A few days ago journalist Barney Calman published a thorough and well researched article about the problem of academic research fraud. Although the contents will seem familiar to any long time reader of the Daily Sceptic, it’s great news that much bigger audiences are now being exposed to information about the scale and nature of the problems inside scientific institutions.
In July the Daily Sceptic published an article by me entitled, “Photoshopping, fraud and circular logic in research“. It discussed the problem of Asian paper forging operations colloquially nicknamed “paper mills”, the Chinese Government policies that incentivise forging of scientific research, and cited former BMJ editor Richard Smith’s essay on the problem of fictional clinical trials. For classical journalists to write about a topic typically requires them to find an insider or specialist willing to put their own name on things – indeed, one of the major weaknesses of newspapers vs blog sites like this one is their reluctance to do original research into scientific topics. Scientists willing to put their names on allegations is the permission journalists need to cover a story like this – and now the Mail has it:
Speaking on the Mail on Sunday’s Medical Minefield podcast, Smith – who was involved in the investigations that exposed Malcolm Pearce – said:
“It’s shocking, but common. Many of these fraudulent studies are simply invented. There were no patients. The trial never happened.”
Research coming out of countries where doctors are commonly rewarded with pay rises for publishing their work – such as Egypt, Iran, India and China – is more likely to be faked, investigations show.
“In China, doctors can only get promoted if they score enough ‘points’, by getting published,” says John Carlisle, an NHS anaesthetist who spends his spare time hunting for fraudulent medical studies.
Calman cites many examples of serious research fraud:
- Malcolm Pearce, who created a non-existent pregnant women he claimed to have saved from an ectopic pregnancy and who forged a drug trial.
- Werner Bezwoda, who falsely claimed he had cured women with breast cancer by giving them bone marrow transplants.
- Eric Poehlman, the only one ever jailed for research fraud, who fabricated studies into weight gain and the menopause.
- Woo Suk Hwang, who became a national hero in South Korea after claiming a breakthrough in stem cell research that never actually happened.
- Joachim Boldt, who forged a staggering 90 studies into drugs for regulating blood pressure during surgery. “These trials had been published over many years in leading journals, but it turned out they had never happened,” says Ian Roberts, Professor of Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “Again, when they were excluded from the review, it showed the treatment was not effective. British surgical guidelines had to be changed. It made me realise, if someone can get away with fabricating 90 studies, the system isn’t working.”
The story also discusses how the scientific system has been unable to reach agreement on the effectiveness against COVID-19 for both hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, largely due to how high profile trials showing efficacy keep turning out to be fraudulent.
There’s much more and the entire article is, of course, worth reading in full.
Analysis
Smith zeros in on the core problem: the scientific system is entirely trust based. If someone emails a Word document containing a table of results to a journal, then it’s just assumed that the trial did in fact take place as written. The document itself is supposed to be reviewed, although as we’ve previously discussed here peer review is sometimes claimed to have happened when it very obviously couldn’t have. But nobody checks anything deeply. Peer reviews, when they properly happen, take the intellectual honesty of the submitter for granted.
This system was probably okay at the start of the 20th century when science was a small affair dominated by hobbyists, companies and standalone inventors. It’s easy to forget that Einstein, perhaps the most celebrated scientist of all time, came to the attention of the world only after developing new physics in his spare time whilst working as a Swiss patent clerk. But after the end of World War Two governments drastically ramped up their spending on academic research. Throughout the 20th century science didn’t just grow, it grew exponentially (nb. log scale):
In the second half of the 20th century, the number of papers published annually was doubling about every nine years, with the end of the war being a clear inflection point.
A century ago there was very little incentive for a scientist to lie to a journal. There was no point because there wasn’t much money in it. Academic positions were rare, the communities were small, and there were few enough interesting claims being published that they’d attract attention and be discovered if they weren’t true. But in 2021 it’s all very different. Annual production of new scientists by academia alone is vast:
The effect Chinese policies have had on science can be clearly seen in this graph, but even before China more than doubled its PhD production the trend was strongly upwards.
Underlying this system is an implicit assumption that the number of discoveries waiting to be made within a given time window is unlimited. Giving scientists money is seen as an uncontroversial vote winning position, so nobody in government stops to ask whether there are actually enough answerable scientific questions available to absorb the increased research budgets. If there aren’t then people become tempted to either make up answers, as in much of the COVID ‘science’ that is written about on this site, or make up questions, hence the proliferation of un-rigorous fields like the study of “white tears“.
