From fabricated research to paid authorships and citations, organized scientific fraud is on the rise, according to a new Northwestern Unive
From fabricated research to paid authorships and citations, organized scientific fraud is on the rise, according to a new Northwestern University study.
By combining large-scale data analysis of scientific literature with case studies, the researchers led a deep investigation into scientific fraud. Although concerns around scientific misconduct typically focus on lone individuals, the Northwestern study instead uncovered sophisticated global networks of individuals and entities, which systematically work together to undermine the integrity of academic publishing.
The Victor Ninov situation is one of my favourite cases of scientific fraud because it's rare to see so straightforward an example of someone being brought low by their own hubris.
Like, okay, faking the synthesis of a previously unobserved element: it's one of the few varieties of scientific fraud that actually has a clear gameplan for getting away with it. The physical properties of unobserved elements are, in principle, predictable, and there are only so many ways to go about synthesising them. If you do your homework, it's not outside the realm of possibility that your claimed results will end up being at least mostly consistent with the results of subsequent legitimate efforts to synthesise that element, and any minor discrepancies will end up being dismissed as statistical anomalies and/or the product of sloppy experimental design. It's by no means an easy game to play, but it's a game you can conceivably win.
And Victor Ninov did it. He rolled the dice and he won – twice. His fabricated results for elements 110 and 112 were corroborated by later work, and nobody noticed that his actual data was a crock of shit. He got away with it as cleanly as he could have hoped. It was only the third time he tried it, with element 118, that he biffed it and claimed results which nobody could replicate, and this is the only reason his earlier frauds were discovered. If he'd quit while he was ahead, it's likely the first two incidents never would have come to light.
Like, they say the third time's the charm, and buddy here learned the hard way that sometimes, the opposite also holds true.
thought #2: I don't think AI is going to create a uniquely bad atmosphere for fraud in academic articles, because we've already established the incentives and conditions for fraud to be a substantial problem in the first place
most people heard about the foundational Alzheimer's research that was found to be fabricated, and that was probably the most high profile case in recent years
institutions basically lock PI's in an eternal grant-writing grind where they have to produce interesting, relevant, and novel research continually in order for them and everyone under them to keep their jobs. it de-incentivizes any type of research that seeks to verify or reproduce previous studies (journals generally won't publish this) and if you end up NOT finding something ground-breaking, then it's seen as a scientitic failure rather than a naturally possible outcome of investigating the world, in which things sometimes aren't interesting
this obviously lays incentives for fudging data in the whole field of science itself, but there's been high amount of fraud coming from institutions in china which is why I was disappointed but not especially surprised by this
I'm prefacing this by saying that scientists based in china have been asking for solutions to this and rightly pointing the blame to the uniquely weird government funding scheme as the cause. I'm not going to get too much into it, but there have been issues with fake paper mills for years, and "citation circles" (iirc you can get a cash kickback for how many times you're cited) of people agreeing to cite each other's irrelevant papers.
it's gotten to the point where, and this is really bad, PI's over here will ignore papers that come from china-based institutions under the presumption that the data is unreliable.
excerpt from the article:
For example, in 2017, Tumor Biology published by Springer retracted 107 papers, all of which are by Chinese authors, because authors provided made-up contact information of potential reviewers, and the review processes ended up being manipulated by third-party agencies that make profit from “faking” the review processes (Chen, 2017). Also, certain journals have in recent years witnessed a concentration of works by authors from China. We suspect that this is because of closely knit networks of editors, reviewers and authors, which results in superficial peer-review, easy acceptance, and deliberate self-citing from the same journals to boost impact factors (see Guglielmi, 2019 for similar patterns of behaviors occurring to Italian scientists).
re: the last sentence, it does happen to a lesser degree elsewhere, which is why this is a field-wide problem
the chinese government has I think in recent years realized that the way everything is structured is de-legitimizing their research, and there have been huge efforts to crack down on fraud and basically place sanctions on these scientists. but that's sort of just handling the symptoms and not the cause - I'm not sure how far along they are on rectifying the index by which they ascribe merit and funding potential to PI's (we do this in other ways too) but yeah, the whole system of academia itself has to change.
