Archive for the 'Scientific Misconduct' category

Detection is up, yes, but contingencies still matter

Apr 18 2012 Published by under Academics, Scientific Misconduct

In a recent post Comraddde PhysioProffe supplies a necessary correction to the oft-repeated claim that scientific fraud is on the rise. Science blog legend Carl Zimmer's bit in the NYT is only a reflection of a constant drumbeat which you can see in comments posted after many accounts of fraud, say over at retraction watch. As CPP puts it:

I keep hearing this asserted, but I see zero evidence that it is the case. What is clearly the case is that there is now an all-time vastly greater ability for interested sleuths to reveal failures of research integrity (e.g., by image analysis, sophisticated statistical analysis, etc).

Even so, his position tends to ignore some basic reality about the contingencies which influence human behavior in this instance. His first commenter notes this and in fact Zimmer had a followup NYT bit which talks mainly about the fact that scientists busted for fraud never admit their wrongdoing. Like one Michael W. Miller, a scientific fraudster discussed on this blog. One counter-example is listed by Zimmer:

One notable exception to this pattern...Eric Poehlman, was convicted of lying on federal grant applications and was sentenced to a year in jail. For the previous decade, he had fabricated data in papers he published on obesity, menopause and aging.

During his sentencing hearing, Dr. Poehlman apologized for his actions and offered an explanation.

“I had placed myself, in all honesty, in a situation, in an academic position which the amount of grants that you held basically determined one’s self-worth,” Dr. Poehlman said. “Everything flowed from that.”

Unless he could get grants, he couldn’t pay his lab workers, and to get those grants, he cut corners on his research and then began to fabricate data.

It's just reality. Grant getting is harder and yet laboratory heads are still expected to land plenty of funds. More mouths to feed and fewer grant dollars to throw into them means the pressure is on. And the choices are sometimes stark, or seemingly so. Failing to get a grant can mean losing your job. Take the case of Peter Francis, previously of OHSU. He had a foundation award which notes that his faculty appointment was in 2006. A RePORTER search pulls up just the one award funded in 2011...this R01 was the one that included falsified data and was the (sole) subject of the ORI finding of research misconduct.

As always, I assert my possibly naive belief: Nobody sets out in a science career because they want to fake data and publish made-up results.

It proceeds from this that the data fakers must stray from the path at some point. And the reasons for straying are not due to random cerebral infarct. The reasons for straying are heavily influenced by contingencies. Facing a failure to secure grant funding is a pretty big contingency. Thinking that faking up a preliminary result (hey, it's just pilot data, we shouldn't take it as true until a full study follows it, right?) will make the difference in a fundable score is a pretty big contingency.

People like CPP can insist that contingencies were always at play. But they simply were not. The success rates for NIH grant getting show a clear difference in the difficulty of getting funded across scientific generations.

Those who are our older and more established scientists have been shaped by three cycles of NIH budget woes forcing down grant success rates- the early 80s, late 80s into the early 90s (which caused the political pressure leading to the doubling) and the present one starting about 2004 (after the decade-of-the-double). Some of them may have only been trainees for the first one but the campfire lore and attitudes were transmitted. The graph gives us a point of reference. For established investigators in the mid-80s, a success rate of about 37% represented the dismal landing from a down cycle! Then just one cycle later the success rates were down at 25%- OMMFG we have to DO SOMETHING!! The doubling was great and indeed success rates started to go back up towards the 35% value.

Yeah well the success rate was 17.7% in FY2011.

The contingencies are most assuredly different. And to think this plays no role in the rates of data faking and scientific fraud is dangerously naive.

Share

24 responses so far

Convicted fraudster of alcohol research, Michael W. Miller, tries re-web-ilitation

Apr 16 2012 Published by under Alcohol, Scientific Misconduct

We convered Alcohol research fraudster Michael W. Miller in a prior post. This was following a finding of the ORI of the NIH and a note on retractionwatch. My post focused on the fact that when cheaters like Michael W. Miller are finally caught, there is no way to recover for their sins. No way to reclaim that money. No way for the person who really deserved the job or the award to be compensated.

