
Researcher questions data in old paper by chloroquine researchers - GordonS
https://twitter.com/schneiderleonid/status/1242889208651448322
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bsaul
I'm not a biologist, but a friend of mine is. From what he told me, it is a
pretty common "practice" to alter results in many ways to meet the high
standard of scientific reviews, because of the pressure to get a publication.

Photoshopping curves to pimp your results, or simply "omitting" part of your
experiments that would make your statistics go down.

Note that most of them is done in moderately good faith : very often,
something obviously went wrong in one experiment and doesn't invalidate the
general idea behind a paper (i'm not saying it's ethical or even true).

Another thing for people not familiar with research paper : just having your
name as a coauthor doesn't mean you have anything to do with the actual
research beeing done. Most of the work is done by phds or post-doctoral
students.

Lab bosses probably don't have the time to double-check every single result of
every single paper, especially in a big labs, but they still appear as co-
author.

All of that to say : i wonder what is really specific to Mr Raoult, and what
is just the ugly side of a field brought to light because of media focus.

~~~
oceanghost
I worked at a very successful research lab in the UC system for a few years.
Nearly everything we did was fabricated. We would literally write proposals in
a day or two and DARPA would throw 250k at us. We'd have some undergrad f
around with a robot and video camera, write a paper and call it a day.

Everything was a business decision. I remember watching a PHD candidate being
told he needed to stay another year because basically, we needed him to get
grant money. I was an undergrad at the time and was offered a PHD track, but I
declined because I didn't want that to be me.

The experience has left me with a deep distrust of academic science.

~~~
agumonkey
do you know how prevalent this is ? maybe you met other people in other
fields.

~~~
oceanghost
I would wager science attracts immoral people at more or less the same rate
any other field. Look no futher than the reproducibility crisis.

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ash
More details from the tweet author:
[https://forbetterscience.com/2020/03/26/chloroquine-
genius-d...](https://forbetterscience.com/2020/03/26/chloroquine-genius-
didier-raoult-to-save-the-world-from-covid-19/)

~~~
agumonkey
So there are chances that it's yet another fallacious system induced 'start'
that may explode. Also the parallels with current PUSA psyche are too ironic.

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ejstronge
The title is editorialized, which goes against the HN rules. Linking to tweets
is challenging, as there’s sometimes not a lot of context, but even the tweet
doesn’t go as far as the HN title...

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qilo
Literally the 2nd tweet:

 _As reminder: Raoult 's paper on alleged #chloroquine cure of #COVID19 had
rigged, omitted or even falsified data and was published without peer review
in a journal he controls. Trial was not randomized, controlled or blinded in
any way._

[https://twitter.com/schneiderleonid/status/12429058031888220...](https://twitter.com/schneiderleonid/status/1242905803188822016)

~~~
ejstronge
Sorry, I did not have a chance to flesh this out. The current title
('questions data in old paper') is much more reasonable to describe a set of
PubPeer comments.

I'm not making any claims about the chloroquine study.

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amelius
It makes me wonder what their motivation was then, because this whole thing
only increased their chances of being exposed.

~~~
api
A lot of times people who do this are self-deluded. They "know" they are right
and just fudge it a bit to get that across.

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skat20phys
Vulnerable world, meet modern academics.

