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On a Friday in March 2013, a researcher working in the lab of a prominent pulmonary scientist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, was arrested on charges of embezzlement. The researcher, biologist Erin Potts-Kant, later pled guilty to siphoning more than $25,000 from the Duke University Health System, buying merchandise from Amazon, Walmart, and Target—even faking receipts to legitimize her purchases. A state judge ultimately levied a fine, and sentenced her to probation and community service.
Then Potts-Kant's troubles got worse. Duke officials took a closer look at her work and didn't like what they saw. Fifteen of her papers, mostly dealing with pulmonary biology, have now been retracted, with many notices citing "unreliable" data. Several others have been modified with either partial retractions, expressions of concern, or corrections. And last month, a U.S. district court unsealed a whistleblower lawsuit filed by a former colleague of Potts-Kant. It accuses the researcher, her former supervisor, and the university of including fraudulent data in applications and reports involving more than 60 grants worth some $200 million.
[...] Under an 1863 law, citizen whistleblowers can go to court on behalf of the government to try to recoup federal funds that were fraudulently obtained. Winners can earn big payoffs, getting up to 30% of any award, with the rest going to the government. Whistleblowers filed a record 754 FCA [False Claim Act] cases in 2013, and last year alone won nearly $600 million. The U.S. government, meanwhile, has recouped more than $3.5 billion annually from FCA cases in recent years.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday September 02 2016, @02:47PM
While this could be a smear campaign, it sounds more likely that Potts-Kant is a pseudoscientist who wormed her way into scientific circles with bull. Science is powerfully attractive to confidence tricksters because its reputation is so very high. For most people, to sort facts from fiction, there's no better authority to heed than scientists and scientific research. Scientists must be careful not to be taken in. Check the work, don't be lazy. Peer reviewers aren't always as careful as they ought to be on that.
She may be one of those people who actually does not understand science but hides that well, knows how to talk like a scientist. She may secretly harbor a great deal of contempt and envy for real scientists, thinks they're all full of bull just like herself, thinks their success is down to connections and not good scientific work, and is also angry at the unfairness she thinks she sees. Very cynical, thinks it's not only scientists, but everyone who cheats and lies.
She got as far as she did because she hooked up with a supervisor who also cheated and lied. That supervisor may have unwittingly fueled the perception that science is all bull anyway by getting sloppy to the point of unethical conduct. May have won the position with good science, then turned bad. If all this speculation is correct, both deserve having their careers ruined, and more. The researchers who believed and used their results, cited them in their own research, have wasted a lot of effort trying to build on their fake work and must clean up a big mess, review everything they based on the fraudulent work and change or even retract most of it. It's possible the fraudulent work was purposely buried in obscure and borderline junk journals and few or none tried to build on it, as she knew it wouldn't hold up to scrutiny, so maybe the mess isn't too bad.
Scientific misconduct also adds fuel to the contentions of the anti-intellectual, climate change denying, creationist blow hards. I've read some of the papers of one of the Climate Change denying cranks who actually has a university position, this Roy Spencer of the U. of Alabama at Huntsville, and though meteorology is not my area, it was easy to tell that Spencer was full of crap. He was very blatant about it. Like, in one paper he claimed that temperature data fit on a sine wave curve, then made it fit by cherry picking the data by cutting off everything before 1979. Even bragged that he could fit most any data to most any curve. He has also openly supported Intelligent Design/Creationism. Why that man hasn't been drummed out, I don't understand. There is value in contrary viewpoints, but his conduct goes beyond that. He might be right, just like the sun might not rise tomorrow, water might not flow downhill, and 2+2 might not be equal to 4. Is it that education in Alabama is that poor?
(Score: 2) by CirclesInSand on Friday September 02 2016, @06:28PM
This post is a lot more fun if you pretend you are reading the origin story of a comic book villain.