That pisses me off.

It also pisses me off when people who do dodgy things in science, like Charles Nemeroff, get to keep on keeping on as if nothing happened. Some patsy University will happen along to hire the dude if they think it is in their interest to do so.

Well, I see from a comment at retraction watch that Michael W. Miller plans a full court press to rehabilitate his image. Online anyway.

Welcome to michaelwmiller.net. According to Network Solutions, it was registered by Reputation Changer on Mar 15, 2012.

Registrant:
Reputation Changer LLC
39 West Gay Street
West Chester, Pennsylvania 31410
United States

Registered through: GoDaddy.com, LLC (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: MICHAELWMILLER.NET
Created on: 15-Mar-12
Expires on: 15-Mar-13
Last Updated on: 20-Mar-12

The ORI finding of misconduct was published in the Federal Register on Feb 27, 2012. So this fraudster immediately used Reputation Changer to do what they do :

ReputationChanger.com specializes in helping people make their mistakes vanish from the eyes of potential clients and employers. Embarrassing arrests and unseemly articles can be pushed off of the front page of Google searches, where they are unlikely to be viewed by the majority of Google users. Because people tend to only look at the first page of results, Google searches can once again reveal the great things you or your company achieved, rather than the negative reviews overzealous and under impressed individuals have posted. People have an array of motivations for posting negative press, but the important question is not why do they post it– you should be asking yourself how to get rid of it.

How do they do it? By building a fawning self-web-presence that says crapola like:
Michael W. Miller Presents Astounding Findings or perhaps Michael W. Miller Publishes Scientific Gold. This latter conveniently omits to mention the two retracted papers that were, of course, not "Gold" but more like "made up crap".

As far as I can tell, every link in the site points to somewhere else on the site. I'm sure this is hot stuff in repairing your Google ranks.

Wait, wait...what's this? I tried to see if his Google presence had been improved and I found another site. michaelwmillerupstate.com was registered....by Reputation Changer .... on Mar 15, 2012. Here's what I learned about the good Professor Miller's attitude toward's research:

But research is not the only component in a successful endeavor. Michael W. Miller understands that documentation—accurate documentation—is pivotal. Without this documentation, research findings could not undergo duplication. All the work that went into a study would prove wasted. This is why Michael W. Miller publishes so many different writings.

It overlooks all the "work" that other people put into trying to replicate Michael W. Miller's faked (and now retracted) research papers. It seems that "accurate" documentation perhaps is in the eye of the beholder? or just a flagrant lie on the part of the Reputation Changer system for rehabilitating the web image?

As his career moves forward, researcher Michael W. Miller will continue to conduct research. Through his writing, Professor Michael W. Miller will share this research with the world. The result, Michael W. Miller hopes, will manifest as improved medical knowledge and techniques.

Really? He's going to continue is he? Can't wait to see what University is willing to hire him.

Okay, what else do you have to offer, Google? OMMFG, ANOTHER ONE!!!! michaelwmillerblog.com was registered....shall we just guess? Yep, by Reputation Changer on Mar 15, 2012.

Wonder how many more of these frigging things are out there?

Ahh, well. Just remember to keep linking to the ORI finding showing that Michael W. Miller faked data. And maybe to the retraction watch blog entry on Michael W. Miller.

__
Added: I'm particularly intrigued by the michaelwmillerupstate one. His place of employment when the fraudulent papers were detected was the State University of New York Upstate Medical University. I wonder how they feel about this use of "upstate"?

Share

24 responses so far

Alcohol research fraudster Michael W. Miller

Mar 03 2012 Published by under NIH funding, Scientific Misconduct

Per ORI, one Michael W Miller, most recently Chair of Neuroscience and Physiology at SUNY Upstate Medical University, is a data faker.

ORI finds that the Respondent engaged in research misconduct by falsifying and/or fabricating data that were included in grant applications R01 AA07568-18, R01 AA07568-18A1, R01 AA006916-25, and P50 AA017823-01 and in the following:

The "following" included some paper retractions detailed over at the RetractionWatch blog.

