LOL, and you haven't even mentioned the vegan unscientific nonsense which is comming from the "Harward Medical School"'s nutritional epidemiologists...
It's amazing that it isn't. If your doctor lied to you knowingly and gave you the wrong treatment because they stood to profit from it and you died they'd likely be thrown in jail for murder. For some unknown reason when a conman publishes and pushes a non-cure that harms people's health and can result in serious injury or death they don't get the same treatment. For some reason that's viewed as being "just not as bad" by society.
As a recent PhD graduate from an Ivy League, I gotta say that the academic research system is just corrupted. Finding answers to how the natural world works or understanding the limits of so-called applied science are nowhere near as important to the modern day research group as is the publication of papers or the award of research grants, even for projects that are doomed to fail. Wait until you find out that the same research group is often unable to replicate its own results… It’s very sad, but I don’t see it changing anytime soon.
This is what happens when you have unqualified people doing research. If you look at the amount of papers published since December in cancer research, you're going to see a spike of papers being published in comparison to the past. Literally stole my research and then they have the nerve to put "for researchers and Healthcare workers" in the journals I accessed. I read thousands of studies and that is how they repay me. They have no idea what they are doing. No integrity. They never put in the work. Utter delusion! They really punish you for trying to make a difference and save lives because that is how they make their money and I did it for free! Crazy stuff.
Academia is corrupt to the core. They have abandoned the pursuit of knowledge and now only care about power and coercive control. If these criminals do not go to prison then expect public trust to disappear.
I’m currently a postdoc at one of the Harvard-affiliated institutions and I do cancer research. Curiously, one of my housemates is a grad student at Khalid’s lab. If there’s one thing that being a scientist has taught me it is to identify patterns. And in this specific subject (scientific fraud), one of the most recurrent themes is working for a toxic boss. But let’s get to the root of the problem. This whole Harvard publications scandal is a byproduct of how research is funded. It all starts with the asshole principal investigator putting pressure on their students to deliver these megalomaniac high-impact papers because that will bring funding to the lab. And they *have to* keep winning these grants, otherwise they won’t be able to spend thousands and thousands of dollars on fancy experiments such that they can publish more high-impact papers, and get more funding. It’s a vicious cycle, and this has nothing to do with our endless curiosity to understand how nature works anymore, as other people have stated in this comment section. Modern science is just another cog in the capitalist engine, so it’s almost impossible to “fix the system”. What I believe can work as a solution is changing the way science is funded. Instead of giving grants to researchers who publish hundreds of papers every year, funding agencies should be giving money to groups that not only do innovative research but also publish highly reproducible data. If you’re proposing groundbreaking hypotheses but your previous Nature/Cell/Science papers cannot be replicated, then you’re out. Not only that, but a proper investigation should be followed, and if fraud is proven these PIs should be banned from asking for funding. I mean, if you (the government) are going to give away millions and millions of dollars to develop science, why not create some sort of agency that tests the reproducibility of published data? What is the point of making fancy science if the experiments only work in the hands of the paper's first author? What would happen then is that we scientists would have to slow down and do careful and well-documented science, instead of this shit show that we keep seeing, not only at Harvard but everywhere. I wonder how much of all the published data we can truly believe. I’m afraid that if I find out the actual number, I might just give up science
Totally agree!! the biggest issue with research is the pressure of publication. the institutions do not care if the work produced was of quality standard as long as there are publications. Especially when you go out and enter the job market for academia, your worth is pretty much analysed based on the number of papers you published.
Just be careful of blaming capitalism, it's like saying the problem with food poisoning is the food. When it is obvious the food has been corrupted in some way, question is, by what?
@studiouskid1528correction: I apologize Studiouskid, taking a second look at your comment I see now you mentioned greed as an example, rather than refiring to capitalism itself. I will correct my comment in the manner I ought to have responded. Indeed, the core of capitalism is fair trade, both parties should be happy and get greater value from the trade. Greed like may other things that corrupts the process, is a pollutant. I also believe a lust for prestige is also to blame for the curruption.
It's odd to blame capitalism for the misaligned incentives you describe. Perhaps the issue relates to the fact that a main funder of research in the US is the government. That doesn't sound like a capitalism problem at all. Having said that, you're spot on that this kind of malpractice should attract severe consequences.
If you think about it these scandals out of Harvard are actually excellent in helping us to dismantle the idea that this institution has any sort of legitimacy that supersedes other academic institutions because of its name and perceived status. In short can't say I don't like.
Academics don't get starry eyed over institutions like that, it's all about individual researchers. It just so happens that schools like Harvard have the money and access to resources to attract some of the best.
@@cooseev i was a little bit starry eyed until i started working here and realized my public school degrees prepared me just fine. Harvard just has a fuckton of money and people can get away with pushing boundaries because of it. Most good researchers don't where you went to school, but theres still plenty who will prioritize pedigree when deciding between two people. Kinda silly now that I've seen behind the curtain a bit.
@@mariabartovthe reason why it needs to be dismantled is because it effects the amount of money other schools get. If two equally talented researchers apply for grant funding for a research project, there's going to be a bias towards the one affiliated with the more prestigious university. Wealth begets wealth and the social capital that comes with associating with these institutions puts many people at an unfair advantage.
As a former CS prof who was asked to peer review articles for publication, I didn't last long because I was honest about the trash I was asked to review. And the vast majority was trash - statistics didn't make sense, papers cited didn't say what they said it did, etc. That wasn't what the publication wanted. So, after two years I was not asked again. Publish or perish has caused endemic fraud.
Who were your superiors during this time? I'm curious to know if there are real scientists involved in the publication, or just writers and business people
And there is me ... self taught and reading these papers like ... WTF ? The graphs make no sense, the analysis results doesn't understand it's own figures and just repeats the data without knowing if it's significant, or even less vs more. THen compare it with older papers and everything is organized ... oh also science papers used to be longer than a page. They shrunk from 10-15 pages down to 5 paragraphs ...
@@orangesolarflare4228 My superiors? My dean? He had nothing to do with it. That's not how peer review works. PR happens when people in the field are contacted to review the work of "peers". None of the papers I reviewed were from my university or from anyone I knew.
Oh man. I'm sitting here, writing my little medical dissertation, wondering whether that comparatively simple thing I've done is even worthy of publication... but then I see this and at the very least I have the consolation that all my data is mine and real.
As a medical journal reviewer, if the research is honest and medically credible I will support it with a detailed critique and suggestions for revisions. If you provide just one useful BIT of information it is useful to us all. See my post above. This is what I was advised when I asked "What is good or useful research " 1988
@@charlesdarwin5185Oh, Darwin's paper? The one that's been passed around like a bad penny? They've been tweaking it every which way but loose. Why let go of it when it's so convenient for justifying their naughty ways?
Weird, it's almost like having extremely high pressure to publish positive results in high-impact journals encourages people to cut corners or fudge numbers to get positive results when things aren't going their way
Always true, even before journals really existed and you'd have to publish your own book and hope people read it. It's just systematic now which bakes the fraud into it all.
true but that's where we as humans need to step up and speak out. everyone knows society is terrible right now and it's bc of TONS of situations like this happening in every aspect of our lives. if someone's throwing money at you does that mean you take it even if you know you don't deserve it??? these people are capable of NOT colluding with capital business interests but they CHOOSE to do it. like I get your point and it is true but you're acting like people have no choice but to act this way. this is a level of planning and fraud that is beyond negligence. it's BELLIGERENT
it's the lack of action that kills me, in high school if I used a sentence from something else, I could be expelled, and they were flat out faking and coping all that?
I remember trying to replicate the results of a psychiatric paper whilst in my 3rd year of university and i could for the life of me not figure out how they got the results that they did, especially since their paper was peer-reviewed.This makes me think that data falsification might be much more rampant in academia then i previously thought.
Not really. This was fake research, but it's not that common. A LOT of research gets checked by others. The problem with something as complicated as the human brain, is when you do a study, you're supposed to make sure everything is the same. No two people are the same, not even identical twins have exactly the same DNA..... The human brain is literally the most complicated thing science knows of. If you really studied that, I shouldn't have to explain it out for you to understand the problem.....
Same, last year as a CS PhD student step one was to replicate and step two was to improve on another labs published results. Following their steps to the letter got absolutely no useful results and I am certain they made it up.
@@rafaelthetoaster7292 "improve on another's lab results" improve how? Does improving mean making/including measurements that further confirm the end results? That's not science, that's scientism. It sounds like just trying to find out what else you can correlate to affirm the conclusion you already have, that is not science. You can't "improve on another's lab results", those results are the results. You can improve the methodology, but you can't improve the results, that's a bunch of garbage y'all are doing if that's what is being done.
If you would believe it educated professionals actually matter more than regular people on the street. These people will never see the inside of a prison cell. They will be given a slap on the wrist and go back to the same work they were doing before.
Why should it just be them that suffers? The entire point of science is that it is verifiable. Every scientist that could have verified these results and didn’t should have their credentials revoked and put in prison for life.
"Research is based on prior research" Many times, reasearch is based on "scientific" dogmas and is meant to confirm these dogmas even if these are completely false (e.g. the nonscientific vegan propaganda and the notion that plants are "healthy"...)
@@erkinalp I'm sure Claudine Gay learned her lesson; a slap on the wrist for the president, for conduct that would get any student expelled from her school in a heartbeat.
Literally the entire international financial system is a criminal enterprise and if only the public knew exactly what was going on heads would roll in quantities that made the french revolution look like the medalist podium in a "don't lose your head" competition
Harvard University wanted my blood for erythromelalgia research. I would have had to pay for the blood drawn and they only offered to “repay” the cost for it if I did pay. Harvard received 505 million in donations in 2022. The cost of my blood being drawn was 150. Cheapskates wouldn’t give me 150 to pay for the blood drawn. Even with my rare condition with even rarer age and gender circumstances they put money before everything.
as a biomedical engineer, I read through the main paper in question and I am left feeling confused right from the abstract. in my opinion, not only are there obvious instances of data fraud in the paper, the entire premise is bizarre and conflicting. applying a hydrogel to a cancerous tumor is not a new idea, however, it is a difficult one. it seems that the suggestion is that a surgeon is to perform open brain surgery to apply a hydrogel to a brain tumor, basically. if you're already doing open brain surgery, you would surgically remove the majority of the cancer cells that you can perceive. so I guess the idea is to then apply the hydrogel to the surrounding tissue and just hope that it has an effect on any potential remaining cancer cells, even though these cancer cells grow directly into the brain tissue, and can often be difficult to detect during surgery once the bulk of the tumor is removed? since the hydrogel has to be applied directly to the cancerous cells to work, how does the surgeon determine placement of the hydrogel to brain tissue once the bulk of the glioblastoma is removed? is it just a 'place and pray' type of deal? none of these questions are answered in the paper. also, they claim to use allogenic glioblastoma xenograft tumor cells here, but this type of glioblastoma tumor cell line is known to be unable to flow through the blood (doesn't properly metastasize) after the cells have been introduced into the mouse subjects due to complications related to culturing and immunogenically altering these lab treated cells, even though they claim in their abstract and introduction that the cancer cells do flow through the blood after the original infusion has taken place, once the cancer cells have taken hold in the target area, which is a conflict with the reality of this cell line type, in my opinion. this discrepancy is never addressed. how did they overcome this cell line's propensity to fail to metastasize? moreover, I felt that they did not fully describe the biological mechanism by which their supposed process actually works. they just kind of say that it works (somehow) and then show their falsified results. I can't believe their application for animal test subjects was approved by Harvard's IACUC for research that, in my opinion, doesn't demonstrate a fully formed mechanism for the function of this technology (i.e. they don't explain why or how this works thoroughly) and that I'm not convinced is actually useful in cancer treatment due to the method of usage. and their suggestion at the end of their abstract and their paper in total is that the next step is to test this mysterious technology on HUMAN subjects! they basically say 'this is a foundational study and the next step is human research'. moreover, the data fraud here is so brazen it's truly shocking, even to me. using product images for antibodies and MSC cells from biotech company websites is beyond fraud - it's unbelievable. at this point, there is clearly a culture of criminality and scientific fraud at Harvard that cannot be ignored. as far as I'm concerned, every paper published by anyone that has gotten ahead academically at Harvard needs to be reviewed for evidence of fraud, and peer reviewed for real by people outside of the university to determine whether it should have even been published in the first place (i.e. is this even useful or well described science). Harvard needs to be investigated thoroughly.