What NYT reported about Johanna Olson-Kennedy sitting on her null findings on puberty blockers is but one such story in a field in which man
By: Benjamin Ryan
Published: Oct 24, 2024
[ That’s a quote from a talk that pediatric gender medicine doctor Johanna Olson-Kennedy gave in which she was dismissing concerns about young people potentially regretting getting double mastectomies for a gender transition. ]
Some of the biggest names in the pediatric gender medicine field are part of an entrenched global trend in which they prioritize the transgender advocacy mission over honest and direct science. They hide inconvenient research findings. And they seek to prevent other researchers from even asking questions that might yield inconvenient answers. Supporting them is a cabal of activists and LGBTQ nonprofits standing at the ready to bully and cancel any scientists or journalists who might bring to light any of the more questionable aspects of pediatric gender medicine.
This pattern is not just limited to Children’s Hospital Los Angeles’ Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy. If you haven’t already heard, according to reporting in The New York Times, this major leader in the pediatric gender medicine field has been sitting on null findings from her National Institutes of Health–funded study of puberty blockers for gender dysphoric children because, she said, publishing them would prove politically inexpedient. (I wrote about an undercover video of her talking about mastectomies here.)
Where have we heard this story before?
Let’s take a trip across the pond to the British National Health Service’s now-shuttered pediatric gender clinic, GIDS. (I encourage you to read all about this troubled clinic in Hannah Barnes’ book Time to Think. Make sure to get the new 2024 U.S. paperback, which has a vital new epilogue.) After it was founded in 2011, GIDS’s leaders sought to recreate the findings of the original Dutch protocol that was first cultivated in the mid-1990s and that ultimately gave rise to the global pediatric gender-transition treatment movement during the 2000s and 2010s.
But the British team failed. They did not find a substantial benefit from providing puberty blockers to gender dysphoric children by following the Dutch protocol. So did these researchers alert the world to their troublesome findings? Did they send a word of caution to a field that by then was circumnavigating the globe, setting up what would soon be hundreds of pediatric gender-clinic outposts?
No, they kept their failure secret.
It wasn’t until Oxford sociologist Michael Biggs became suspicious and ultimately rooted out the truth that the GIDS clinicians finally owned up and published their failed study.
Also in England, the NHS’s Cass Review, which was published in April after a four-year effort to assess pediatric gender medicine at home and worldwide, sought to assess the long-term outcomes of the wider population of former GIDS patients. But the adult NHS gender clinics refused to share their de-identified data on those now-adult patients, providing only specious reasons for their refusal.
Now it seems as if the NHS will ultimately force them to do so. But for now, the world is poorer for not having that data. Because this entire field is compromised by a woeful lack of long-term data, in particular about the more recent cohorts of gender-dysphoric adolescents who have undergone gender-transition treatment, and whose profiles are vastly different from those kids who entered the original Dutch study.
After the Cass Review came out, activists went into overdrive to tell wild falsehoods about it, as I reported at the time. Hilary Cass, the pediatrician lead author of the report, was appalled, and told a reporter that those activists were harming children.
A flood of false claims about England's Cass Review has coursed across social media and the press and among activists and academics. If only
Even when fact checked, Erin Reed, who has a popular Substack and X account, has repeatedly made demonstrably false claims about England's C
There are also plenty of examples of academics being discouraged from even asking research questions that might lead to an answer that would prove inconvenient for the pediatric gender medicine movement. Take, for example, the trio starting a long-term study to assess whether rapid-onset gender dysphoria is a true phenomenon. These three seasoned investigators have had to self-fund their research and are subject to persistent derision and scorn by trans activists for daring to ask difficult questions about this medical field and about the reasons for the recent surge in trans identification in natal girl adolescents in particular.
Branded as gender heretics by the pediatric gender-medicine establishment and transgender-rights activists, Michael Bailey, Dr. Lisa Littman
One of those three investigators, physician-researcher Dr. Lisa Littman, spoke to me for my article on The Trans Tipping Point in the New York Post. She said of the activists who attack her: “It’s as if their loyalty is to the transition interventions and not to the long-term health and well-being of transgender-identified young people.”