One of the interesting things is that this guy published in decidedly normal journals. There was something in the ORI finding about a PNAS submission, but that seemed to be the high IF watermark for Miller. I make special note of this since I am one of those fond of pointing out the positive correlation between journal IF and retractions.

You will be unsurprised that my attention is drawn in this case to the grant support. That year -18 grant renewal application mentioned? It got converted into an R37 MERIT (10 yrs of non competing renewals instead of the usual 5) in the A1 version. Which means it was scored very highly, from what I deduce about the R37 process. The P50 is, of course, a Center.

Big monetary commitment for NIAAA and very prestigious for Professor Miller.

Boo, hiss, fraudster bad guy....

Except think about those folks who didn't get something because if this guy. The Chair position was an external hire. The P50 took the place of another one- and it isn't just the PI/PD. Each competing Center that didn't get funded probably also had a handful of Component PIs. Who put in a lot of hard work and had a lot of great science. The R37? Well it probably counts at least double because of the 10 year interval. And of course some other worthy mid-career NIAAA scientist didn't receive this honor for her work.

I'm irritated on behalf of anyone who applied to NIAAA for grant support and didn't get the award during the interval they were supporting this Miller fraudster.

Final note. He was supposedly ratted out by someone in his lab. Since the offense seemed to be making up bar graphs rather than the all-too-typical duplicated gel/blot/image, there really would have been no other way to nail him. So the reviewers really can't be blamed for missing anything.

Share

43 responses so far

Wherein lies the harm of so-called "courtesy" authorships?

Nov 04 2011 Published by under Science Publication, Scientific Misconduct, Scientific Publication, Tribe of Science

The BMJ policy on the criteria for deserving an authorship on a scientific paper raised it's ugly head today on the Twitts.

For additional edification and background, one @mattjhodgkinson provided a link to his editorial and blog post on the topic. You may also wish to review the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors standards.

My take on these standards is two fold.

First, the exclusion of those who "merely" collect data is stupid to me. I'm not going to go into the chapter and verse but in my lab, anyway, there is a LOT of ongoing trouble shooting and refining of the methods in any study. It is very rare that I would have a paper's worth of data generated by my techs or trainees and that they would have zero intellectual contribution. Given this, the asymmetry in the BMJ position is unfair. In essence it permits a lab head to be an author using data which s/he did not collect and maybe could not collect but excludes the technician who didn't happen to contribute to the drafting of the manuscript. That doesn't make sense to me. The paper wouldn't have happened without both of the contributions.

Second, and the real topic for today, is the notion of "courtesy authorships". It is a not infrequent punching bag. What I want to know is, where's the evidence of a problem? What is the nature of the problem? What is going to be solved by this that justifies the denial of credit to the deserving (see above)?

@mattjhodgkinson offered:

Authors - inc. gift authors - take responsibility for papers. The gift may be poisoned.

Yes...but this is the case for any author on a multi-contributor paper. So I'm not seeing where this specifically affects so-called courtesy authors.

How about you Reader? Can you describe for me why gift authors are a systematic problem?

How frequent are genuine, totally noncontributing "gifts"? Are you sure you are not just whinging about the degree of contribution? Have you never had an offhand comment made in a discussion absolutely crystallize your thinking?

Assuming that we are not talking about pushing someone else meaningfully* out of deserved credit, where lies the harm even if it is a total gift?

Who is hurt? How are they damaged?

__
*by pushing them off the paper entirely or out of first-author or last-author position. Adding a 7th in the middle of the authorship list doesn't affect jack squat folks.

Share

40 responses so far

What does a retracted paper mean?

Jun 03 2011 Published by under Conduct of Science, Ethics, Science Publication, Scientific Misconduct

crossposting from Scienceblogs.

I've been having a little Twitt discussion with Retraction Watch honcho @ivanoransky over a recent post in which they discuss whether a failure to replicate a result justifies a retraction.

Now, Ivan Oransky seemed to take great umbrage to my suggestion in a comment that there was dereliction in their duty to science to intentionally conflate a failure to replicate with intentional fraud. Per usual, we boiled it down to a fundamental disagreement over connotation. What it means to the average person to see that a paper is retracted.