No, there should be draconian repercussions for the charlatans publishing these papers. The same should apply to the humanities which are responsible for this scourge and tries to pose as scientific when they’re just ideological. Their “studies” are used to set economic and social policies and are incredibly damaging and wasteful.
Imagine how rampant this fraud actually is, when you realize that most researchers are not this lazy with their fraud. As a pathologist myself, I’m skeptical of almost every cancer paper I ever see.
I’m afraid that if we somehow were able to find out what is true and what is data fabrication in cancer biology (or science in general), we would have to redo pretty much everything. That, or just quit science.
You'll have to go to the beginning of modern (medical) "science", germ theory vs terrain theory, the involvement of J.D. Rockefeller in modern medicine and the family in the world medical/healthcare industry.
The whole point of senior researchers having their names on these papers was the assurance of proper oversight. "I didn't really pay much attention to this paper I put my name on" is quite a damning admission.
A lot of senior researchers get their names put on projects that they have absolutely ZERO interaction with. This is done because it fosters junior PI’s relationship with them, and gives the paper more credibility. This is especially stupid considering how picky some PI’s can be about putting their actual research assistants and coordinators names onto it (you know… the people who ACTUALLY collect and process the data). You would think that PI’s would respect their employees who are the ones doing all of the ACTUAL work! Such a stupid system and way of doing things. It doesn’t just purposelessly rob undergraduates and even graduates of the proper career development (which would be free to give them and could be more readily provided), but also robs the future of the industry and the future of science.
What a shock. The world's rich kids are doing the exact same thing their parents did to our banking system and didn't get punished for. I am outraged and alarmed and never suspected anything like this for a moment.
this seems similar to how top athletes are often juiced or how many forbes billionaires are fraudsters. When you rank the top people within a group, then you will get those who are at the top in terms of skill, luck, as well as fraud. Seems like one explanation for why this is so common in top universities
It goes to literally every competive field that the top handful get stupidly rich, even videogames and journalism. It always ends up just selling a power fantasy to the masses.
@@reviewchan9806Good. Because American meritocracy IS a farce pushed by exactly the same people in power. It is in their best interest that YOU believe in it, so you fall in line and don't question or compete with their power. I say that as someone who went to an Ivy+ school.
My daughter worked for the EPA for two years after college. She worked on Thyroid studies. She quit due to data dishonesty, illegal lab practices and horrible management. Her direct manager was restricted from working in the labs after my daughter files a report. Apparently this is a huge issue at the EPA.
I was head of a thyroid patient org. What you describe does not surprise me. Thyroid research is utter shit. So badly done, lying about results, much of the most fundamental research is yet to be actually done. Would very much have liked to be able to message you and get to know more, but I suppose it's not possible. Well done to your daughter though
@@thyroidtube3739my god I just started working in that field. First thing I have to do is writing on a review and I'm so so glad I'm not the only one seeing the contradictions in those studies! Thank you for rescuing my sanity I thought I was going crazy because some of those things CAN'T BE RIGHT. There's a relatively old paper for example claiming they found proteins in cell compartments where they aren't even located. And this is cited by review after review without anyone checking if this makes sense since we know where those proteins are located nowadays. It's absolutely flabbergasting!
@@thyroidtube3739 I am an aspiring physicist currently in high school. Seeing the cases of academic misconduct is bothering me a lot this year. How is it possible that the people at the very top of academia are doing fraudelant activities. Aren't those guys there for the love of their respective fields?
@@unknownrealms8452Well who knows. I suspect that every institution is corrupt. I think it's an inevitable development, actually, I have been thinking about that. The more an institution - such as Cochrane, for instance, or a university, say, or a scientific journal - acquire status the more people will protect their place in it, I think, and the more they will break fundamental moral principles in order to protect that status. Something like that. It's often not at all about money, it's about status, legacy, stuff like that. And I also think that many have more faith in others than in themselves. "It¨s no big deal if I break a little rule here and there. Everyone else is probably doing the right thing, so science is probably safe and I get my PhD/tenure/publication. I am just doing it now, only this time, just to get ahead. Who is going to find out?". Am sure you have read up on the replication crisis, if not, please do. And very good luck with your aspirations. We need proper science, not more gender studies.
My bestie wrote a paper about 10 years ago and submitted it to a well-known and prominent journal. She was the only author. Her paper was immediately accepted with no edits. Her supervisor was very excited that it was so well received, insisted that she change it so that he was included at a co-author, even though he never even read her paper (he was away on sabatical and she submitted it without letting him know). She was upset that all her hard work was going to be "diluted" if she included his name. He pressured her so much that she gave in as she had not yet completed her doctorate. The university she attended had just the year before, started to encourage faculty to submit as many papers as possible each year as their salary was pegged to the number of papers that were published. Every one of her lecturers who only taught (that is, did not also write research papers) resigned as their pay essentially was half that of the professors who had their names all over as many papers as possible. I am sure this happens in hundreds of universities around the world.
It's the norm for PhD advisor's name to be on every paper you publish during your time as a PhD student. It doesn't 'dilute' your contributions, as you'd be the first name anyway. Everyone understands when they see it as well.
@@superneenjaa718 Yes, that's true. However, it's pretty insane for him to make money off a paper he didn't even look at while she probably didn't make any additional money as a student.
@@superneenjaa718If the only advice(/coercion through position of power) you give, is to put your name on it. Then you're not an advisor, you're quite literally a criminal. If as a society we don't punish criminals, then the non criminals will be punished by the criminals. The law of incentives dictates that you will get a criminal society.
This is what's happening at my university. I'm an undergrad research assistant and my professor hates having to ask her PhD students to put out more papers. Apparently the university will not giver her tenure unless she puts out more papers.
This is a reflection on the state of our society: the absence of any sense of ethics, the level of entitlement of those at the top combined with the lack of accountability of those in politics, in the government, in the judiciary, in business and in academia is astounding. This kind of behavior is a the result.
Unfortunately, that's not the problem. Problem started with the Rand corporation and the whole culture of MBA types. 50 years ago, if you were a professor, in any field, you get tenure by showing to your colleges that you bright, smart and do good research. The MBA and Economic types in Rand decided that's not good enough, instead we have to have metrics on everything that government spend money on and for Academia, it was decided that paper number of citation count is the metric, not because it's relevant really but because no one could have come up with better metric. So now we have a system in which honest people are punished and cheaters get all the benefits. Many of this paper are done with substantial budgets and even if they are not replicated elsewhere no one can proof frauds. Hence, if you are an honest Academics, you can never match the productivity of these guys and you will fall behind -? you don't get to go to a good research university -> won't get research grants -> won't publish honest research. Honestly, this system would never work and we would soon find that most published research are bullshit now. We have to go back to the system in which there are select few scientist that are selected mainly based on what they did in they PhD years and get tenure quickly in 2 years instead of publish or parish pressure. We don't need professors to be mini-CEO's of their research labs like they currently are.
Years ago, I helped my professor with some vector art for an illustration. It was maybe 15 mins of work and he still attributed me. Point being not all researchers are void of integrity, but it gets hard when you see your peers pull this stuff.
I worked in cancer research twice and trying to find enough evidence to validate my results was really exhaustive and long, my supervisor would not accept until i covered every analytical possible to confirm my results so in my head that's how is always supposed to work. Being in research really broke my spirit, so many people just want the prestige and the awards, while when i was a kid i just wanted to do it because it sounds cool to be super intelligent and help people, it has never been about the money or fame, at least for me,but in reality is a bunch of men children fighting about who has the biggest lollipop a lot of times.
For a number of years I was a reviewer for a lowly engineering journal produced solely by volunteers at various universities and I took my job very seriously. How this level of academic fraud can be so pervasive is just astounding to me.
If you thought its more now, just wait till these fraudsters get a hold of image generation AI. That would be so hard to catch. There is no way to detect duplications
The peer review process relies on the honor system. They aren't looking for evidence of fraud, the peer review process is mainly looking to see if the paper is well written. When a research paper goes through the peer review process they are mainly checking for spelling ,grammar ,format and math errors. People have placed more importance on the peer review process (and Doctorates) than it deserves.
Right, that and basic sanity checking of the result, papers do get rejected quite a lot if they are obviously wrong, the issue is of course when a result is nontrivial to reproduce so that you have to take the author's word for it.
Peer reviewed should mean some prominent scholars reviewed and responded it formally in writing. Ideally we should get a supporter as well as an opponent response. But the modern trend of peer review is pretty much just what Grammerly does, it just sounds important. The real peer reviews come after now.
You forgot one major aspect that can doom a research paper, at least in certain fields; how much does it contradict the established scientific narrative?
@@Eyes0penNoFear That's not going to doom any paper. If you manage to write something reproducible and well founded that contradicts the leading theories in a field most journals will be extremely happy to publish. Most great research is great because it upturns the status quo.
@@BosonCollider Not only that, I even know a fairly toxic professor who doesn't include all his details in the methods section specifically SO nobody can replicate his work - that way he has no rivals in the future.
Years ago any research coming out of Harvard was considered the gold standard. Now, in light of all the plagiarism and then questionable research, anyone should think twice about the academic and scientific integrity of any Harvard study or publication.
Elizabeth Bik, the hero we need. "How did you manage to sleuth out these peer-reviewed, and dastardly cases of academic research fraud?" "Well, unlike the people who formally reviewed the papers, I actually bothered to look at the data contained therein." This is the saddest part of the video.
a university should just have that one woman look for data fraud full time. it would be worth more than 10 professors doing research to have one person checking to make sure there is no frauds.
That's like compensation consultants. They are well paid with the incentive to do nothing important, make minor recommendations and watch the drama unfold
@@samsonsoturian6013 its a lot of work though mate. you would need to be smart enough to be able to know a paper is fraudulent. most people have no way of knowing...
@@samsonsoturian6013 shes actually doing a super important function. you need to be very skilled to determine if fraud happened in a very niche academic paper. the trouble is nobody reads most papers so the fraud is easily un-detected
Literally they should hire the biggest Harvard haters to just comb through data looking for fraud. 1 hater can do the work of 3 Harvard lovers who secretly don't want to find fraud.
I'm not saying I was anything near the level of Harvard (reputation wise) but when I was a bachelor in molecular biology in my Uni, I experienced the same. We were supposed to check if using specific wavelengths of non-ionizing radiation, more on the RF spectrum, would have a killing effect on cancer cells. Needless to say, cancer irradiation today is with strong radiation, It damaged you and the cancer. RF is just normally thought off as being too weak to have any effect. So we grew some lung cancer cells in dishes and used the physics department particle accelerator (no idea, that's what they said) to create the correct radiation. No noticeable effect. But if you never been in biology, you need to know this - if you get a good result the explanation is pretty to the point and brief and leaves a good impressions. If you get negative result you're expected to go head over heels to explain why it's not working as is and it's very annoying. So my mentor, tenured doctor, told me to nudge the images and results to me more favorable. This and the general self importance of alot of the doctors, lectures and professors made me lose respect for the field.
Knowing what doesn't work is as valuable as knowing what does work. It may even help lead to something that works. - Thomas Edison, sort of In your case, publishing what you tried that didn't succeed could easily lead someone to think about it, and maybe think, "But what if we changed this one thing?" And if they succeed, you're cited in THEIR paper. I guess that makes too much sense, though.
