place of grift, the Trustees are facing allegations of tax fraud and money laundering

I wonder how closely Stanford is following the demise of it’s public image. Beyond the Bankmans and Frieds it seems like there are starting to be a lot of stories involving fraud coming out of there. Makes sense when you consider their links to the Silicon Valley culture of today.

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.

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.

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.

The sad thing about research is:

1. Negative findings do not get published. His leads to many labs doing research that they don’t know has already been futile. I can only imagine how many billions of research dollars get wasted.
2. Bias. Even the a post doc student with no pharma connections and funding from government has a huge conflict of interest: that conflict being, if you spend a couple years doing research and all your experiments don’t find results then you don’t get a job. Funnily enough, they always find something.

How long before AI is used to check research around the world, in all languages, looking for mistakes and possibly outright lying?

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.

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.

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.

How long before AI is used to do the research?

google is an AI in that sorta sense

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And that is typically 3 years, unless it is subject to a Regulatory Hold, which this would not have been because it was not clinical research submitted to a Regulatory Agency (FDA, etc)

Everything is under a legal hold in Pharma. I worked for an ethical company and every product had holds on them.

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True. But even if the paper isn't published the timestamp of the hypothesis is there

you could name names. I don't see the point of protecting someone you just described, and without that your post could've been written by anyone bluffing and puffing

Isn't this the institution that brought together two people who gave the world Sam Bankman-Fried?

Allegations of data fraud can fuck someone's entire career, even if shown to be false. As a scientist, I'm completely on board with punitive measures for folks who knowingly and deliberately fuck with data....but I want a human- actually, several humans- looking into it before anything goes public.

The number of horror stories I've read from and about students accused of plagiarism because a comparison program thought their work was too similar to something else is...too high for me to ever place trust in a program. It's too severe of a consequence, and too high a rate of false positives.

This is a great response. I don't know much about AI.

I did spend years teaching and I know for a fact that at some high up American education systems that plagiarism is allowed. It's not an open thing, but at many schools, bringing in foreign students with the massive amount of tuition they pay, it gets blown off.

A professor friend of mine was stalked by a foreign student and was told to arrange security to walk her to her car because the school wanted the huge amount of tuition.

Sounds to me like a more socialized and less capitalistic system for the research field wouldn't have nearly this pervasive an incentive.....but of course, we can't because socialism is badddddd.

A family friend went through the process on the other end. She had all the documentation to show it was her work, start to finish. More, truth be told, than I would ever have been able to produce if it had been me in the hot seat. Google Docs had recorded the evolution of her paper. Her citations were complete. She just used the wrong combination of less-common words, and the comp program dug up a source that matched it just enough to trigger.

I know that students get away with plagiarism all the time- even blatent straight up copy/pasting stuff. I myself was told to let it go unless it was verbatim the wiki article. But it shouldn't mean that we have a lighter trigger where we're allowed to enforce shit. Get enough undergrads attempting to sound sophisticated together and they'll eventually reproduce the language of any seminal work.

I'd give the "you need to stop doing this" but they knew there wasn't going to be any real repercussions. I was teaching overseas.

As an aside, students are paid to go to college in Saudi Arabia. They treat it like a job they hate for the most part.

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Nothing socialist or capitalist about it. Even if it was socialist you would get the same problems.