Here’s another example. When UCL neuropsychologist Sallie Baxendale sought to obtain peer review for her review paper about what scientists know—and don’t know—about the neuropsychiatric impacts of puberty blockers, here was what happened, according to what she wrote in Unherd:
None of the reviewers identified any studies that I had missed that demonstrated safe and reversible impacts of puberty blockers on cognitive development, or presented any evidence contrary to my conclusions that the work just hasn’t been done. However, one suggested the evidence may be out there, it just hadn’t been published. They suggested that I trawl through non-peer reviewed conference presentations to look for unpublished studies that might tell a more positive story. The reviewer appeared to be under the naïve apprehension that studies proving that puberty blockers were safe and effective would have difficulty being published. The very low quality of studies in this field, and the positive spin on any results reported by gender clinicians suggest that this is unlikely to be the case.
Another reviewer expressed concerns that publishing the conclusions from these studies risked stigmatising an already stigmatised group. A third suggested that I should focus on the positive things that puberty blockers could do, while a fourth suggested there was no point in publishing a review when there wasn’t enough literature to review. Another sought to diminish an entire field of neuroscience that has established puberty as a critical period of brain development as “my view”.
Dr. Baxendale ultimately published her vital review paper, which concluded: “Critical questions remain unanswered regarding the nature, extent and permanence of any arrested development of cognitive function associated with puberty blockers. The impact of puberal suppression on measures of neuropsychological function is an urgent research priority.”
Meanwhile, the American Academy of Pediatrics has assured the public in its 2018 policy statement on the gender-affirming care method that puberty blockers are “reversible.” Twenty Republican attorneys general recently sent a stern, probing letter to the AAP, suggesting that that claim, which they assert is false, violates consumer protection laws. A lawsuit is likely imminent. The AAP is already being sued by a detransitioner over the statement. The original legal complaint lambasts the AAP for never responding to Canadian sex researcher James Cantor’s scathing fact check and critique he published of the policy statement in 2019.
Personally, I don’t think the claim that puberty blockers are reversible is definitively false, given what science is able to tell us at this time. But on the flip side, we also know that it is not definitely true either. As Dr. Baxendale’s paper demonstrates, there remain too many substantive and unanswered questions about how using drugs that throw vital human development processes out of synch might impact a young person, possibly for the rest of their lives.
The AAP announced in August 2023 that it was going to conduct a systematic literature review of the evidence behind pediatric gender medicine—and then never said another word about it. The authors of such reviews are expected to publish their methodology in advance, and the there is no sign that the AAP has done so.
Then there’s the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH, which as the Alabama attorney general’s subpoenas have revealed and Jesse Singal reported for The Economist in June, suppressed systematic literature reviews about this field that it commissioned from Johns Hopkins. And after a Biden Health official and the AAP strong armed WPATH into removing the age restrictions on gender-transition treatment and surgeries in the update to its trans-care guidelines in 2022, WPATH president Dr. Marci Bowers coordinated for the leadership to lie about why they had done so. All of this is detailed in scathing, unsparing detail in the Alabama AG’s amicus brief to the Supreme Court, which argues that the court should uphold Tennessee’s law banning pediatric gender-transition treatment.
And in the wake of today’s news about Dr. Olson-Kennedy, we have an example of yet another front in this battle over pediatric medicine: the sheer denial and deflection coming from transgender activist Ari Drennen of Media Matters and the LGBTQ “media watchdog” GLAAD. As you can see from the tweet below, all they could do in the face of such a damning report was deflect.
This makes me wonder: What exactly is GLAAD’s endgame? This is the same nonprofit that had the temerity to condescend to the New York Times last year and falsely claim that the “science is settled” on pediatric medicine with their protest truck they drove around the Times building in Midtown Manhattan.
The science is, of course, not settled. No science is. It is always evolving, in particular in this tempestuous and troubled field of pediatric gender medicine. And there are many people in this wider movement who are seeking to suppress the full, ever-changing truth from coming to light.