Why use the word 'Slave'? you're just coming off as a jerk, not edgy or corky or whatever you were going to. You don't get much say in your seminar final paper. Anyway, was the professor's idea, but then again the whole idea was pretty doomed from the get go, and like I stated you'd have to write some shpill why it didn't work rather than showing a 2 fold increase (which is nothing. like 2% dead cells in control versus 4% in the treated. It's not even that significant) and a much straight forward explanation with some bull future premise. It wouldn't go anywhere anyway.@@charlesdarwin5185
Nobody was supposed to be looking, it's Harvard, the most prestigious of all gentlemen's clubs, and the good, upstanding, respectable scholars of Harvard are beyond reproach. Respectability is the refuge of scoundrels; it's so much easier to engage in fraud when you're perceived as a trustworthy and upstanding researcher of the highest pedigree.
The president of the University of Kiel, Germany also recently stepped down from her position due to data manipulation accusations in her papers. She worked in molecular cancer research, focussing on pediatric and adolescent cancer biology.
Peer review processes for academic and scientific journals need a major overhaul. Personally I think that authors should be required to submit their deidentified data sets, and there shouls be an independent reviewer that verifies statistical methods. Having published a handful of articles as a junior researcher, I have not once been asked for actual data. there also seems to be this underlying assumption that scientists will be honest. Obviously not. So greater oversight is needed. 10,000 papers were retracted last year. This is staggering!
@@elvisnnaemeka6722 I wouldn't even call it that; I'd say it's more in line with racketeering. Except instead of burning down your home or shop if you don't pay protection money they'll torch your career if you don't hail them as being geniuses in their field.
Peer review relies on scientists giving other scientists the benefit of the doubt. If every single data point is scrutinized, then there’s no time for an actual job. I understand where you’re coming from, but peer review is a voluntary process that is incredibly important but requires a lot of commitment from the scientific community.
I like ihe idea of people being required to publish their data sets, I think they should also be required to define what statistical methods they used on it (they often don't). However, I think the bigger issue is journals. They should be rid of entirely. They are predatory, and in my opinion, one of the root causes of all this (the other being research grants being awarded the way they are). The journals do nothing, make massive amoutns of money doing things which cost minisclue amounts. They charge scientists massive amounts to publish their papers, they encourage the whole more papers = better researcher mentalilty. They make people pay to even look at the research papers (yes, the scientists don't make them so hard to access by choice, that is entirely the publishers fault). Just to make it clear: hey charge people to submit their papers AND they charge people to read said papers. They do moderate and do peer review, but guess what!? They don't actually do that either, they get other scientists to do it, for free, for them. So you can't even say all the money they make goes to that. What do they do, then, that costs the hundreds of millions people give each of the big publishers every year? Well... they print a magazine sized book once a month, and have a website that hosts all the papers. It probably costs them more money to stop people who didn't pay from reading the papers than it costs to run the entirety of their business (their actual business, which is printing a magazine once a month and hosting a website, not all the bloat they use to justify all their penny pinching).
They have started to do this with psychological research where researchers can post their hypotheses and method prior to conducting the research and then posting all raw data into a data base so other researchers can do their own statistical analyses. I don't know how widely it's used though.
This begs the question of how much medical practice could potentially be based on fraudulent information, if it is so easy to commit this kind of manipulation and influence so much other work before being caught.
Ultimately there is a rigorous clinical trial process before any drugs are approved by the FDA. In the pharmaceutical world, academic literature is garbage.
I suggest reading the Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz. Nina in the book goes through how the Diet Heart Hypothesis was instituted not because of good evidence but simply because Ancel Keys was influential. She goes into a good bit of the supporting evidence and how bad those studies are and even more so, how much the opposing scientists were bullied out of the conversation.
It’s truly unfortunate that every new case of fraud can erode the public’s trust and HOPE in science. on the other hand, fraudsters will always exist. I’m glad the ones that have, have been exposed, and hopefully it wont take as long next time someone similar comes along!
@thesleepydot Wokism is antiscientific and it has infected from the top down. Couple that with corporate capture and it is the Dark Ages all over again.
I wanna thank you for getting the word out and explaining everything really well so that someone like me who has no background in research or academia, can understand all of this easily. That's a gift!
Response to the title: Yes, it is. It has been for decades and it's only been getting worse with time. Hopefully now that some attention has been going to this problem maybe we can begin to address some of the problems.
@amarissimus29 @philkim8297 @schokilooover @tinycervid7679 I wasn't trying to make a joke but I will take the compliments on it. In science currently there is a massive crisis, it is not making the news for the most part for some reason. But of peer reviewed cancer research only about 30% can be replicated, which means 70% is bunk.
You mentioned several times that the frauds were unbelievably lazy. It makes me wonder just how much fraud is going undetected simply by being less lazy.
One shortcoming of the peer review process is that it’s not meant to look for fraud, and largely works with the assumption of the data being honest. The main purpose of peer review is to assess that the topic of the paper is relevant to the field, that the methods used are appropriate to address the questions being asked, that the interpretation of the results make sense, and that there are no major unresolved questions. Maybe we need a better system to look for fraud?
It's so great that you cover this. I'm a PhD student and it feels awful to hear that lies and fraud exist in research too, but knowing is half the battle I guess
Don't give up. You will be rewarded when you go to Google Scholar and look at number of citations you receive and ResearchGate when you get a notification
I have wanted to go to a certain Ivy League school. I was in contact with one of the professors. The environment, all, everything has changed so much and I have been warned to not go there ever, because it's not the school, it used to be. It's really sad.
It's worrisome to think about the fact that people getting caught get caught because they do basically nothing to cover their tracks. Think about the fact that their are other people committing fraud who are at least a little clever about hiding their misdeeds.
I am not surprised to hear this about Harvard.... Harvard (and all academic institutions) needs to seriously assess how grad students, pra's, and postdocs can safely report academic dishonesty and falsifications. Even though they find out about it after they join the lab and start working, they may have very little choice about next steps. I really feel for the junior investigators who are powerless in this situation.
Researches in Health Sectors have always been shady. Aside from this, it is weird how you got two different research, both peer reviewed, claiming the exact opposite thing. So many times I have heard two different doctors saying the exact opposite thing on a particular topic. Same goes for nutritionists.
Peer review system now is totally broken. Good, precise, and constructive reviewers are very very rare. Oftentimes, they are just destructive, horrible and judging the "name of the institute" or "who is this person's supervisor" rather than the true content of the research. In my field, the circle is quite small like they almost know each other. This even lets the reviewer to play politics with each other, like if you try to publish in the wrong journal (that some person is a frequent reviewer or editor at that journal) you will be automatically rejected (and sometimes even with a very mean rejecting letter). But if you published in the "correct" journal like your supervisor knows the editor, it will be very easy to get published with a very little check on your data. So, it's not surprising at all that someone from a super big-named institute like the Harvard got a little check on their result despite being peer-reviewed.
Regarding your spot for Ground News, I just want to note that while "Another Cheater" is loaded language, "Newest Target" is also biased, because it implies the accused person is a victim ("target") instead of simply reporting on the accusations.
r/whoosh 🤦That's the *exact* point that Pete was making. Do your friends call you Captain Obvious? Or perhaps watch again and you *might* learn something. Sheesh
@@donttalkcrap Are you talking to me? In fact, my point was not his point. Pete's point was (among other things) that the first headline was "a lot more pejorative, a lot more emotional" than the second headline. He made no point at all about the second headline, other than to say that it was different from the first. My point is that calm-seeming language can still show bias.
time for an independent organization thats not affliated to these colleges to peer review these papers. Cant trust thiefs checking other thiefs if someone stole
Wonder how long it will take the world to understand that if you want actual competence, looking for it in a group of people linked together only by how lucky they where when born and the amount of money they have, is a terrible way to go about finding it.
In this case they cheated their pay to the top. Cheaters have an unfair advantage... most people with any power are cheaters. It should be assumed anyone with money and power lied and did evil to get there because 99.9% of them did. Unfortunately now the lunatics run everything so good luck curing that cancer.
Competence isn't something you are born with. It is a product of lifestyle. And it is by luck. Everything is by luck. And you will keep being clueless about how things are or about how to get smarter scientists because you are not aware of tools which boost smartness nor use them regularly. There is not one minute spent at universities to train better cognitive neural maps in the whole time they are there. It is like stressing people out about a foot race but never teaching them on a single practice session while making them memorize the history of shoelaces. The outcomes of that race are going to be : very slow. You have to train the mind like anything else - but it is complex in its nature and the very training changes how you think so ...
@@agnidas5816 "Tools which boost smartness" Idk man. Maybe you need them more than I do. "Not one minute spent at universities to train better cognitive neural maps in the whole time they are there." I'm gunna assume you meant, "There is not one minute at universities that isn't used to train better cognitive neural maps, in the whole time they are there." In which case that's obviously crap, given lots collages in the US are glorified party houses. But even then I never said that there is zero universities that teach competence. Harvard just isn't one of those. Its a rich persons wank party.
The pressure in the academe is that the more scientific publications you have your name, the better. This corresponds with the higher likelihood of approval of funding and grant applications. Also papers take years for the data collection and analysis, trial design, ethics review, etch. It is easier to plagiarize or fabricate information. This however severely impedes the progress of science just for the aim of prestige of multiple flawed academics.
@@jonnyd9351Well, they're not paid, and they do it in their own time, and they're given far too many papers to review each properly. Blame the journals, this is their fault entirely.
@@ichigo_nyanko To add, papers are really long and can take hours to read thoroughly. The way they are presented can be an absolute drag and bore to read. Some are like reading a poorly written novel. And on top of the many papers researchers have to peer review, they have to read many more papers for their own research to support their claims.
peer review was never about checking for fraud. that would take too much time. papers take hours to read, and longer to understand. peer review assumes no fraud or lying.
Can Harvard sue those people for fraud? I don't think they should get to say "oops, you got me! Sorry!" There should be legal consequences for to deter that kind of fraud😡
When paper publishers lock the papers behind paywall, it discourages peer review from the layman. Sure, you can argue that your average person isn't checking these papers out, but just because the average person won't be able to understand the science, doesn't mean they can't spot below average photoshop. Profiting off scientific publications will only encourage these behaviors, and discourage looking for it.
This is crazy. I work at a bank and we have to employ independent teams to replicate everything we do to satisfy the Federal Reserve. And we’re just predicting how much money we’re going to make. So life saving research and most other scientific research has no meaningful oversight, while we actually do what these institutions should be doing just to make sure we’re not wrong about what our future balance sheet might look like.
The problem is, in science, duplicating experiments require A LOT of time and resource and money. And there simply isn't the time, resource and personel to do this - because nobody funds replication of experiments and no prestige is given to those that do so. If we want to fix the system, we have to completely revamp the funding system as well as increase it by a lot if we still want the same output. All of this is driven by how prestige and financial rewards are given out.
My (recently) late father who was a Phd of Agrobiosciences told me that he stopped publishing papers since there's a lot of fraud in academia, he didn't want to be even adjacent to it. At the time I didn't believe him, I thought he just didn't want to publish papers because it's a hassle, but it seems he was telling the truth
I recently submitted my first author paper for publication and am currently writing my dissertation. Western blots have given me the absolute worst time - I spent months troubleshooting. I cannot fathom how people get away with such blatant image manipulation.
There is a tendency to regard WB's as "easy" in comparison to PCR or ELISA when it is in fact much more difficult. I know only a handful of people that can consistently make representative WB's and figure out why they are "not working." It is even harder for trainees since they need to be focused on their dissertation, and not on bench technique. The problem is probably not you, it is probably your PI.
Holy shit. Something else is going on at Harvard that we’re not privy to currently. Larry Sommers was quite the shady character and to think his “legacy” died is total bs. Whitney Webb goes into this stuff pretty deeply.
Every university should have some sort of article reviewer division. A group of people whose sole job is to review their university’s publications and that of collaborative publications. So if it comes to light that the publication is fraudulent, entire universities and not just individuals are implicated.
It's hard to think that would happen when most uni underpay research staff and are understaffed in research departments. We have to get money from charities and governments to fund ourselves and our projects. It's not as lucrative as spending money on property investment or opening more courses and programmes for foreign students who pay a lot.