Did Barney Calman get wind of this story by reading this site? It’d be nice to think so. If you’re out there Barney, why not drop us a line and say hello? There are plenty more investigations like that one in the archives of the Daily Sceptic, such as “Fake Science: the misinformation pandemic in scientific journals” and “436 randomly generated papers published by Springer Nature“, which examine the use of AIs to generate fake scientific papers, or “The bots that are not“, which shows that virtually all academic research into the existence of bots on Twitter is wrong. It’s of vital importance that our society becomes more aware of the flaws in the research system, as it’s the only way to break the cycle of governments and media taking so-called scientific claims for granted.
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Rather comical for the Mail to take an interest in this.
The Mail gets a lot of bad press for seemingly pro lockdown/vaccine articles but, as with Daily Sceptic, they have to play by certain rules which still allow their readers the opportunity to vent their spleen in the comments section.
More importantly those comments are read by tens of thousands of others many of whom tick their approval.
This will reassure others who are borderline sceptics that they are very far from alone.
Mail commenters can be very well informed with information they did not get from the MSM. Attached is a screenshot from another article this morning. It was not the most popular comment (which are all hostile/sceptic) but note the single downtick
Rightly so.
I’m sorry no, i’m not having that, all they have to do is print facts. There’s a reason it’s called daily fail.
Most mail commenters are blood thirsty lunatics, it’s why the mail never allows comments on police brutality stories, because DM readers love state violence.
The fact most of them suck up the big bad Russia propaganda shows how naive they really are.
I only read Mail articles relating to lockdown/vaccines or others linked to here at DS.
The rules they have to play to are those that ensure they continue to enjoy the income from ongoing tsunamis of lockdown/vaccine goverment propaganda that have been such a lucrative feature of Lockdown since before it began.
That they rarely moderate comments, unlike the Telegraph, says a lot even if it’s only because they don’t wish to alienate their readers.
I bought a paper copy once last year to celebrate some particularly splendid piece but it was too much hard work what with it being full of adverts interspersed with snippets about Love Island and Loose Women.
Don’t make excuses for them, the DM were the ones who did most of the government’s cv19 fearmongering, they deserve no credit.
You do not have to justify to anyone what you read.
Thank you but it’s not a problem bennyboy.
Anti_socialist and I often travel in the same direction but in this case we have different options.
I’m all in favour of free speech provided it does not descend to rudeness.
Of course, you dont have to justify reading material, but you may have to justify your comments, if you make them on public forums.
I tried to make it clear that like you it is the comments that I read and possibly the header bullet points unless its Hitchins (yes I know ‘traitor’) or Littlejohn.
”Most mail commenters are blood thirsty lunatics” What tosh!, a bit like all bexiteers are uneducated racists.
LOL, I reckon if you had a poll of DM readers they’d bring back Stocks and pillory. I wouldn’t be surprised if they wouldn’t vote for birching & witch burning, some of them have their heads stuck in the medieval period.
Most comments are from the 16,000 employees in The Cabinet Office
What else do you think they do all day
Because they all secretly hate their employers which would hardly be surprising? Sir Humphrey will not be pleased.
I agree.
Am pleased to say that I’ve never read the paper but have often commented on their online site whenever an anti lockdown/vax comment seems appropriate.
They do “moderate ” on occasions as sometimes my comments disappear, but in the main they get through.
I find there are at least 75% kindred spirits.
Please try it – you may be pleasantly surprised – just avoid the rest of it which IMHO is pure rubbish.
I’ve never commented on DM but i up tick every comment that opposes cv19 tyranny.
Exactly the same way that I use it which why I’m pleased it’s there.
MrSmartyPants probably works for the Cabinet Office. (cheers Cyril).
The Times is read by the people who run the country
The Daily Mirror is read by the people who think they run the country
The Guardian is read by the people who think they ought to run the country
The Morning Star is read by the people who think the country ought to be run by another country
The Independent is read by people who don’t know who runs the country but are sure they’re doing it wrong
The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country
The Financial Times is read by the people who own the country
The Daily Express is read by the people who think the country ought to be run as it used to be run
The Daily Telegraph is read by the people who still think it is their country
And the Sun’s readers don’t care who runs the country providing she has big ****
That sounds like a Sir Humphrey quote
The Mail have largely done SAGE and the government’s bidding, certainly when it comes to championing masks and then the vaccines but they’ve occasionally dipped their toe into the scepticism angle to make out they are ‘balanced’ but they have been anything but.
It is great to have 5 minutes of pretending to be fastidious.
They have clearly been got at, comments now closed but those already there remain, some very interesting indeed.
This is extremely unusual, some beady eyed factchecker on the way to work at the Ministry of Truth must have spotted the obvious counter-narrative headline and made a few phone calls.
Much of the Mail is clickbait garbage and celebrity stalking. However, that pays for it very occasionally dropping substantial, well researched articles like this. You have to mine through a lot of dross to get to the few nuggets of gold, mind.
Hopefully Karen’s had breakfast.
