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from the Fraudulent-Humanities-Studies dept.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/health/piero-anversa-fraud-retractions.html
A prominent cardiologist formerly at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston fabricated or falsified data in 31 published studies that should be retracted, officials at the institutions have concluded.
The cardiologist, Dr. Piero Anversa, produced research suggesting that damaged heart muscle could be regenerated with stem cells, a type of cell that can transform itself into a variety of other cells.
Although other laboratories could not reproduce his findings, the work led to the formation of start-up companies to develop new treatments for heart attacks and stroke, and inspired a clinical trial funded by the National Institutes of Health.
"A couple of papers may be alarming, but 31 additional papers in question is almost unheard-of," said Benoit Bruneau, associate director of cardiovascular research at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco. "It is a lab's almost entire body of work, and therefore almost an entire field of research, put into question."
[...] A study published in the journal Circulation by Dr. Anversa was retracted in 2014 after co-authors wrote to the journal saying the data in the paper were not data they had generated. Dr. Anversa left Harvard and Brigham and Women's in 2015.
Despite the troubling questions that had been raised about the stem cell work, the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute began a clinical trial of injected stem cells for patients with heart failure.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday October 18 2018, @03:40AM (3 children)
A researcher might get away with falsifying obscure stuff that few care about.
But the big findings, no way. Those will be built upon, and that serves as the ultimate check. In this case, sounds like a whole lab was set up to do deeper and further exploration of the findings. It was only a matter of time before the problems with the original research lead to problem after problem with further research, and ultimately the discovery of the reason why.
Might well be that Mr. Anversa cheated his way through school, including grad school, and managed to wangle a doctorate that he didn't earn or deserve. Cheating at the doctorate level is way harder but not impossible. Lot harder to find people who are able and willing to write papers and even do research for the doctorate degree seeker. who must at a minimum be able to understand what the others have done for him.
On the other hand, it's also possible that he honestly earned the doctorate. But the competition and challenge never ends. Getting a doctorate is in many ways merely a waypoint. Then you move on to Publish or Perish. Maybe you do a postdoc. Maybe you secure a university position, as an assistant professor, which, while lowly, is still higher than a mere lecturer. If you don't perish, and you manage to move up to associate professor, you're still under pressure to perform, and as bigly as possible. It might be that the cheating doctor reached this point and then at last yielded to the temptation to cheat. You have to wonder about people who are smart enough to get that far, but still fool enough to try to fake it rather than admit they're stuck.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 18 2018, @04:01AM (2 children)
This guy had 31 bogus papers published. They all made it through peer review. And entire businesses were created and funded based on his fraud. A couple of weeks ago the fact that 3 PhDs deliberately set out to defraud the peer review process in another discipline and had something like half of their papers rejected was cited as proof of the utter bogosity of that entire discipline. Maybe the problem ain't with the area of study.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by shrewdsheep on Thursday October 18 2018, @08:42AM (1 child)
Peer review can only work when you in principle trust that research is genuine. If a researcher describes an experiment, you have to trust that he really did it and not faked some results. When you have to question everything in a paper, the review would imply a replication. I believe, the system is still largely intact, although probably 99% of papers are flawed in some aspect (in a non-fraudulent way), and this is the bigger problem. There are >100k papers per year and by my estimate less than 1% is actively fraudulent (~ 1k) (not counting publications in predatory journals).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 18 2018, @03:27PM
All you have to do is require independent replications. The reason the papers were wrong is irrelevant, the replications will catch the problem either way. This was figured out centuries ago and its only recently that people started trying to skip this crucial step of the scientific method.