@@marionettekent Make it a matter of university reputation, not that of a scientific faculty. If they cut corners with reviewing, they will hurt the entire university and not just the scientific faculties or individuals. As in, you want to do proper scientific research? Then you must spend money on this, otherwise your institution wouldn’t be taken seriously.
I used to work at a Harvard lab 30 years ago. I had to share the waterbath with an Indian guy from the adjacent lab. I couldn't understand why my Northern blot experiment never worked even after I repeted it 3-4 times and Lost a month. And then I came to work one morning at 5:30 and found the waterbath ice cold and that guy turning the knobs on it. I started immediately looking for a lab where I could perform my experiment unobstructed, and I was allowed to use the lab equipment at the MGH and the Northern blot results were great. At that time all the postdocs in my lab conducted the experiments according to nationality: the Japanese doc with a Japanese group, a Russian with a Russian group etc.The head of the lab cut short that practice and we are not allowed to leave the lab. So, I never told him what was going on. Working after hours at a different location was not possible on a long run and I quit.So did an American post doc who worked on the same project with me. The head of the lab was furious , he called us incompetent and hired another post doc, they submitted a paper and had to retrieve it because of faking the results. After returning to the totalitarian Slovenia, I was banned from scientific work and any academic career because I did not produce any paper at Harvard.
The thing that always strikes me when I think about this is that if this kind of OBVIOUS fraud makes it through peer-review, then what about all the cleverly disguised stuff? The whole body of knowledge is called into question (seems like medical sciences and social sciences are particularly bad, but all of them are really in a bad place). We let the system erode to the point where it simply no longer works.
One of my dreams of being in this field is this type of awareness… fabrication/falsification awareness and trying to keep people honest in research. I hope to somehow do something big in this area as it really pisses me off how much work we do in research just for someone to do one or two little things (although it’s small, it makes a HUGE impact) that will cause research to just be obsolete from the sheer dishonesty. The things patients/subjects go through in research, then someone fucks it up. Seriously makes me angry. I’ve been involved in practically every step of research from models,experimental design, through preclinical research, and now in human research. I’ve seen everything and how challenging everything is… how long everything takes and how many people are involved. How dare people just do something as small as changing a picture or even numbers to just throw MILLIONS of dollars on just ONE project down the drain. Ugh.
I really don’t know what to do about this. It’s clear that the current “publish or perish” system incentivizes cutting corners, forging data, etc., and quantity > quality of papers. Research shouldn’t stop though; there are obviously a lot more important questions that need to be answered. Where should the money come from? Crowdfunding seems unrealistic at best (and that’s already happening with interest groups like the AMA, AAMC, ACS, Alzheimer’s Association, etc. constantly asking for donations), and corporate/government grants introduce potential bias. So much goes into this, but science one of the most important things in modern society, and it needs to continue (the right way.)
Just because researchers have a lot of publications under their belt does not mean that you should put your guard down. The lax security on research like this is just not right. I hope there are criminal charges for all parties in the wrong.
Any Alumn of Harvard before the year 2015 is properly embarrassed to say they went to Harbor… Really any Ivy League school. So embarrassing to our country
In 2002 I saw a journal article that was a direct copy of my dissertation from 1996, but the truth is it can be career suicide to go up against tenured professors in your own field. If they cheated once, they can do it again by creating fake notes showing they did it years before but waited to publish.
@@orionspur That's terrible. With AI, it's absolutely possible. I hear they are now hiding dissertations to protect their DEI hires. This is after the Harvard President scandal. She checked all the boxes including her last name.
Makes me think about the show Suits where they only hire lawyers from Harvard due to the reputation of that school. If they were making that show today, they would need to choose a different school 😂
Not really. First, the undergrad sciences and Harvard law are fairly separate, they have separate cultures, oversight, separate admissions, etc. The main thing people look for in a college is how good the department they want to major in is, and don’t care about whether some other department they will never take a class in is having issues. And law is not research. In law you get paid by the hours worked or a salary. But research has a “publish or perish” culture that promotes fraud. Getting funding and grants to keep a lab going is based on getting positive results….finding not just something new, but which is something of a breakthrough or which makes a splash in the field. But those results are rare, and if people feel their income is under threat….some will fake results. Plus I would not blame Harvard unless they hired someone already known to commit fraud. If someone has a great track record, and you hire them based off of that, I wouldn’t say that you were at fault if they later got caught for the first time doing something shady. That is on them.
@@Itried20takennamesthey have hired professors that have been known to be fraudulent in their research. And have been slow to rid themselves of dishonest professors. Riding their damaged reputation into the ground.
I've struggled with getting a PhD for the past few years. Especially since my oldest God-Daughter finished medical school. One of the things putting me off was just how much time and energy someone puts into their dissertation research and since I work full time...well, it'd kill me. But after seeing just how hard career academics work I think to myself "damn, I could probly pick up another full time job AND get my PhD if I do it like them!"
Thanks Pete for helping expose fraudulent research. Public exposure of this kind of behavior is vital, because without any consequences this kind of behavior will continue.
What, no-coauthors realized that the photos were not from their own experiments? What kind of co-authors are these people? Are they real? In my area of physics, the papers are read carefully by others after publication, who can easily verify the results on with own, and no such fraud has been seen (or needed).
I would guess they are either complicit or committed the fraud themselves due to pressure from the main author to deliver positive results without outright asking them to fake it.
I was told I had a yr to live. I left the docs office. Never went back. That was 30 years ago. Diagnosis was cancer. Apparently the kind that don't kill you. Cervical cancer
imo, as long as the number and notoriety of publications are valued more than honest and replicable results, nothing will change. Journals don't publish research with boring results, when the answer is "we tried this thing and it didn't work". Academic institutions don't give funding or tenure to scientists who don't get frequent and exciting publications. Scientists don't want to lose their funding based on their inability to get published. if folks cant guarantee their livelihood from their honest research, fudging the results can be very enticing. i hope this changes.
Because the journals and grant giving system incentivises cheating over scientific progress. If we didn't have such predatory systems lingering over these scientists head, they wouldn't feel pressured to either cheat or feel like a failure. Entire lives are made and broken over how many papers a person has, the way it is now. Colleccting data takes a long time. If you felt your livelihood was dependend on cheating to speed up data collection you would do it too (or at least, most people would). Just another reason to pay researchers way more than they are paid now, too. Researchers are paid barely above minimum wage in mnay places.
Why wouldn't it keep happening? If others don't have the money to replicate a study, or if the results could differ depending on the variation of participants, what is to stop them from lying completely as they have the knowledge to make it believable?
Why wouldn't it ? there was a huge scandal that 30% of Elsevier was faked and that is the biggest publication. EVeryone keeps using it like nothing happens so ... the cheaters are now safe in their nefarious activities.
When you are the final author that usually means you are the Principal Investigator who was funding or overseeing it. For example when I was at University the student who did the most research and writing would be the first author, followed by second third and so on, and then the professor would be the final author. That doesn’t mean the last author has little to do with the content of the paper: on the contrary being final author is almost as prestigious as being first author, you are expected to review all the content and make sure it is correct, it is assumed you were the force behind designing the study, motivating the students to conduct the study, and identifying the correct analyses to perform
Go to ground.news/pete to stay fully informed. Subscribe through my link to get 30% off unlimited access this month only.
As long as lobbying exist in Academia, just like in the government, these type of fraud and corruption will remain rampant.
It's almost as if it's all fake, like your accent.
LOL, and you haven't even mentioned the vegan unscientific nonsense which is comming from the "Harward Medical School"'s nutritional epidemiologists...
@@haroldcruz8550
As long as people don't have the life changing Holy Spirit of the Holy Bible corruption shall go on.
in academia publish or perish and this explains the 98% or more all published research is fake falsified fraudulent
Lying about cancer research ought to be a criminal offence
All academic fraud shoukd be, because there's a ton of money that comes with PhDs and academic citations
It's amazing that it isn't. If your doctor lied to you knowingly and gave you the wrong treatment because they stood to profit from it and you died they'd likely be thrown in jail for murder. For some unknown reason when a conman publishes and pushes a non-cure that harms people's health and can result in serious injury or death they don't get the same treatment. For some reason that's viewed as being "just not as bad" by society.
fraud is fraud, it is illegal but the university or prosecution would need to press charges which they likely won't
It shouldn't matter what the subject matter is. Fraud is fraud.
All of it is fraud at the end of the day. Either a lot of money is wasted, or the false information causes indirect damage and harm.
Imagine having a 2nd or 3rd or 4th authorship on your advisor’s paper and it gets retracted as you’re applying for jobs 😳
Unluckkkkyyyy
how come i keep finding you on so many eyeopening videos? the algorithm must be very kind to the both of us
@@monkeytimesmagazine3725 are either of you familiar with Tony Heller or Kent Carnivore?
@@johnmartinsen963 no
@@monkeytimesmagazine3725 more "eyeopening" content on their channels
As a recent PhD graduate from an Ivy League, I gotta say that the academic research system is just corrupted. Finding answers to how the natural world works or understanding the limits of so-called applied science are nowhere near as important to the modern day research group as is the publication of papers or the award of research grants, even for projects that are doomed to fail. Wait until you find out that the same research group is often unable to replicate its own results… It’s very sad, but I don’t see it changing anytime soon.
It is not sad, it is part of The Plan.
Well that is depressing af
What research group are you referring to?
This is what happens when you have unqualified people doing research. If you look at the amount of papers published since December in cancer research, you're going to see a spike of papers being published in comparison to the past. Literally stole my research and then they have the nerve to put "for researchers and Healthcare workers" in the journals I accessed. I read thousands of studies and that is how they repay me. They have no idea what they are doing. No integrity. They never put in the work. Utter delusion! They really punish you for trying to make a difference and save lives because that is how they make their money and I did it for free! Crazy stuff.
Academia is corrupt to the core. They have abandoned the pursuit of knowledge and now only care about power and coercive control. If these criminals do not go to prison then expect public trust to disappear.
"Oh you went to Harvard? Oh wow, I'm so sorry."
So true. They will never recover from it.
oh, you went to harvard, hey! where did my wallet go? the exit is on the left lol
I’m currently a postdoc at one of the Harvard-affiliated institutions and I do cancer research. Curiously, one of my housemates is a grad student at Khalid’s lab. If there’s one thing that being a scientist has taught me it is to identify patterns. And in this specific subject (scientific fraud), one of the most recurrent themes is working for a toxic boss. But let’s get to the root of the problem. This whole Harvard publications scandal is a byproduct of how research is funded. It all starts with the asshole principal investigator putting pressure on their students to deliver these megalomaniac high-impact papers because that will bring funding to the lab. And they *have to* keep winning these grants, otherwise they won’t be able to spend thousands and thousands of dollars on fancy experiments such that they can publish more high-impact papers, and get more funding. It’s a vicious cycle, and this has nothing to do with our endless curiosity to understand how nature works anymore, as other people have stated in this comment section. Modern science is just another cog in the capitalist engine, so it’s almost impossible to “fix the system”. What I believe can work as a solution is changing the way science is funded. Instead of giving grants to researchers who publish hundreds of papers every year, funding agencies should be giving money to groups that not only do innovative research but also publish highly reproducible data. If you’re proposing groundbreaking hypotheses but your previous Nature/Cell/Science papers cannot be replicated, then you’re out. Not only that, but a proper investigation should be followed, and if fraud is proven these PIs should be banned from asking for funding. I mean, if you (the government) are going to give away millions and millions of dollars to develop science, why not create some sort of agency that tests the reproducibility of published data? What is the point of making fancy science if the experiments only work in the hands of the paper's first author? What would happen then is that we scientists would have to slow down and do careful and well-documented science, instead of this shit show that we keep seeing, not only at Harvard but everywhere. I wonder how much of all the published data we can truly believe. I’m afraid that if I find out the actual number, I might just give up science
Another governmental agency? That's another fraud nest!