Yes indeed some hours ago, thank you for your interest but let’s not go back there shall we?
6 comments already on this thread. Maybe dial back the coffee.
It’s window-dressing. Until newspapers start reporting against the approved agencies it is empty gestures. So, did the Mail or any mainstream source report about the Pfizer research fraud documented in BMJ this week? Of course not.
Or the three deaths of 16 year olds In Stoke
May be a positive though. In the last year of the war German soldiers largely stopped committing atrocities knowing a day of reckoning was coming
Is it three now Cecil, same school still?
Lobbying for Funding appears to be the problem
Indeed, corruption, far & wide, I note how the article doesn’t mention big pharmas track record of scientific ghostwriters etc. But apparently Ivermectin is discredited very easily due to fake research, I wonder who wrote & paid for the fake research?
Objective peer review in scientific journals died long ago, you get what you pay for. Long live scientism.
It doesn’t mention ghostwriting because I don’t know much about it. I guess you’re talking about company scientists writing articles that later get academic names put on them, or do you mean something else? Perhaps you could write an article and send it in, if you have a good understanding of the problem.
Yes.
No.
No.
BC (Before Covid) and going back to beginning of the millennium there was the carrot agency for editors and journalists, Science Media Centre (housed in the Wellcome Institute), and the stick agency (Sense About Science). Latterly, there has been lots of funding from Gates. Journalists love award ceremonies where they enjoy industrial patronage.
I forget which scientist it was who cured the midwife toad of her spots using a regime of bleeding and purging. I think he got a Noballs Prize.
Are you seriously suggesting that the PCR test is a load of bollocks and 500,000 people were never going to die
Outrageous. you’ll be saying next that jabs are not safe and kill children
I’m a little uncomfortable with the use of “exponential” to describe the growth of cited papers. The T+1 value being an >1 exponent of the T value doesn’t necessarily imply that the growth in the value is due to the magnitude of that value, as contrasted with external driver.
Consider the Mouse Utopia experiment. The growth in the mouse population would have been an exponent of the number of mice, and limited by that number. That doesn’t map directly to cited papers: papers don’t literally breed new papers.
And in both cases the really significant factor, the growth driver, are the resources being dumped into the system by someone playing God.
I’m sympathetic because I’m not a fan of how much abuse the word exponential has taken during COVID times, but I don’t think something has to be growing for internal reasons to be described as growing exponentially. It’s just a way to describe the shape of a curve.
It’s true that papers don’t literally breed papers, but it wouldn’t be surprising if there’s some sort of feedback loop here. The more scientists there are, the more students can be taken on, who go on to become scientists, who need their own classes of students, etc. Or alternatively, the more scientists there are, the more topics they claim to explain scientifically, and that in turn is used to justify more scientists. But it’s just speculation. I don’t think anyone really knows why ‘science’ has grown so fast.
Maybe that’s why John Ioannadis is never mentioned favourably by many of his so called peers – and the MSM of course.
Apart from reaching fame years ago for exposing a high percentage of peer reviewed science as simply wrong and often fraudulent I understand he was the first to do serious research – Clara County’ Diamond Princess etc – in exposing the lies behind the MSM’s and powers that be, grossly exaggerated covid death rate.
Not good career moves maybe, but thankfully he’s still going strong.
My business specialises in the training of peer review.
Two essential components: the expertise, integrity and experience of the reviewer; and complete independence, free from any influence.
I’ve personally trained over 20,000 people in this discipline. Failure always comes down to the absence of one or both of the above.
‘Peer Review’ – Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet.
“Peer review to the public is portrayed as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller, but we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong”
“Doctored Data” ( Dr M.Kendrick, author) , as I understand, reaches similar conclusions..
Who would of thought, a multi billion dollar industry is riddled with fraud and subterfuge!
Reminds me of that film, Thank you for smoking, if you haven’t seen it, you should.
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/thank_you_for_smoking
Government is politicians – not notorious for truthfulness.
In general, gradual increase in ‘me, me, me, instant gratification-seeking’ from 1990 onwards when ethical values ditched on grounds ‘they didn’t pay’.
What’s general inevitably gets into ‘science’ – scientists are people too.
Scientific research cannot be done without an ethical code of conduct – it is open-minded endless search for ‘way it really is’ increasing accuracy as years go by.
Research necessitates acceptance of own fallibility – humility is not obsequious, it’s basic honesty.
‘Me, me, me’ being perfect, desperately wants what ‘me’ wants – to be right, no matter what.
Success of science was due to ethical values, including honesty. Not money. It was notoriously poorly funded – real scientists so fascinated by World they forget themselves to extent they forget to ask about pay.
Hence ‘absent-minded’ stereotype – their focus, unlike most, being on things outside their own skin they inevitably reach information over-load – last on their list of things to be remembered – themselves, falls off bottom of list.