I rely upon my usual solution, DearReader. Select all choices that apply when you see a retraction or that you think should induce a retraction.

 

Direct link to the poll in case you can't see it.

My position can be found after the jump.... Continue Reading »

Share

16 responses so far

And the troll shouted "Who's that trip-tropping across MY BRIDGE!??"

Sep 17 2010 Published by under Diversity in Science, NIH Careerism, Postgraduate Training, Scientific Misconduct, Scientific Publication, Uncategorized

Namnezia is sorely provoking YHN.

I do the best imitation of myself

So why is it plagiarism? Because you are copying text of something that already has been published. And since most journals own the copyright to your manuscripts, re-using your own text verbatim is likely a copyright violation. It’s a bit silly, but apparently that’s the way it is and according to the article in The Scientist, papers have been retracted by journals because of this. My approach that I tell people in my lab is that it’s OK to take the old methods and change them around a bit, but that the introduction should be written from scratch. They can read an old introduction and then replicate it by memory, and this is usually enough to make the two texts sufficiently different, but they should never cut and paste text form their old papers.

No, no, NO! This is NOT plagiarism. There is no intent to deceive and academic papers are not supposed to contain lyrical text of overwhelming genius and originality. NOT. The text is there to service understanding the data, how it was collected and to advance the scientific interpretations. Which might be repeated over and over again.

"...which all supports Darwin's conception of the Origin of Species". This is science. We all create unique studies to address issues of common interest. We use common techniques. For common reasons. There are only so may ways to say "dopamine overflow in the nucleus accumbens" for chrissakes! Or to say "the rat presses the lever to get an intravenous infusion of drug".

On Expanding Diversity

For the most part, in these programs the definition of enhancing diversity in sciences and other academic fields means increasing participation of minorities (and women) within the sciences. However, I’ve started to think that this is a somewhat narrow view of what diversity should mean. In my view, the current rationale for providing programs to help minority students is that these students traditionally don’t have access to the same type of educational resources as non-minorities do. This is due in part to the fact that many come from socioeconomically disadvantaged areas which simply do not have the same resources and academic support networks. Yet, there are several other people who also do not have access to these resources because they also come from socioeconomically disadvantaged areas, but just not happen to be from an underrepresented racial or ethnic minority group.

Straw-man. I'm sorry but if your University has not clued into the need to include first-generation college students and other indicators of impoverished background into the diversity effort, it has been living under a policy rock for at least 5-8 years, maybe more.

Take the wording of the NIH program traditionally shorthanded as "Minority Supplements".

Individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds which are defined as:

1. Individuals who come from a family with an annual income below established low-income thresholds. These thresholds are based on family size; published by the U.S. Bureau of the Census; adjusted annually for changes in the Consumer Price Index; and adjusted by the Secretary for use in all health professions programs. The Secretary periodically publishes these income levels at http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/index.shtml . For individuals from low income backgrounds, the institution must be able to demonstrate that such candidates have qualified for Federal disadvantaged assistance or they have received any of the following student loans: Health Professions Student Loans (HPSL), Loans for Disadvantaged Student Program, or they have received scholarships from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under the Scholarship for Individuals with Exceptional Financial Need.

2. Come from a social, cultural, or educational environment such as that found in certain rural or inner-city environments that have demonstrably and recently directly inhibited the individual from obtaining the knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary to develop and participate in a research career. Eligibility related to a disadvantaged background is most applicable to high school and perhaps to undergraduate candidates, but would be more difficult to justify for individuals beyond that level of academic achievement.

That's the 2005 Notice which replaced the older 2001 Notice which did not contain this sort of language and was apparently exclusive to ethnic minorities. So ever since 2005 even the NIH has been on board with this. I am aware of University level revisions of diversity language that date to at least five years before that. The times have changed so people who keep banging on about how this is needed are a bit out of step. If your local University hasn't adapted, it needs to get with the program pronto.

Given my understanding of this change in the reality of diversity efforts in modern academia, it rings quite jarringly in my ears to bang on with the "what about the poor white folks" line. That, my friend, is falling right into anti-diversity talking points. Are you sure you want to align yourself with those folks?
Grrr, Namnezia-Goat Gruff. Grr.