Totally agree!! the biggest issue with research is the pressure of publication. the institutions do not care if the work produced was of quality standard as long as there are publications. Especially when you go out and enter the job market for academia, your worth is pretty much analysed based on the number of papers you published.
Just be careful of blaming capitalism, it's like saying the problem with food poisoning is the food. When it is obvious the food has been corrupted in some way, question is, by what?
@studiouskid1528correction: I apologize Studiouskid, taking a second look at your comment I see now you mentioned greed as an example, rather than refiring to capitalism itself. I will correct my comment in the manner I ought to have responded.
Indeed, the core of capitalism is fair trade, both parties should be happy and get greater value from the trade. Greed like may other things that corrupts the process, is a pollutant.
I also believe a lust for prestige is also to blame for the curruption.
It's odd to blame capitalism for the misaligned incentives you describe. Perhaps the issue relates to the fact that a main funder of research in the US is the government. That doesn't sound like a capitalism problem at all.
Having said that, you're spot on that this kind of malpractice should attract severe consequences.
If you think about it these scandals out of Harvard are actually excellent in helping us to dismantle the idea that this institution has any sort of legitimacy that supersedes other academic institutions because of its name and perceived status. In short can't say I don't like.
Academics don't get starry eyed over institutions like that, it's all about individual researchers. It just so happens that schools like Harvard have the money and access to resources to attract some of the best.
Add Columbia and Berkeley
Such strong language. The only reason you’d want to ‘dismantle’ it is because they wouldn’t let you into the club 😂
@@cooseev i was a little bit starry eyed until i started working here and realized my public school degrees prepared me just fine. Harvard just has a fuckton of money and people can get away with pushing boundaries because of it. Most good researchers don't where you went to school, but theres still plenty who will prioritize pedigree when deciding between two people. Kinda silly now that I've seen behind the curtain a bit.
@@mariabartovthe reason why it needs to be dismantled is because it effects the amount of money other schools get. If two equally talented researchers apply for grant funding for a research project, there's going to be a bias towards the one affiliated with the more prestigious university. Wealth begets wealth and the social capital that comes with associating with these institutions puts many people at an unfair advantage.
As a former CS prof who was asked to peer review articles for publication, I didn't last long because I was honest about the trash I was asked to review. And the vast majority was trash - statistics didn't make sense, papers cited didn't say what they said it did, etc. That wasn't what the publication wanted. So, after two years I was not asked again. Publish or perish has caused endemic fraud.
Who were your superiors during this time? I'm curious to know if there are real scientists involved in the publication, or just writers and business people
And there is me ... self taught and reading these papers like ... WTF ? The graphs make no sense, the analysis results doesn't understand it's own figures and just repeats the data without knowing if it's significant, or even less vs more.
THen compare it with older papers and everything is organized ... oh also science papers used to be longer than a page. They shrunk from 10-15 pages down to 5 paragraphs ...
@@agnidas5816 i think the 5 paragraphs thing is because you are just reading the synopsis
@@orangesolarflare4228 My superiors? My dean? He had nothing to do with it. That's not how peer review works. PR happens when people in the field are contacted to review the work of "peers". None of the papers I reviewed were from my university or from anyone I knew.
@@orangesolarflare4228what he meant was, since he was actually serious in his job, people stopped giving him stuff to review.
Oh man. I'm sitting here, writing my little medical dissertation, wondering whether that comparatively simple thing I've done is even worthy of publication... but then I see this and at the very least I have the consolation that all my data is mine and real.
Why would it not be worthy of publication? Even if results are negative, that still furthers our knowledge on the subject.
As a medical journal reviewer, if the research is honest and medically credible I will support it with a detailed critique and suggestions for revisions.
If you provide just one useful BIT of information it is useful to us all.
See my post above. This is what I was advised when I asked
"What is good or useful research " 1988
Thus spoke someone calling himself Charles Darwin. 🤡
@@suprememasteroftheuniverse everything has to obey the laws of evolution
@@charlesdarwin5185Oh, Darwin's paper? The one that's been passed around like a bad penny? They've been tweaking it every which way but loose. Why let go of it when it's so convenient for justifying their naughty ways?
Weird, it's almost like having extremely high pressure to publish positive results in high-impact journals encourages people to cut corners or fudge numbers to get positive results when things aren't going their way
Always true, even before journals really existed and you'd have to publish your own book and hope people read it. It's just systematic now which bakes the fraud into it all.
Correct, however this also goes directly on the reviewing process of such papers... These obvious duplicates should raise questions instantly!
Almost?
true but that's where we as humans need to step up and speak out. everyone knows society is terrible right now and it's bc of TONS of situations like this happening in every aspect of our lives. if someone's throwing money at you does that mean you take it even if you know you don't deserve it??? these people are capable of NOT colluding with capital business interests but they CHOOSE to do it. like I get your point and it is true but you're acting like people have no choice but to act this way. this is a level of planning and fraud that is beyond negligence. it's BELLIGERENT
it's the lack of action that kills me, in high school if I used a sentence from something else, I could be expelled, and they were flat out faking and coping all that?
I remember trying to replicate the results of a psychiatric paper whilst in my 3rd year of university and i could for the life of me not figure out how they got the results that they did, especially since their paper was peer-reviewed.This makes me think that data falsification might be much more rampant in academia then i previously thought.
I fear, you are right
Not really.
This was fake research, but it's not that common. A LOT of research gets checked by others.
The problem with something as complicated as the human brain, is when you do a study, you're supposed to make sure everything is the same.
No two people are the same, not even identical twins have exactly the same DNA.....
The human brain is literally the most complicated thing science knows of.
If you really studied that, I shouldn't have to explain it out for you to understand the problem.....
Same, last year as a CS PhD student step one was to replicate and step two was to improve on another labs published results. Following their steps to the letter got absolutely no useful results and I am certain they made it up.
@@rafaelthetoaster7292 "improve on another's lab results" improve how? Does improving mean making/including measurements that further confirm the end results? That's not science, that's scientism.
It sounds like just trying to find out what else you can correlate to affirm the conclusion you already have, that is not science. You can't "improve on another's lab results", those results are the results. You can improve the methodology, but you can't improve the results, that's a bunch of garbage y'all are doing if that's what is being done.
That’s what I hear across the board. Academics don’t get more grants without playing bullshit games. That’s how grants are generally *designed…*
Research is based on prior research. If its falsified for something like this, they should be in prison and their degree credentials revoked forever
If you would believe it educated professionals actually matter more than regular people on the street. These people will never see the inside of a prison cell. They will be given a slap on the wrist and go back to the same work they were doing before.
Why should it just be them that suffers? The entire point of science is that it is verifiable. Every scientist that could have verified these results and didn’t should have their credentials revoked and put in prison for life.
Hypothetical testing in practice run first ney
Unfortunately, the people in charge are friends with politicians.
"Research is based on prior research"
Many times, reasearch is based on "scientific" dogmas and is meant to confirm these dogmas even if these are completely false (e.g. the nonscientific vegan propaganda and the notion that plants are "healthy"...)
It's about time we apply criminal charges of fraud for academic misconduct like this.
Disciplinary charges exist already..
@@erkinalp I'm sure Claudine Gay learned her lesson; a slap on the wrist for the president, for conduct that would get any student expelled from her school in a heartbeat.
How much money did they get paid for the fraud?
Literally the entire international financial system is a criminal enterprise and if only the public knew exactly what was going on heads would roll in quantities that made the french revolution look like the medalist podium in a "don't lose your head" competition
Harvard’s reputation will fall if Harvard doesn’t take any action against these people. As a person of science, I am glad I have not chosen Harvard.
Harvard University wanted my blood for erythromelalgia research. I would have had to pay for the blood drawn and they only offered to “repay” the cost for it if I did pay. Harvard received 505 million in donations in 2022. The cost of my blood being drawn was 150. Cheapskates wouldn’t give me 150 to pay for the blood drawn. Even with my rare condition with even rarer age and gender circumstances they put money before everything.
Greedy people. They couldn't spare $150?
@@Communist-Doge Harvard's endowment is ~ $50B "with a B" dollars, essentially they get rid of all tuition and it wouldn't make a dent.
as a biomedical engineer, I read through the main paper in question and I am left feeling confused right from the abstract. in my opinion, not only are there obvious instances of data fraud in the paper, the entire premise is bizarre and conflicting. applying a hydrogel to a cancerous tumor is not a new idea, however, it is a difficult one. it seems that the suggestion is that a surgeon is to perform open brain surgery to apply a hydrogel to a brain tumor, basically. if you're already doing open brain surgery, you would surgically remove the majority of the cancer cells that you can perceive. so I guess the idea is to then apply the hydrogel to the surrounding tissue and just hope that it has an effect on any potential remaining cancer cells, even though these cancer cells grow directly into the brain tissue, and can often be difficult to detect during surgery once the bulk of the tumor is removed? since the hydrogel has to be applied directly to the cancerous cells to work, how does the surgeon determine placement of the hydrogel to brain tissue once the bulk of the glioblastoma is removed? is it just a 'place and pray' type of deal? none of these questions are answered in the paper.
also, they claim to use allogenic glioblastoma xenograft tumor cells here, but this type of glioblastoma tumor cell line is known to be unable to flow through the blood (doesn't properly metastasize) after the cells have been introduced into the mouse subjects due to complications related to culturing and immunogenically altering these lab treated cells, even though they claim in their abstract and introduction that the cancer cells do flow through the blood after the original infusion has taken place, once the cancer cells have taken hold in the target area, which is a conflict with the reality of this cell line type, in my opinion. this discrepancy is never addressed. how did they overcome this cell line's propensity to fail to metastasize? moreover, I felt that they did not fully describe the biological mechanism by which their supposed process actually works. they just kind of say that it works (somehow) and then show their falsified results. I can't believe their application for animal test subjects was approved by Harvard's IACUC for research that, in my opinion, doesn't demonstrate a fully formed mechanism for the function of this technology (i.e. they don't explain why or how this works thoroughly) and that I'm not convinced is actually useful in cancer treatment due to the method of usage. and their suggestion at the end of their abstract and their paper in total is that the next step is to test this mysterious technology on HUMAN subjects! they basically say 'this is a foundational study and the next step is human research'.
moreover, the data fraud here is so brazen it's truly shocking, even to me. using product images for antibodies and MSC cells from biotech company websites is beyond fraud - it's unbelievable. at this point, there is clearly a culture of criminality and scientific fraud at Harvard that cannot be ignored. as far as I'm concerned, every paper published by anyone that has gotten ahead academically at Harvard needs to be reviewed for evidence of fraud, and peer reviewed for real by people outside of the university to determine whether it should have even been published in the first place (i.e. is this even useful or well described science). Harvard needs to be investigated thoroughly.
Excellent post
Thanks for the professional explanation!
Thanks for this informative comment.
Finally, an *actual* person with the *actual expertise*. Not just a mere 8 y.o that claim as one
As someone who has a bit of doubt whether or not I want a biomedical engineering degree, this comment inspires me
there should be large cash rewards for these kinda debunks, fraudulent science is such a horrible thing
yeah and all the people paying journals for these fake articles should be paid back too.
I have a new business idea:
> Publish fake research, get paid
> Publish article exposing the fake research, get paid
> Repeat
@@JoshusBarber modern problems...etc.
No, there should be draconian repercussions for the charlatans publishing these papers. The same should apply to the humanities which are responsible for this scourge and tries to pose as scientific when they’re just ideological. Their “studies” are used to set economic and social policies and are incredibly damaging and wasteful.
Isn’t this fraud and should be prosecuted?!?! No accountability = no fear/deterrent = expect more fraudulent behavior to come
Imagine how rampant this fraud actually is, when you realize that most researchers are not this lazy with their fraud. As a pathologist myself, I’m skeptical of almost every cancer paper I ever see.
I’m afraid that if we somehow were able to find out what is true and what is data fabrication in cancer biology (or science in general), we would have to redo pretty much everything. That, or just quit science.