That ‘forgetfulness’ enables them to explore unknown without considering they might personally be at risk there – so no ‘comfort-blanket’ of pre-conceived ideas.
Risks of X-rays were found after potential benefits. Today’s self-centred, thus risk-aversion mind-set would have no X-ray diagnosis or therapy now.
From mid-1980’s on I and others kept warning that ditching ethical values would cause failed research, failed pipelines, failed team-working, failed communication; crashed profits – deaf ears and blind eyes everywhere claimed they were ‘getting it right’ – in terms of self-destruct they were.
Scientists now do not set out to find out. They set out to prove themselves right or to prove others wrong – false positives and false negatives everywhere.
e.g. ‘proof’ of concept, to ‘show’ efficacy (efficacy pays), not safety (safety’s bad for profits and only for others) – not open-minded Study – all for self no matter what happens to others – fast food, no table-manners.
Over last 17 or so years claimed discoveries have been:
Either well-established wheels only just learnt about by those making claim.
Or result of pitching for funding to ‘research’ well-known wheel – dead-cert success – higher profile – easier access to funding – money no matter what.
We’re all now paying the price, plus some, for ditched ethical values
Dr. Kevin Corbett Interview | Following the Science? | Oracle Films
The publish or perish culture creates an environment where subgroups form to repeatedly publish papers that analyse the same datasets using methods of increasing complexity, whose only use is in supporting the publication of another paper. Here is an example from software engineering:
http://shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com/2021/01/17/software-effort-estimation-is-mostly-fake-research/
NeilofWatford above tell us that his business teaches peer reviewing and outlines the parameters required to ensure independence.
Perhaps he could tell us how the groupthink you describe undermines those parameters.
the mail is strangely schizophrenic. I have come to the conclusion there are 2 camps (like in most organizations) so one toes the Govt. line but the other tries to impart tthe facts on the jab dangers. so it seems the best of the MSM in at least reporting the marches even if the headline and text is mostly debatable to say the least, but this is counterbalanced by the pictures which looked picked to show the banners with the most information against the jabs
When research grants to universities are not dependent on the number of papers published in “peer reviewed” journals, no matter how obscure, then there might be an increased chance of independence. When you get authors referring to their own papers that basically back themselves then there’s a problem, particularly if the order of authorship is changed so that the lead author in one paper references another paper where they are further down the pecking order. It is amazing the number of papers reporting on SARS-CoV-2/Covid that have originated in China.
The problem is the scale of the funding. In the US the NIH funded 40 billion dollars worth of “research” the NSF another 9 billion. The NIH budget under President Brandon FY 2022 is ballooning the NIH to 50 billion US$. This is just the US expenditure in these two areas, add in the Defense appropriations and we are off to the moon. There is no way to police a system that is so lavishly funded that literally anything goes and no one is going to check or be held to account because there are just too many researchers pursuing too many projects for any audits to have a meaningful impact (and there are never any audits, so …). Everyone in the research bizness knows its all corrupt garbage BS, but it pays the bills, as they say. And no one is ever likely to be found out to be a fraud.
This is a huge problem, virtually the entire medical establishment inc scientific journals are captured and unreliable.
please see Dr Kevin McCairn discuss the issue with Dr Richard Flemming
btw Dr McCairn is worth keeping up with, his style is strong medicine for some but he’s a very good resource.
very good all round analysis of the situation and problems with the vaxxes etc.
Re the DM article.
Could it be a hatchet job against HCQ and Ivermectin?
To promote the new wonder pills?
Is it true that Ivermectin studies are mostly fake? What would be the cash incentive?
I think a couple that showed efficacy have turned out to be fake, and the Surgisphere paper of course was fake. There are lots of studies into ivermectin so that’s not most, but some meta-studies that included them had to be redone and their conclusions changed to ‘no evidence of any effect’ after those studies were removed.
I haven’t investigated that in any depth so don’t know if they were really fake, or what the motives were. Given the apparently high prevalence of faked clinical trials even in pre-COVID times, I suspect the answer is that yes they were really fake, and no there were no special motives. Just the normal ones of wanting to get promoted, people seeing what they wanted to see (ie. in theory there should be fame and glory for anyone who finds a cure for COVID) and so on.
Trouble is that if you want decent results, you have to make them up!
This is a well sourced look into widespread medical corruption, pharma dollars have polluted everything from research to the journals to politics.
Dr. Jason Fung: Financial Conflicts of Interests and the End of Evidence-Based Medicinehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6IO2DZjOkY
The UK is often criticised for slow adoption of new drugs with all sorts of claimed benefits, but perhaps our process of approval and verification is necessary because of the problem described in this article.