A Science News report about Dr. Eliezer Masliah (who held a highly important role at the National Institute of Aging), a 300-page dossier composed of misconducts at his lab, as well as followups… Featuring everyone’s favorite research integrity sleuths (Elizabeth Bik, Mu Yang, “Cheshire”, …) and more.
Post URL points to archive.org due to soft paywall on Science News. Here’s the original link
The fraud surrounding Alzheimer’s research continues… Not too long ago the fraud was related to amyloid (archive version). That article was even written by the same author and features many of the same investigators.
I work in Pharma R&D (on the manufacturing side) and the company I work for has run trials for Alzheimer’s products based on research that has since been found to be fraudulent. As a published scientist myself, I would like to think that this level of manipulation and fabrication is the exception rather than the rule. However, I do think it is worth asking at this point what it is about Alzheimer’s research in particular that has led to this being so prevalent and, more importantly, so impactful. Basically, how did it go so far before anything was caught?
I suspect at least part of the answer is due to the large influx of money into the field. Researchers were tripping over themselves to earn those grants and then, once they had them, produce results to keep them. I am not in academia, so I don’t have great insight into the NIH, NIA or their processes, but this should be a wake up call to put up a certain amount of guard rails.
I have a suspicion it’s not just an Alzheimer’s issue but rather quite systemic to lots of competitive fields in academia… There definitely needs to be guard rails. I think the sad thing with funding is… these days you have to be exceptionally good at grant writing to even have a chance of getting into the lottery, and it mostly feels like a lottery with success rates in the teens… and apparently no grant=no lab, no career for most ppl (seriously why are most PI roles soft money-funded anyway). Hard to not try and cut the corners if there’s so much pressure on the line
Not to mention, apparently even if you are a super ethical PI who wants to do nothing wrong, if the lab gets big enough, there might eventually be some unethical postdoc trying to make it big and falsify data (that you don’t have time to check) under your name so… how the hell do people guard against that.
I’m honestly impressed how science is still making progress with all of these random nonsense in the field
Reading about this is making me feel sick. It’s so sad how many people’s lives have been negatively affected because of this Masliah’s dishonesty. I think people who fake research like this belong in jail.
Sadly I think low key dishonesty is even more prevalent than what this guy did - the way we dole out money encourages researchers in every field to cherry pick data so that they can keep getting funding.
It’s definitely way more prevalent. There actually is this post from Retractionwatch just a few days ago too. This is kind-of a systematic issue induced by how scientific funding & the system works…
My current PI is actually co-mentoring a student who was studying scientific fraud, but the problem is… being a fraud researcher is apparently a really good way to alienate a lot of people, which ensures you never make it in academia (which is heavily dependent on networking/knowing people)… so I don’t know how many ppl would seriously study this.