"Experts" have gone unchecked for far too long
“Trust the science”, they say. “Listen to the experts.” No thanks lmao
You'll have to go to the beginning of modern (medical) "science", germ theory vs terrain theory, the involvement of J.D. Rockefeller in modern medicine and the family in the world medical/healthcare industry.
@@BlueBones8science sucks, let's all believe in flat earth
The whole point of senior researchers having their names on these papers was the assurance of proper oversight.
"I didn't really pay much attention to this paper I put my name on" is quite a damning admission.
A lot of senior researchers get their names put on projects that they have absolutely ZERO interaction with.
This is done because it fosters junior PI’s relationship with them, and gives the paper more credibility.
This is especially stupid considering how picky some PI’s can be about putting their actual research assistants and coordinators names onto it (you know… the people who ACTUALLY collect and process the data). You would think that PI’s would respect their employees who are the ones doing all of the ACTUAL work!
Such a stupid system and way of doing things. It doesn’t just purposelessly rob undergraduates and even graduates of the proper career development (which would be free to give them and could be more readily provided), but also robs the future of the industry and the future of science.
What a shock. The world's rich kids are doing the exact same thing their parents did to our banking system and didn't get punished for. I am outraged and alarmed and never suspected anything like this for a moment.
this seems similar to how top athletes are often juiced or how many forbes billionaires are fraudsters. When you rank the top people within a group, then you will get those who are at the top in terms of skill, luck, as well as fraud. Seems like one explanation for why this is so common in top universities
It goes to literally every competive field that the top handful get stupidly rich, even videogames and journalism. It always ends up just selling a power fantasy to the masses.
Now I know why Harvard and the like don't hire me and I never become a multi-millionaire... I am too honest.
The incentive structures of everything you have list caters to fraudsters. Almost all successful tech start ups are sketchy as hell
Genuinely makes you disbelief in the whole American idea of meritocracy
@@reviewchan9806Good. Because American meritocracy IS a farce pushed by exactly the same people in power. It is in their best interest that YOU believe in it, so you fall in line and don't question or compete with their power. I say that as someone who went to an Ivy+ school.
My daughter worked for the EPA for two years after college. She worked on Thyroid studies. She quit due to data dishonesty, illegal lab practices and horrible management. Her direct manager was restricted from working in the labs after my daughter files a report. Apparently this is a huge issue at the EPA.
I was head of a thyroid patient org. What you describe does not surprise me. Thyroid research is utter shit. So badly done, lying about results, much of the most fundamental research is yet to be actually done. Would very much have liked to be able to message you and get to know more, but I suppose it's not possible. Well done to your daughter though
@@thyroidtube3739my god I just started working in that field. First thing I have to do is writing on a review and I'm so so glad I'm not the only one seeing the contradictions in those studies! Thank you for rescuing my sanity I thought I was going crazy because some of those things CAN'T BE RIGHT. There's a relatively old paper for example claiming they found proteins in cell compartments where they aren't even located. And this is cited by review after review without anyone checking if this makes sense since we know where those proteins are located nowadays.
It's absolutely flabbergasting!
@@thyroidtube3739 I am an aspiring physicist currently in high school. Seeing the cases of academic misconduct is bothering me a lot this year. How is it possible that the people at the very top of academia are doing fraudelant activities. Aren't those guys there for the love of their respective fields?
@@unknownrealms8452Well who knows. I suspect that every institution is corrupt. I think it's an inevitable development, actually, I have been thinking about that. The more an institution - such as Cochrane, for instance, or a university, say, or a scientific journal - acquire status the more people will protect their place in it, I think, and the more they will break fundamental moral principles in order to protect that status. Something like that. It's often not at all about money, it's about status, legacy, stuff like that. And I also think that many have more faith in others than in themselves. "It¨s no big deal if I break a little rule here and there. Everyone else is probably doing the right thing, so science is probably safe and I get my PhD/tenure/publication. I am just doing it now, only this time, just to get ahead. Who is going to find out?". Am sure you have read up on the replication crisis, if not, please do. And very good luck with your aspirations. We need proper science, not more gender studies.
It's a horrible problem in any industry where regulatory capture is benificial.
My bestie wrote a paper about 10 years ago and submitted it to a well-known and prominent journal. She was the only author. Her paper was immediately accepted with no edits. Her supervisor was very excited that it was so well received, insisted that she change it so that he was included at a co-author, even though he never even read her paper (he was away on sabatical and she submitted it without letting him know). She was upset that all her hard work was going to be "diluted" if she included his name. He pressured her so much that she gave in as she had not yet completed her doctorate. The university she attended had just the year before, started to encourage faculty to submit as many papers as possible each year as their salary was pegged to the number of papers that were published. Every one of her lecturers who only taught (that is, did not also write research papers) resigned as their pay essentially was half that of the professors who had their names all over as many papers as possible. I am sure this happens in hundreds of universities around the world.
It's the norm for PhD advisor's name to be on every paper you publish during your time as a PhD student. It doesn't 'dilute' your contributions, as you'd be the first name anyway. Everyone understands when they see it as well.
@@superneenjaa718 Yes, that's true. However, it's pretty insane for him to make money off a paper he didn't even look at while she probably didn't make any additional money as a student.
@@superneenjaa718If the only advice(/coercion through position of power) you give, is to put your name on it. Then you're not an advisor, you're quite literally a criminal.
If as a society we don't punish criminals, then the non criminals will be punished by the criminals. The law of incentives dictates that you will get a criminal society.
This is what's happening at my university. I'm an undergrad research assistant and my professor hates having to ask her PhD students to put out more papers. Apparently the university will not giver her tenure unless she puts out more papers.
Immediately accepted lol something fishy there
This is a reflection on the state of our society: the absence of any sense of ethics, the level of entitlement of those at the top combined with the lack of accountability of those in politics, in the government, in the judiciary, in business and in academia is astounding. This kind of behavior is a
the result.
Unfortunately, that's not the problem. Problem started with the Rand corporation and the whole culture of MBA types. 50 years ago, if you were a professor, in any field, you get tenure by showing to your colleges that you bright, smart and do good research. The MBA and Economic types in Rand decided that's not good enough, instead we have to have metrics on everything that government spend money on and for Academia, it was decided that paper number of citation count is the metric, not because it's relevant really but because no one could have come up with better metric.
So now we have a system in which honest people are punished and cheaters get all the benefits. Many of this paper are done with substantial budgets and even if they are not replicated elsewhere no one can proof frauds. Hence, if you are an honest Academics, you can never match the productivity of these guys and you will fall behind -? you don't get to go to a good research university -> won't get research grants -> won't publish honest research.
Honestly, this system would never work and we would soon find that most published research are bullshit now. We have to go back to the system in which there are select few scientist that are selected mainly based on what they did in they PhD years and get tenure quickly in 2 years instead of publish or parish pressure. We don't need professors to be mini-CEO's of their research labs like they currently are.
Years ago, I helped my professor with some vector art for an illustration. It was maybe 15 mins of work and he still attributed me. Point being not all researchers are void of integrity, but it gets hard when you see your peers pull this stuff.
I worked in cancer research twice and trying to find enough evidence to validate my results was really exhaustive and long, my supervisor would not accept until i covered every analytical possible to confirm my results so in my head that's how is always supposed to work. Being in research really broke my spirit, so many people just want the prestige and the awards, while when i was a kid i just wanted to do it because it sounds cool to be super intelligent and help people, it has never been about the money or fame, at least for me,but in reality is a bunch of men children fighting about who has the biggest lollipop a lot of times.
That's true. I quit
Darwin got the biggest lollipop and scammed us all .. .. ...
ironically they also have the smallest lollipops, if u know what i mean
@@Brukrexhow? I'm not well versed in biology
Yep
For a number of years I was a reviewer for a lowly engineering journal produced solely by volunteers at various universities and I took my job very seriously. How this level of academic fraud can be so pervasive is just astounding to me.
If you thought its more now, just wait till these fraudsters get a hold of image generation AI. That would be so hard to catch. There is no way to detect duplications
Money money moneyyy
Yeah you were likely just another fraudster yourself.
Harvard has been corrupt since at least the 60s when the nutritional science sold their scientific soul to the Adventist cult food industry agenda.
Which journal? Thanks
The peer review process relies on the honor system.
They aren't looking for evidence of fraud, the peer review process is mainly looking to see if the paper is well written.
When a research paper goes through the peer review process they are mainly checking for spelling ,grammar ,format and math errors.
People have placed more importance on the peer review process (and Doctorates) than it deserves.
Right, that and basic sanity checking of the result, papers do get rejected quite a lot if they are obviously wrong, the issue is of course when a result is nontrivial to reproduce so that you have to take the author's word for it.
Peer reviewed should mean some prominent scholars reviewed and responded it formally in writing. Ideally we should get a supporter as well as an opponent response.
But the modern trend of peer review is pretty much just what Grammerly does, it just sounds important. The real peer reviews come after now.
You forgot one major aspect that can doom a research paper, at least in certain fields; how much does it contradict the established scientific narrative?
@@Eyes0penNoFear That's not going to doom any paper. If you manage to write something reproducible and well founded that contradicts the leading theories in a field most journals will be extremely happy to publish. Most great research is great because it upturns the status quo.
@@BosonCollider Not only that, I even know a fairly toxic professor who doesn't include all his details in the methods section specifically SO nobody can replicate his work - that way he has no rivals in the future.
Years ago any research coming out of Harvard was considered the gold standard. Now, in light of all the plagiarism and then questionable research, anyone should think twice about the academic and scientific integrity of any Harvard study or publication.
If it's a pillar of society it's probably made of paper. Then filled with poo.
Elizabeth Bik, the hero we need.
"How did you manage to sleuth out these peer-reviewed, and dastardly cases of academic research fraud?"
"Well, unlike the people who formally reviewed the papers, I actually bothered to look at the data contained therein."
This is the saddest part of the video.
a university should just have that one woman look for data fraud full time. it would be worth more than 10 professors doing research to have one person checking to make sure there is no frauds.
That's like compensation consultants. They are well paid with the incentive to do nothing important, make minor recommendations and watch the drama unfold
@@samsonsoturian6013 its a lot of work though mate. you would need to be smart enough to be able to know a paper is fraudulent. most people have no way of knowing...
@@samsonsoturian6013 shes actually doing a super important function. you need to be very skilled to determine if fraud happened in a very niche academic paper. the trouble is nobody reads most papers so the fraud is easily un-detected
Literally they should hire the biggest Harvard haters to just comb through data looking for fraud. 1 hater can do the work of 3 Harvard lovers who secretly don't want to find fraud.
@@samsonsoturian6013 exactly i you pay an executive $1m less and they dont quit thats the same as making $1m in profit for the company
I'm not saying I was anything near the level of Harvard (reputation wise) but when I was a bachelor in molecular biology in my Uni, I experienced the same. We were supposed to check if using specific wavelengths of non-ionizing radiation, more on the RF spectrum, would have a killing effect on cancer cells. Needless to say, cancer irradiation today is with strong radiation, It damaged you and the cancer.
RF is just normally thought off as being too weak to have any effect.
So we grew some lung cancer cells in dishes and used the physics department particle accelerator (no idea, that's what they said) to create the correct radiation. No noticeable effect.
But if you never been in biology, you need to know this - if you get a good result the explanation is pretty to the point and brief and leaves a good impressions.
If you get negative result you're expected to go head over heels to explain why it's not working as is and it's very annoying.
So my mentor, tenured doctor, told me to nudge the images and results to me more favorable.
This and the general self importance of alot of the doctors, lectures and professors made me lose respect for the field.
Knowing what doesn't work is as valuable as knowing what does work. It may even help lead to something that works.
- Thomas Edison, sort of
In your case, publishing what you tried that didn't succeed could easily lead someone to think about it, and maybe think, "But what if we changed this one thing?" And if they succeed, you're cited in THEIR paper.
I guess that makes too much sense, though.
Whose idea was this?
Was it yours and you were slave to professor?
Why use the word 'Slave'? you're just coming off as a jerk, not edgy or corky or whatever you were going to. You don't get much say in your seminar final paper.