Share

34 responses so far

The UWisc misconduct case, revisited.

Aug 30 2010 Published by under Mentoring, NIH Careerism, Postdoctoral Training, Postgraduate Training, Scientific Misconduct

A Finding of Misconduct Notice in the NIH Guide today (NOT-OD-10-130) holds more than the usual interest, Dear Reader.

Elizabeth Goodwin, PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison: Based on the report of an investigation conducted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-M) and additional analysis conducted by ORI in its oversight review, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) found that Elizabeth Goodwin, PhD, former associate professor of genetics and medical genetics, UW-M, engaged in scientific misconduct while her research was supported by National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), National Institutes of Health (NIH), grants R01 GM051836 and R01 GM073183. PHS found that the Respondent engaged in misconduct in science by falsifying and fabricating data that she included in grant applications 2 R01 GM051836-13 and 1 R01 GM073183-01.

The recent Marc Hauser misconduct case has been widely reported to have depended on or been triggered by whistleblowers from within his own lab. Comments in several places have praised the laboratory members for their bravery and willingness to take the inevitable career hit (possibly irrecoverable hit) in the service of correcting the scientific record.

Remember the profile in Science a number of years ago which described a group of trainees who blew the whistle on Elizabeth B. Goodwin?

Chantal Ly, 32, had already waded through 7 years of a Ph.D. program at the University of Wisconsin (UW), Madison. Turning in her mentor, Ly was certain, meant that "something bad was going to happen to the lab." Another of the six students felt that their adviser, geneticist Elizabeth Goodwin, deserved a second chance and wasn't certain the university would provide it. A third was unable for weeks to believe Goodwin had done anything wrong and was so distressed by the possibility that she refused to examine available evidence.

Two days before winter break, as the moral compass of all six swung in the same direction, they shared their concerns with a university administrator. In late May, a UW investigation reported data falsification in Goodwin's past grant applications and raised questions about some of her papers. The case has since been referred to the federal Office of Research Integrity (ORI) in Washington, D.C. Goodwin, maintaining her innocence, resigned from the university at the end of February.

2006. My how time has flown. There was a brief note from someone in the student's department indicating that other laboratories had helped them to bring at least one paper to press.

Most noteworthy are the young scientists who worked so hard on the paper at early stages of their careers--because they are victims of this unfortunate situation and are doubly victimized if the conclusion the scientific community reaches is that this paper has no merit. Although the scientific results are the most important component of the vindication of the work, I feel strongly that we owe it to our young scientists to draw attention to the verification.

Hmm, that appears to be the last paper published by O. Lakiza.

An update, which I missed, in Science from June of this year gave us a preview of the Notice.

Four years after a group of graduate students faced the agonizing experience of turning in their mentor for apparently falsifying scientific data, she has pleaded guilty to a criminal charge in the case. Elizabeth Goodwin, who was a biologist at the University of Wisconsin (UW), Madison, until resigning in February 2006, admitted "that she included manipulated data" in a grant progress report "to convince reviewers that more scientific progress had been made with her research than was actually the case,"

it also says this about the fate of the trainees.

But the outcome for several students, who were told they had to essentially start over, was unenviable. One, Chantal Ly, had gone through 7 years of graduate school and was told that much of her work was not useable and that she had to start a new project for her Ph.D. (The reason wasn't necessarily because of falsified data but rather, Ly and the others thought, because Goodwin stuck by results that were questionable.) Along with two of the others, she quit graduate school. Allen moved to a school in Colorado. Just two students chose to stay at UW.

One hopes the outcome is slightly better for the Hauser trainees...

Another interesting thing that popped up in the Hauser affair was the mention of involvement from the US Attorney's office. Maybe I'm so focused on the misconduct that I usually ignore any mention of legal penalties. But the Science bit on Goodwin emphasizes that the Department of Justice press release (pdf) indicates a $50,000 fine to the HHS has already been issued. Furthermore:

Goodwin will be sentenced on 3 September on the charge of making false statements and faces up to 1 year in jail and a $100,000 fine.

