
Doubts about Johns Hopkins research have gone unanswered, scientist says - jalanco
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/doubts-about-johns-hopkins-research-have-gone-unanswered-scientist-says/2013/03/11/52822cba-7c84-11e2-82e8-61a46c2cde3d_story.html?hpid=z2#.UT-IYe5b9aw.hackernews
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taeric
I can't help but think some of this relates to this:
[http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about...](http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about_charity_is_dead_wrong.html)

The pressures that we put researchers under to deliver nothing but positive
results is terrible. There is an overhead to research. There is an overhead to
progress. Why do we try to eliminate it with such prejudice, when the
consequences seem so obviously dire?

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anigbrowl
I strongly agree. I was struck by the mention that in the 60s 2/3rds of
research projects were funded, whereas nowadays only 1/5th are. This is not
just due to stinginess; there are more research labs chasing funding and grant
applications have become professionalized, if not commercialized. Maybe this
is also a function of more people pursuing academic success as a career path,
because the rise of IT has resulted in a significant devaluation of labor-
intensive work and thus the earning power of people engaged in it.

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marcelsalathe
1/5? That would be nice... NIH funding levels are at 1/10 nowadays.

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plg
Paylines at many institutes are even lower, around 8% It's only going to get
worse with the sequester

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olefoo
I would trace this to the same root as the reason the largest banks are
allowed to walk away from open corruption and money-laundering. We have
inculcated into our society a servile deference to power. Nobody of any
importance is held accountable for their actions, even if they would be
universally recognized as wrong.

While it may be shocking that a laboratory director is more concerned with the
reputation of his institution than that it does good science in an ethical and
responsible; I doubt anyone is terribly surprised.

We know this, but to face it requires us to acknowledge our own complicity in
the lie that things are alright, that we live in a stable society that is not
on the verge of collapse. Our institutions are visibly failing, and we don't
know what we would replace them with.

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rayiner
Oh yes, because a bunch of academics or paper-pushers at NIH have any power...

The reality of why nobody addresses these concerns is:

1) It's bad publicity. Everyone is on board with making these things look
good, from the universities that support this research to the federal
government that spends billions funding this research. It doesn't serve
anybody's interest to blow the lid on something like this.

2) It's boring. It's too esoteric to explain to the average person what
actually constitutes scientific misconduct.

3) It's hard to pin down. Scientists aren't self-policing. Academics don't
have a culture of ripping into each others' work, and indeed academia has a
culture of letting everyone puff up their little egos. A given academic
doesn't really rip into other academics so they don't rip into him.

~~~
scott_s
_Academics don't have a culture of ripping into each others' work_

From my experience reviewing papers, being privy to program committee
discussions, listening to my colleagues talk, and attending conferences, I
have to disagree.

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tlarkworthy
indeed, and the biologists are some of the harshest.

~~~
scott_s
I think everyone thinks of their own field as the harshest.

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wuest
The crux of this sort of issue was laid bare relatively early in this article:
results and papers are more important than good science, which leads to an
increased incidence of fraud and related misconduct. If good science were
actually valued, one scientist wouldn't have been driven to suicide by the
fact that his research (assuming it was not fabricated to begin with) was
being questioned and the colleague who raised valid questions wouldn't have
lost his job. I can't imagine that this is all that uncommon a scenario.

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kpierre
Curiously, the data is publicly available:
<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/query/acc.cgi?acc=GSE29662>

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frozenport
It better be, the NIH paid for it and this kind of research must submit to an
NIH approved archiving service.

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drucken
_"Deceased respondents no longer pose a risk," the letter said._

\- classic! Yes, science stops when the scientist is dead, says the US
government ...

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RougeFemme
Or. . .even if doesn't stop, we now have an excuse to sit back and do nothing
until our chain is yanked again.

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skosuri
This is one side of a story of guy that had just been fired and is filing a
lawsuit. What exactly is the criticism of the paper since the paper is
available? If the only argument is the threshold to consider something a hit
or not on the screen, there is a ton of followup in the paper looking at those
genes more closely. Am I missing something?

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demetrius
I don't understand why you've mentioned "on the screen".

If the treshold is set too low, we'll end up with false positives. I.e. we'll
think the study shows something when in fact it doesn’t. And this is not
something that can be fixed in follow-up papers.

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skosuri
It was a genome wide screen looking for synthetic lethality with another gene.
As with all screens you get a bunch of hits and you follow up on the most
promising ones, which they did in the paper.

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plg
Shoot first and ask questions later. Better to apologize after than to ask
permission before. Too big to fail.