Anyway, was the professor's idea, but then again the whole idea was pretty doomed from the get go, and like I stated you'd have to write some shpill why it didn't work rather than showing a 2 fold increase (which is nothing. like 2% dead cells in control versus 4% in the treated. It's not even that significant) and a much straight forward explanation with some bull future premise. It wouldn't go anywhere anyway.@@charlesdarwin5185
@@CrumpetsNBiscuits the ideation for the project is by the professor. People just have to work long hours will poor pay.
Is ct scan type stuff irradiation bad too?
Nobody was supposed to be looking, it's Harvard, the most prestigious of all gentlemen's clubs, and the good, upstanding, respectable scholars of Harvard are beyond reproach. Respectability is the refuge of scoundrels; it's so much easier to engage in fraud when you're perceived as a trustworthy and upstanding researcher of the highest pedigree.
I mean, it's hardly a gentlemen's club anymore
It's incredible that they did not even think of rotating or mirroring the images, or applying any sort of transformation.
The president of the University of Kiel, Germany also recently stepped down from her position due to data manipulation accusations in her papers.
She worked in molecular cancer research, focussing on pediatric and adolescent cancer biology.
Peer review processes for academic and scientific journals need a major overhaul. Personally I think that authors should be required to submit their deidentified data sets, and there shouls be an independent reviewer that verifies statistical methods. Having published a handful of articles as a junior researcher, I have not once been asked for actual data. there also seems to be this underlying assumption that scientists will be honest. Obviously not. So greater oversight is needed. 10,000 papers were retracted last year. This is staggering!
It's not peer review process. It's PAL REVIEW PROCESS. Their friends and co-fraudsters "review" the publications.
@@elvisnnaemeka6722 I wouldn't even call it that; I'd say it's more in line with racketeering. Except instead of burning down your home or shop if you don't pay protection money they'll torch your career if you don't hail them as being geniuses in their field.
Peer review relies on scientists giving other scientists the benefit of the doubt. If every single data point is scrutinized, then there’s no time for an actual job. I understand where you’re coming from, but peer review is a voluntary process that is incredibly important but requires a lot of commitment from the scientific community.
I like ihe idea of people being required to publish their data sets, I think they should also be required to define what statistical methods they used on it (they often don't).
However, I think the bigger issue is journals. They should be rid of entirely. They are predatory, and in my opinion, one of the root causes of all this (the other being research grants being awarded the way they are). The journals do nothing, make massive amoutns of money doing things which cost minisclue amounts. They charge scientists massive amounts to publish their papers, they encourage the whole more papers = better researcher mentalilty. They make people pay to even look at the research papers (yes, the scientists don't make them so hard to access by choice, that is entirely the publishers fault). Just to make it clear: hey charge people to submit their papers AND they charge people to read said papers. They do moderate and do peer review, but guess what!? They don't actually do that either, they get other scientists to do it, for free, for them. So you can't even say all the money they make goes to that.
What do they do, then, that costs the hundreds of millions people give each of the big publishers every year? Well... they print a magazine sized book once a month, and have a website that hosts all the papers. It probably costs them more money to stop people who didn't pay from reading the papers than it costs to run the entirety of their business (their actual business, which is printing a magazine once a month and hosting a website, not all the bloat they use to justify all their penny pinching).
They have started to do this with psychological research where researchers can post their hypotheses and method prior to conducting the research and then posting all raw data into a data base so other researchers can do their own statistical analyses. I don't know how widely it's used though.
This begs the question of how much medical practice could potentially be based on fraudulent information, if it is so easy to commit this kind of manipulation and influence so much other work before being caught.
Ultimately there is a rigorous clinical trial process before any drugs are approved by the FDA. In the pharmaceutical world, academic literature is garbage.
I suggest reading the Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz.
Nina in the book goes through how the Diet Heart Hypothesis was instituted not because of good evidence but simply because Ancel Keys was influential.
She goes into a good bit of the supporting evidence and how bad those studies are and even more so, how much the opposing scientists were bullied out of the conversation.
I can recall a very recent mass experiment that lasted a few years.
Just ask your doctor.
@@StandAloneState I know, right? Huge stonking great elephant being ignored in these comments!
Tough days for science and its public image.
The rot is being exposed.
It’s truly unfortunate that every new case of fraud can erode the public’s trust and HOPE in science. on the other hand, fraudsters will always exist. I’m glad the ones that have, have been exposed, and hopefully it wont take as long next time someone similar comes along!
@thesleepydot Wokism is antiscientific and it has infected from the top down. Couple that with corporate capture and it is the Dark Ages all over again.
The truth coming out is always a good thing
I fucking love it
Thank you for exposing all these higher education research scandals! No wonder why so many people with Phd can't make any difference in this world.
I wanna thank you for getting the word out and explaining everything really well so that someone like me who has no background in research or academia, can understand all of this easily. That's a gift!
Response to the title: Yes, it is. It has been for decades and it's only been getting worse with time. Hopefully now that some attention has been going to this problem maybe we can begin to address some of the problems.
Cancer research has a notoriously low rate of replication so this makes sense.
Low reproduction rate is the goal no? Lead by example.
@amarissimus29 I thought high reproducibility is ideal
@@philkim8297I think, it was a joke about not wanting cancer cells to reproduce quickly
@@philkim8297 no no, you want the cancer cells to replicate less, so this is good
@amarissimus29 @philkim8297 @schokilooover @tinycervid7679 I wasn't trying to make a joke but I will take the compliments on it. In science currently there is a massive crisis, it is not making the news for the most part for some reason. But of peer reviewed cancer research only about 30% can be replicated, which means 70% is bunk.
You mentioned several times that the frauds were unbelievably lazy. It makes me wonder just how much fraud is going undetected simply by being less lazy.
One shortcoming of the peer review process is that it’s not meant to look for fraud, and largely works with the assumption of the data being honest. The main purpose of peer review is to assess that the topic of the paper is relevant to the field, that the methods used are appropriate to address the questions being asked, that the interpretation of the results make sense, and that there are no major unresolved questions. Maybe we need a better system to look for fraud?
Like incetivising replication studies?
What a nice little loophole regarding the PPT that a viewer sent you. "I'm not gonna credit you because I didn't ask you"
👌👌👌
It's so great that you cover this. I'm a PhD student and it feels awful to hear that lies and fraud exist in research too, but knowing is half the battle I guess
Don't give up. You will be rewarded when you go to Google Scholar and look at number of citations you receive and ResearchGate when you get a notification
I have wanted to go to a certain Ivy League school. I was in contact with one of the professors. The environment, all, everything has changed so much and I have been warned to not go there ever, because it's not the school, it used to be.
It's really sad.
Sounds like Yale. But it could be any of them.
It's worrisome to think about the fact that people getting caught get caught because they do basically nothing to cover their tracks. Think about the fact that their are other people committing fraud who are at least a little clever about hiding their misdeeds.
I am not surprised to hear this about Harvard.... Harvard (and all academic institutions) needs to seriously assess how grad students, pra's, and postdocs can safely report academic dishonesty and falsifications. Even though they find out about it after they join the lab and start working, they may have very little choice about next steps. I really feel for the junior investigators who are powerless in this situation.
Researches in Health Sectors have always been shady. Aside from this, it is weird how you got two different research, both peer reviewed, claiming the exact opposite thing. So many times I have heard two different doctors saying the exact opposite thing on a particular topic. Same goes for nutritionists.
Peer review system now is totally broken. Good, precise, and constructive reviewers are very very rare. Oftentimes, they are just destructive, horrible and judging the "name of the institute" or "who is this person's supervisor" rather than the true content of the research. In my field, the circle is quite small like they almost know each other. This even lets the reviewer to play politics with each other, like if you try to publish in the wrong journal (that some person is a frequent reviewer or editor at that journal) you will be automatically rejected (and sometimes even with a very mean rejecting letter). But if you published in the "correct" journal like your supervisor knows the editor, it will be very easy to get published with a very little check on your data. So, it's not surprising at all that someone from a super big-named institute like the Harvard got a little check on their result despite being peer-reviewed.
It's too tightly knit
It only broke down once we stopped being a high trust society
@@SlateprocNo, it broke down *because* we were a high trust society, and we let in untrustworthy elements.
@@Arcessitor so we stopped being a high trust society?
“Publish or perish” has become “publish fake data and perish if caught”
Regarding your spot for Ground News, I just want to note that while "Another Cheater" is loaded language, "Newest Target" is also biased, because it implies the accused person is a victim ("target") instead of simply reporting on the accusations.
r/whoosh 🤦That's the *exact* point that Pete was making.
Do your friends call you Captain Obvious?
Or perhaps watch again and you *might* learn something. Sheesh
@@donttalkcrap Are you talking to me?
In fact, my point was not his point. Pete's point was (among other things) that the first headline was "a lot more pejorative, a lot more emotional" than the second headline. He made no point at all about the second headline, other than to say that it was different from the first. My point is that calm-seeming language can still show bias.
Both are OBVIOUSLY biased.. What's your point?
@@jpgalo99 My point is obvious.
@@Zzyzzyx Obviously. That's the exact point ☝️ 🤣
NOT RESPECT WHATSOEVER FOR PEOPLE WITH CANCER AND WAITING FOR HOPE FOR NEW RESERCH ,IT IS CRIMINAL😢😢😢😢
time for an independent organization thats not affliated to these colleges to peer review these papers. Cant trust thiefs checking other thiefs if someone stole
Wonder how long it will take the world to understand that if you want actual competence, looking for it in a group of people linked together only by how lucky they where when born and the amount of money they have, is a terrible way to go about finding it.
In this case they cheated their pay to the top. Cheaters have an unfair advantage... most people with any power are cheaters. It should be assumed anyone with money and power lied and did evil to get there because 99.9% of them did. Unfortunately now the lunatics run everything so good luck curing that cancer.
i hope im lucky enough to be apart of them
Competence isn't something you are born with. It is a product of lifestyle.
And it is by luck. Everything is by luck.
And you will keep being clueless about how things are or about how to get smarter scientists because you are not aware of tools which boost smartness nor use them regularly.
There is not one minute spent at universities to train better cognitive neural maps in the whole time they are there.
It is like stressing people out about a foot race but never teaching them on a single practice session while making them memorize the history of shoelaces. The outcomes of that race are going to be : very slow.
You have to train the mind like anything else - but it is complex in its nature and the very training changes how you think so ...
@@agnidas5816 "Tools which boost smartness" Idk man. Maybe you need them more than I do.
"Not one minute spent at universities to train better cognitive neural maps in the whole time they are there."
I'm gunna assume you meant, "There is not one minute at universities that isn't used to train better cognitive neural maps, in the whole time they are there."
In which case that's obviously crap, given lots collages in the US are glorified party houses. But even then I never said that there is zero universities that teach competence. Harvard just isn't one of those. Its a rich persons wank party.
Plus rich people don't give a rats ass about finding a cure for cancer for everyone, just for their own "elite" circles.
The pressure in the academe is that the more scientific publications you have your name, the better. This corresponds with the higher likelihood of approval of funding and grant applications. Also papers take years for the data collection and analysis, trial design, ethics review, etch. It is easier to plagiarize or fabricate information. This however severely impedes the progress of science just for the aim of prestige of multiple flawed academics.
Peer-reviewing without reverse-processing the images? Wtf!
The incentive for peer review is to read the abstract, make suggestions for improvement, and get the street cred for involvement
If that's what you expect from peer reviews then you have WAY too much trust in academia😂
@@jonnyd9351Well, they're not paid, and they do it in their own time, and they're given far too many papers to review each properly.
Blame the journals, this is their fault entirely.
@@ichigo_nyanko To add, papers are really long and can take hours to read thoroughly. The way they are presented can be an absolute drag and bore to read. Some are like reading a poorly written novel.
And on top of the many papers researchers have to peer review, they have to read many more papers for their own research to support their claims.
peer review was never about checking for fraud. that would take too much time. papers take hours to read, and longer to understand. peer review assumes no fraud or lying.