Again, I can't recall seeing these before but I may just have missed it. I'm wondering if this represents a new stance in these prosecutions, or perhaps if the PIs in question were just so egregious in their misconduct and obstinate in their defense that the BigGuns were brought to bear.

Share

7 responses so far

On negative and positive data fakery

Aug 22 2010 Published by under Ethics, Science Ethics, Scientific Misconduct

A comment over at the Sb blog raises an important point in the Marc Hauser misconduct debacle. Allison wrote:

Um, it would totally suck to be the poor grad student /post doc IN HIS LAB!!!!

He's RUINED them. None of what they thought was true was true; every time they had an experiment that didn't work, they probably junked it, or got terribly discouraged.

This is relevant to the accusation published in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

the experiment was a bust.

But Mr. (sic) Hauser's coding showed something else entirely: He found that the monkeys did notice the change in pattern—and, according to his numbers, the results were statistically significant. If his coding was right, the experiment was a big success.

The second research assistant was bothered by the discrepancy. How could two researchers watching the same videotapes arrive at such different conclusions? He suggested to Mr. Hauser that a third researcher should code the results. In an e-mail message to Mr. Hauser, a copy of which was provided to The Chronicle, the research assistant who analyzed the numbers explained his concern. "I don't feel comfortable analyzing results/publishing data with that kind of skew until we can verify that with a third coder," he wrote.

A graduate student agreed with the research assistant and joined him in pressing Mr. Hauser to allow the results to be checked, the document given to The Chronicle indicates. But Mr. Hauser resisted, repeatedly arguing against having a third researcher code the videotapes and writing that they should simply go with the data as he had already coded it.

So far as we've been able to tell from various reports, the misconduct charges are related to making up positive results. This is common...it sounds quite similar to a whole lot of other scientific misconduct cases. Making up "findings" which are in fact not supported by a positive experimental result.

The point about graduate students and postdocs that Allison raised, however, push me in another direction. What about when a PI sits on, or disparages, perfectly good data because it does not agree with his or her pet hypothesis? "Are you sure?", the PI asks, "Maybe you better repeat it a few more times...and change the buffer concentrations to this while you are at it, I remember from my days at the bench 20 yrs ago that this works better". For video coding of a behavioral observations study, well, there are all kinds of objections to be raised. Starting with the design, moving on to the data collection phase (there is next to nothing that is totally consistent and repeatable in a working animal research vivarium across many days or months) and ending with the data analysis.

Pretty easy to question the results of the new trainee and claim that "Well, Dr. Joe Blow, our last post-doc didn't have any trouble with the model, perhaps you did something wrong".

Is this misconduct? The scientist usually has plenty of work that could have ended up published, but circumstances have decided otherwise. Maybe it just isn't that exciting. Maybe the project got partially scooped and the lab abandoned a half a paper's worth of work. Perhaps the results are just odd, the scientist doesn't know what to make of it and cannot sustain the effort to run eight more control studies that are needed to make sense of it.

None of this is misconduct in my view. This is the life of a scientist who has limited time and resources and is looking to publish something that is exciting and cool instead of something that appears to be pedestrian or derivative.

I think it would be pretty hard to make a misconduct case over quashing experiments. Much easier to make the case over positive fraud than it is to make the case over negative fraud.

As you know, this is something that regulatory authorities are trying to address with human clinical trials by requiring the formal recording of each one. Might it bring nonclinical research to a crashing halt if every study had to be reported/recorded in some formal way for public access? Even if this amounted to making available lab books and raw, unanalyzed data I can see where this would have a horrible effect on the conduct of research. And really, the very rarity of misconduct does not justify such procedures. But I do wonder if University committees tasked with investigation fraud even bother to consider the negative side of the equation.

I wonder if anyone would ever be convicted of fraud for not publishing a study.