At the center of this story is a burgeoning population of very troubled children. They are owed the best science possible. They are owed the truth, whatever that might be.
==
I previously posted about Olsen-Kennedy's tone-deaf endorsement of medical mutilation.
Imagine a medical study of a cancer treatment that was found to be ineffective, which was then covered up. Why would a report about that coverup need to quote people who had had cancer? These fanatics think we're stupid.
People wonder why the trust in our institutions is so low. It's because they keep producing this kind of fraud, which isn't science any more than Intelligent Design is science.
When the devoutly Christian John Templeton Foundation funded a study on intercessory prayer, they were forced to publish it, even though it found that it was ineffective. Or worse.
Intercessory prayer is widely believed to influence recovery from illness, but claims of benefits are not supported by well-controlled clini
Conclusions
Intercessory prayer itself had no effect on complication-free recovery from CABG, but certainty of receiving intercessory prayer was associated with a higher incidence of complications.
These genderists are doing religious proselytization.
bobbibroccoli on youtube does a lot of very good videos about scientific fraud - mostly focused on physics/chemistry, the nuclear physics area, but his most recent one was about faked human cloning. very good presentation and a very good look at the ethics and context of these situations as well.
Nice! I took science ethics last year, so that’s why this stuff is in the forefront of my brain
My “favorite” case of fraud (ie the one I find most entertaining) remains Spidergate
Scienfitic fraud: The widely publicized alleged discovery of a new species of crocodile in southern New Guinea this week has been exposed as unlawful Taxonomic Vandalism. The authors simply lifted and stole the findings from another scientists paper published seven years earlier! Crocodylus halli, Murray et al. 2019 had in fact already been named Crocodylus adelynhoserae Hoser, 2012
Scientific fraud: The widely publicized alleged discovery of a new species of crocodile in southern New Guinea this week has been exposed as unlawful Taxonomic Vandalism. The authors simply lifted and stole the findings from another scientists paper published seven years earlier! Crocodylus halli, Murray et al. 2019 had in fact already been named Crocodylus adelynhoserae Hoser, 2012
“People Who Eat Eggs Also Ate a Vegetable Once, I Swear”
This Australian, government-supported pamphlet is the most absurd thing you’ll see all week. If anyone wants to know details about the study they are sourcing, here's a quick summary: they didn't do a real, formal, peer reviewed study. They simply did not.
They collected data from an online survey in which people SELF-reported their average diet and how healthy they BELIEVE themselves to be. They recorded that Australian adults eat approximately 5-6 eggs a week. A high enough percentage of people who recorded close to the average egg consumption said they also eat fruits and vegetables.
The CSIRO writes that people who consume a high number of eggs also happen to (report themselves as) eating more vegetables and fruits than those who ate fewer eggs. They concluded that people who eat lots of eggs also, coincidentally, eat actually healthy foods and have a varied diet OTHER than their egg consumption. Literally saying "It's not actually the eggs that are healthy, it's the non-egg food they're eating."
Why are their statements bullshit? Not just because this is a self-reported survey in which people were asked to give their own opinion about their health, instead of using ANY medical records of ANY person involved, but because they're saying eggs are healthy when they really just mean that diets high in vegetables and fruit are healthy. Their fucked up thinking is "if we can say people who eat lots of eggs also eat lots of fruits and vegetables, we can say eating eggs is healthy because eating fruits and vegetables is healthy." What the study finds is that people who tend to eat more food, and less processed food, happen to just eat more on average than people who eat less food, with a higher percent of that food processed.
TL;DR - Actual findings of the study are literally just "people who eat more get more servings of food groups." People who eat more, eat more. It’s no surprise that the exact same study says, verbatim, “it is estimated that half the sample is overweight or obese (50.2%)”, and yet their conclusion is “fruits and vegetable consumption is linked to eating eggs” and not “obesity is linked to eating eggs”. It is the dumbest, least scientific piece of garbage passed off as "science" I've ever seen.
The same study could have simply encouraged people to eat a diet high in fruits and vegetables, but that wouldn’t sell their sponsors’ products.
