The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, is seeking to retract six scientific studies and correct 31 others that were published by the institute’s top researchers, including its CEO. The researchers are accused of manipulating data images with simple methods, primarily with copy-and-paste in image editing software, such as Adobe Photoshop.
This is what happens when academia becomes so hyper focused on a steady cadence of publishing research papers. That’s not even the only issue, having your papers become highly cited is another critical characteristic researchers have to worry about in order to remain competitive. But in order to be often cited, you need to achieve positive results for your hypothesis at all costs, resulting in issues like what this paper discusses: Do Pressures to Publish Increase Scientists’ Bias? An Empirical Support from US States Data.
Academia needs to take a step back and rethink its approach to pressuring researchers to be constantly publishing. I understand that funding is highly competitive and very limited, which is why our governments need to also re-examine our spending priorities. Do we really need another multi-billion dollar Navy ship that’s already obsolete by the time it’s built? Or would our money be better spent funneled into research across all fields and disciplines, advancing our knowledge of the world around us and beyond? I know the world isn’t so black and white and I’m not naive enough to think war will magically go away if we stop spending into it, but surely a comfortable balance can be met. Just $1 billion could probably fund at least several dozen different research projects for a few years. Meanwhile, the Navy just spent $10 billion on just 10 new destroyers in 2023 alone.
you seem one person that has a wide experience in this field. may I ask you why there’s competition among medicine researchers? From my simple point of view, shouldn’t it be effectiveness and affordability of drugs and medical practices the main goal of such research?
I’m not the one you asked, but I’ll try to answer anyway. Competition stems from limited resources. There is limited funding available to medical researchers. Therefore they have to compete for it.
Effectiveness and affordability of drugs is the goal of research maily in farma companies. There’s a lot of medical research that is not directly tied to a drug and is focused on how the body works and what makes it sick. Funding for all kinds of research is limited.
thank you very much.
how the body works and what makes it sick
in my ingenuity I thought this would go towards effectiveness and affordability. thank you again
thank you
I feel the value of negative results is underrated by the scientific community. So they tested one or more hypotheses and achieved negative results. Now the next research team knows what not to do or what to do differently next time.
It’s all knowledge and it’s typically all useful in some way, but society, especially American society, is hyperfocused on achieving results that lend themselves to a marketable product, not the betterment of the quality of life of our species.
Disclaimer: I’m biased as my thesis was one giant dud.
Jfc. Ruin them. Burn their reputations to the ground.
Yes, and also restructure the systems which incentivize this behaviour.
Another high profile research group done in by bad photoshopping. I wonder how many frauds never get caught because they have decent photoshop skills.
Is this not the second of third major fraud from Harvard this past year or so? I recall cadavers being sold or something and perhaps some other high profile researchpaper that was fraudulent from the same institution right?
The incentives have become twisted across academia by the criteria used to allocate funding. Everyone has to produce striking results constantly so they can get published and cited, since funding depends on these crude measures of prestige. This just doesn’t sit easily with undertaking research out of honest curiosity regardless of the results. So in humanities people hype trivia, and in sciences people do that and are also tempted to twist boring results for more impact. You end up with phenomena like this:
First Harvard morgue manager sells body parts and now this.
It’s 2024 and our politicians still haven’t banned Photoshop. When will we learn from our mistakes!..