Can Harvard sue those people for fraud? I don't think they should get to say "oops, you got me! Sorry!" There should be legal consequences for to deter that kind of fraud😡
When paper publishers lock the papers behind paywall, it discourages peer review from the layman.
Sure, you can argue that your average person isn't checking these papers out, but just because the average person won't be able to understand the science, doesn't mean they can't spot below average photoshop.
Profiting off scientific publications will only encourage these behaviors, and discourage looking for it.
This is crazy. I work at a bank and we have to employ independent teams to replicate everything we do to satisfy the Federal Reserve. And we’re just predicting how much money we’re going to make. So life saving research and most other scientific research has no meaningful oversight, while we actually do what these institutions should be doing just to make sure we’re not wrong about what our future balance sheet might look like.
quite odd thinking about this when the federal reserve isnt even a government agency or at all a system the constitution calls for
Their IRB dropped the ball
The problem is, in science, duplicating experiments require A LOT of time and resource and money. And there simply isn't the time, resource and personel to do this - because nobody funds replication of experiments and no prestige is given to those that do so. If we want to fix the system, we have to completely revamp the funding system as well as increase it by a lot if we still want the same output. All of this is driven by how prestige and financial rewards are given out.
My (recently) late father who was a Phd of Agrobiosciences told me that he stopped publishing papers since there's a lot of fraud in academia, he didn't want to be even adjacent to it. At the time I didn't believe him, I thought he just didn't want to publish papers because it's a hassle, but it seems he was telling the truth
I recently submitted my first author paper for publication and am currently writing my dissertation. Western blots have given me the absolute worst time - I spent months troubleshooting. I cannot fathom how people get away with such blatant image manipulation.
There is a tendency to regard WB's as "easy" in comparison to PCR or ELISA when it is in fact much more difficult. I know only a handful of people that can consistently make representative WB's and figure out why they are "not working." It is even harder for trainees since they need to be focused on their dissertation, and not on bench technique.
The problem is probably not you, it is probably your PI.
Good job!
Call ALL of these liars out!
Holy shit. Something else is going on at Harvard that we’re not privy to currently. Larry Sommers was quite the shady character and to think his “legacy” died is total bs. Whitney Webb goes into this stuff pretty deeply.
cant even trust the Harvard morgue to not sell your grandma's body parts
The concept of academia conflicts strongly with the pressures of capitalism.
If one school has this problem then they all do.
"Peer-Reviewed" Image searches are just beyond peer-reviewers...
The sad fact is that in Academia hardly anybody understands or can adequately evaluate anybody's work. No time an Too complicated.
It’s Harvard, I am 40 and it’s been the most prestigious university in the country my entire life.
This happens in everyday workplace too.
I have seen too many colleagues lying their way out of everything.
Every university should have some sort of article reviewer division. A group of people whose sole job is to review their university’s publications and that of collaborative publications. So if it comes to light that the publication is fraudulent, entire universities and not just individuals are implicated.
The only solution is to value rigor and hypothesis or work more than the supposedly extraordinary conclusions!
It's hard to think that would happen when most uni underpay research staff and are understaffed in research departments. We have to get money from charities and governments to fund ourselves and our projects. It's not as lucrative as spending money on property investment or opening more courses and programmes for foreign students who pay a lot.
@@marionettekent Make it a matter of university reputation, not that of a scientific faculty. If they cut corners with reviewing, they will hurt the entire university and not just the scientific faculties or individuals. As in, you want to do proper scientific research? Then you must spend money on this, otherwise your institution wouldn’t be taken seriously.
Thank you Elisabeth Bik for sharing her findings!
I used to work at a Harvard lab 30 years ago. I had to share the waterbath with an Indian guy from the adjacent lab. I couldn't understand why my Northern blot experiment never worked even after I repeted it 3-4 times and Lost a month.
And then I came to work one morning at 5:30 and found the waterbath ice cold and that guy turning the knobs on it. I started immediately looking for a lab where I could perform my experiment unobstructed, and I was allowed to use the lab equipment at the MGH and the Northern blot results were great. At that time all the postdocs in my lab conducted the experiments according to nationality: the Japanese doc with a Japanese group, a Russian with a Russian group etc.The head of the lab cut short that practice and we are not allowed to leave the lab. So, I never told him what was going on. Working after hours at a different location was not possible on a long run and I quit.So did an American post doc who worked on the same project with me. The head of the lab was furious , he called us incompetent and hired another post doc, they submitted a paper and had to retrieve it because of faking the results. After returning to the totalitarian Slovenia, I was banned from scientific work and any academic career because I did not produce any paper at Harvard.
Remember when they said the Internet would make us all more honest? No one would dare do this, it would be so easy to find . . .
The thing that always strikes me when I think about this is that if this kind of OBVIOUS fraud makes it through peer-review, then what about all the cleverly disguised stuff? The whole body of knowledge is called into question (seems like medical sciences and social sciences are particularly bad, but all of them are really in a bad place). We let the system erode to the point where it simply no longer works.
One of my dreams of being in this field is this type of awareness… fabrication/falsification awareness and trying to keep people honest in research. I hope to somehow do something big in this area as it really pisses me off how much work we do in research just for someone to do one or two little things (although it’s small, it makes a HUGE impact) that will cause research to just be obsolete from the sheer dishonesty. The things patients/subjects go through in research, then someone fucks it up. Seriously makes me angry. I’ve been involved in practically every step of research from models,experimental design, through preclinical research, and now in human research. I’ve seen everything and how challenging everything is… how long everything takes and how many people are involved. How dare people just do something as small as changing a picture or even numbers to just throw MILLIONS of dollars on just ONE project down the drain. Ugh.
any 'peer' that 'reviewed' these papers should be under scrutiny too - as well as any papers THEY published.
I really don’t know what to do about this. It’s clear that the current “publish or perish” system incentivizes cutting corners, forging data, etc., and quantity > quality of papers. Research shouldn’t stop though; there are obviously a lot more important questions that need to be answered. Where should the money come from? Crowdfunding seems unrealistic at best (and that’s already happening with interest groups like the AMA, AAMC, ACS, Alzheimer’s Association, etc. constantly asking for donations), and corporate/government grants introduce potential bias. So much goes into this, but science one of the most important things in modern society, and it needs to continue (the right way.)
Faking research, go to jail, degree taken away. Maybe a public flogging.
So in reality, it is Elisabeth that deserves the Nobel Prize.
Just because researchers have a lot of publications under their belt does not mean that you should put your guard down. The lax security on research like this is just not right. I hope there are criminal charges for all parties in the wrong.
Any Alumn of Harvard before the year 2015 is properly embarrassed to say they went to Harbor… Really any Ivy League school. So embarrassing to our country
More like since before 1995 and the internet
Name at the end, blame at the end. The honor of being last author comes with responsibilities.
All PHD holders need to be investigated for plagiarism.
In 2002 I saw a journal article that was a direct copy of my dissertation from 1996, but the truth is it can be career suicide to go up against tenured professors in your own field. If they cheated once, they can do it again by creating fake notes showing they did it years before but waited to publish.
@@orionspur That's terrible. With AI, it's absolutely possible. I hear they are now hiding dissertations to protect their DEI hires. This is after the Harvard President scandal. She checked all the boxes including her last name.
Makes me think about the show Suits where they only hire lawyers from Harvard due to the reputation of that school.
If they were making that show today, they would need to choose a different school 😂
Not really. First, the undergrad sciences and Harvard law are fairly separate, they have separate cultures, oversight, separate admissions, etc. The main thing people look for in a college is how good the department they want to major in is, and don’t care about whether some other department they will never take a class in is having issues.
And law is not research. In law you get paid by the hours worked or a salary. But research has a “publish or perish” culture that promotes fraud. Getting funding and grants to keep a lab going is based on getting positive results….finding not just something new, but which is something of a breakthrough or which makes a splash in the field. But those results are rare, and if people feel their income is under threat….some will fake results.
Plus I would not blame Harvard unless they hired someone already known to commit fraud. If someone has a great track record, and you hire them based off of that, I wouldn’t say that you were at fault if they later got caught for the first time doing something shady. That is on them.
@@Itried20takennamesthey have hired professors that have been known to be fraudulent in their research. And have been slow to rid themselves of dishonest professors. Riding their damaged reputation into the ground.
Funny how the one lawyer that didn’t go to Harvard Law turns out to be the smartest one
I've struggled with getting a PhD for the past few years. Especially since my oldest God-Daughter finished medical school. One of the things putting me off was just how much time and energy someone puts into their dissertation research and since I work full time...well, it'd kill me. But after seeing just how hard career academics work I think to myself "damn, I could probly pick up another full time job AND get my PhD if I do it like them!"
Thanks Pete for helping expose fraudulent research. Public exposure of this kind of behavior is vital, because without any consequences this kind of behavior will continue.
My take is that we've set up naïve organizational structures which are ripe for exploitation by people with criminal mindsets.
Sounds like the “peer reviewers” need to be named as well. Who are these people?
Shouldn't they also be holding the peer reviewers accountable? Since they likely picked reviewers that wouldn't sound the alarms on their fraud.
If they hold peer reviewers accountable they won't have new ones offering to volunteer at risk of being punished.
I am so excited this channel exists! great job dude!
3:40-4:12 i love how even describing the supposed MSC-Bif cells the research team 'made' sounds way too good to not be fraud
What, no-coauthors realized that the photos were not from their own experiments? What kind of co-authors are these people? Are they real? In my area of physics, the papers are read carefully by others after publication, who can easily verify the results on with own, and no such fraud has been seen (or needed).
I would guess they are either complicit or committed the fraud themselves due to pressure from the main author to deliver positive results without outright asking them to fake it.
bet some of these 'authors' have no real contributions at all and just raking up their publications tally... more frauds
I was told I had a yr to live. I left the docs office. Never went back. That was 30 years ago. Diagnosis was cancer. Apparently the kind that don't kill you. Cervical cancer
I would be embarrassed to put Harvard on my resume.
imo, as long as the number and notoriety of publications are valued more than honest and replicable results, nothing will change. Journals don't publish research with boring results, when the answer is "we tried this thing and it didn't work". Academic institutions don't give funding or tenure to scientists who don't get frequent and exciting publications. Scientists don't want to lose their funding based on their inability to get published. if folks cant guarantee their livelihood from their honest research, fudging the results can be very enticing. i hope this changes.
This is my *favorite* topic of yours to touch on; failing western academia mainly blatant fakes in powerful and inherently respected positions.
Why does this keep happening? They must know that the truth will come out eventually.
Because the journals and grant giving system incentivises cheating over scientific progress. If we didn't have such predatory systems lingering over these scientists head, they wouldn't feel pressured to either cheat or feel like a failure. Entire lives are made and broken over how many papers a person has, the way it is now. Colleccting data takes a long time. If you felt your livelihood was dependend on cheating to speed up data collection you would do it too (or at least, most people would). Just another reason to pay researchers way more than they are paid now, too. Researchers are paid barely above minimum wage in mnay places.
Eventually, after they reach the heights of their careers and be well off anyway
I feel like this is only the tip of the iceberg. Most get away with it
Why wouldn't it keep happening? If others don't have the money to replicate a study, or if the results could differ depending on the variation of participants, what is to stop them from lying completely as they have the knowledge to make it believable?
Why wouldn't it ? there was a huge scandal that 30% of Elsevier was faked and that is the biggest publication. EVeryone keeps using it like nothing happens so ... the cheaters are now safe in their nefarious activities.
When you are the final author that usually means you are the Principal Investigator who was funding or overseeing it. For example when I was at University the student who did the most research and writing would be the first author, followed by second third and so on, and then the professor would be the final author.
That doesn’t mean the last author has little to do with the content of the paper: on the contrary being final author is almost as prestigious as being first author, you are expected to review all the content and make sure it is correct, it is assumed you were the force behind designing the study, motivating the students to conduct the study, and identifying the correct analyses to perform