Share

14 responses so far

Harvard announces Hauser was found guilty of misconduct, NIH ORI notified

Aug 20 2010 Published by under Cognition, Conduct of Science, NIH, NSF, Science Ethics, Scientific Misconduct

ScienceInsider has published a letter from Harvard Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Michael Smith, addressed to his faculty.

it is with great sadness that I confirm that Professor Marc Hauser was found solely responsible, after a thorough investigation by a faculty investigating committee, for eight instances of scientific misconduct under FAS [Faculty of Arts and Sciences] standards.

The dean notes that their internal inquiry is over but that there are ongoing investigations from the NIH and NSF. So my curiosity turns to Hauser's NIH support- I took a little stroll over to RePORTER.

From 1997 to 2009 there are nine projects listed under the P51RR000168 award which is the backbone funding for the New England Primate Research Center, one of the few places in which the highly endangered cotton top tamarin is maintained for research purposes. The majority of the projects are titled "CONCEPTUAL KNOWLEDGE AND PERCEPTION IN TAMARINS". RePORTER is new and the prior system, CRISP, did not link the amounts but you can tell from the most recent two years that these are small projects amounting to $50-60K.

Hauser appears to have only had a single R01 "Mechanisms of Vocal Communication" (2003-2006).

Of course we do not know how many applications he may have submitted that were not selected for funding and, of course, ORI considers applications that have been submitted when judging misconduct and fraud, not just the funded ones. One of the papers that has been retracted was published in 2002 so the timing is certainly such that there could have been bad data included in the application.

The P51 awards offer a slight twist. I'm not totally familiar with the system but it would not surprise me if this backbone award to the Center, reviewed every 5 years, only specified a process by which smaller research grants would be selected by a non-NIH peer review process. Perhaps it is splitting hairs but it is possible that Hauser's subprojects were not reviewed by the NIH. There may be some loopholes here.

Wandering over to NSF's Fastlane search I located 10 projects on which Hauser was PI or Co-PI. This is where his big funding has been coming from, apparently. So yup, I bet NSF will have some work to do in evaluating his applications to them as well.

This announcement from the Harvard Dean is just the beginning.

Share

9 responses so far

How To Read A Retraction, Gazfuckbajillion!!11!

Aug 04 2010 Published by under Ethics, Science Ethics, Scientific Misconduct

Nice one in PNAS today:

Retraction for “HOS10 encodes an R2R3-type MYB transcription factor essential for cold acclimation in plants” by Jianhua Zhu, Paul E. Verslues, Xianwu Zheng, Byeong-ha Lee, Xiangqiang Zhan, Yuzuki Manabe, Irina Sokolchik, Yanmei Zhu, Chun-Hai Dong, Jian-Kang Zhu, Paul M. Hasegawa, and Ray A. Bressan, which appeared in issue 28, July 12, 2005, of Proc Natl Acad Sci USA (102:9966–9971; first published online July 1, 2005; 10.1073/pnas.0503960102).

The authors wish to note the following: “The locus AT1g35515 that was claimed to be responsible for the cold sensitive phenotype of the HOS10 mutant was misidentified. The likely cause of the error was an inaccurate tail PCR product coupled with the ability of HOS10 mutants to spontaneously revert to wild type, appearing as complemented phenotypes. The SALK alleles of AT1g35515 in ecotype Columbia could not be confirmed by the more reliable necrosis assay. Therefore, the locus responsible for the HOS10 phenotypes reported in ecotype C24 remains unknown. The other data reported were confirmed with the exception of altered expression of AT1g35515, which appears reduced but not to the extent shown in Zhu et al. The authors regrettably retract the article.” [Emphasis added]

Sounds like these fuckers were--at best--too happy to see the complementation support their hypothesis, and thus didn't do appropriate fucken controls, which would have revealed that the rate of complementation was exactly the same as the rate of spontaneous reversion. Or worse, there was some cherry picking of data going on. Also, it is pretty suspicious that--in addition to the bogus complementation data--there was also, coincidentally, altered expression of the same locus that was not confirmable after publication. Again, sounds like some cherry picking may have been going on.

Worst case scenario, all this shit was totally cherry picked data within the normal range of variability and ginned up into a totally fake fucken story.

Share

6 responses so far

Older posts »

Bad Behavior has blocked 1168 access attempts in the last 7 days.