As an insider, I am tempted to say research in most diseases is driven by lots of fraudulent and oversold results.

Maybe not direct image manipulation as in this case with Alzheimer's, but certainly there is always a lot of monopolistic rich-gets-richer behavior.

Nearly all professors at top universities I have met develop intimate relationships with funders and journals, which they use to steer the field in their preferred direction. As the posted article says "You can cheat to get a paper. You can cheat to get a degree. You can cheat to get a grant. You can't cheat to cure a disease."

I have been asked directly to misrepresent results on several occasions. In the most recent one, a professor who has received all prizes and accolades in his field threatened me and others when we refused to misrepresent research results. I could afford to do this, but my workmates who have families to support were on the brink of giving up to the bully.

It’s also important I feel to stress that this behaviour exists at multiple levels of magnitude. A professor may not be bending journals and whole fields to their will, but can expect and pressure consistently positive results from their lab, to the point of being actively reckless with the truth and blind to the flaws in their theories.

Just getting caught up in the practice of self-promotion and the trumpeting of one’s “novel and impactful” ideas while managing a lab from the top without having done actual frontline research work in some time can take you pretty far from scientific integrity IMO.

With no culture of being proud of reporting negative or contradictory results, I’d say “excessive scientific zeal” is an easy and common trap. Even a slightly forceful lab-leader or PI can end up swaying a group of people into some grey dishonest zone of scientific practice.

This is why science needs to formally pre register hypotheses. "People tested this ten times and it worked once" is infinitely more useful info than "someone published a paper because this works! But we have no idea how many people tried exactly the same thing and got a negative result".

I know two people personally who dropped out of PhD programs due to fraud in their departments. I never asked them too much about it, but I'm imagining it's related to not wanting to lose potential funding or waste years of research to a wrong conclusion.

I could imagine that they might also not want to invest the effort and time needed to complete a degree that would be of little value if it became public knowledge that the department issuing the degree had a problem with fraud.

Thank you for making a stand on this. My doctor has a "No Free Lunch" sign in his office saying he won't talk to pharmaceutical reps. Maybe the research side needs a similar pledge to avoid being corrupted by funding. I don't know what it would be though.

The problem is rarely corruption by funding in the way you're thinking - Merck going "Hey, can you take another look at those numbers?"

The problem is the pressure to get funding by being productive. Negative results are wildly harder to get funded. Less productive labs are at a disadvantage for grants. Which means, like any metric upon which people's salaries rest, people are tempted to game it.

> NIH spent about $1.6 billion on projects that mention amyloids in this fiscal year, about half its overall Alzheimer’s funding

The funding for one year from this one agency amounting to 1.6 billion dollars is a stunning.

If what you say is true, promoters of the validity of the NIH should be a push for statutory changes that mandate NIH commit a percentage of the overall budget to confirming significant past research.

I think part of the challenge is no one wants to throw their hands up in the air and abandon amyloid after so many years and dollars spent on it. Instead, they say "well we just weren't doing an early enough intervention", which is how Aducanumab was forced through with weak evidence of effectiveness.

The big question is what do we do now? There's Tau, but that hasn't been a slam dunk either.

This is code that the price of entry at a minimum is an even more expensive dinner ;)

Timeless ;-). https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1986/08/10

> I have been asked directly to misrepresent results on several occasions. In the most recent one, a professor who has received all prizes and accolades in his field threatened me and others when we refused to misrepresent research results.

I wonder if intentional research fraud should carry legal consequences.

It does carry severe legal consequences. If you defraud a federal agency into funding your research (which almost always accompanies any fraud in basic scientific research) you are committing a federal crime and you can go to jail.

as severe as anything the SEC can bring to bear, imo

We need a glassdoor-ish site for these kind of underhand dealings and fraud.

Also, make a paper/proof trail and get it to court/media/government.

A Glassdoor-like site would be a great idea.

Kind of related, https://forbetterscience.com reports lots of research frauds.

Also, Retraction Watch

Also pubpeer.com

Just don't post from New Zealand on that site

Can you tell us what level of fraudulence is present in research for other mysterious diseases? Such as MS or Crohn's or ..

Cancer, unfortunately:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02002-5

"Exclusive: investigators found plagiarism and data falsification in work from prominent cancer lab" (July 20, 2022)

If people were faking research suggesting a cure for MS or Crohn's, then there would be (alleged) cures to discuss, no?

There are quite a few treatments and theories of cause. No need for alleged full cure.

Fraud and fabrication of results are abhorrent, but this is too simplistic a take. These fraudulent results didn't single-handedly spawn 16 years of fruitless research. Instead blame the incentives that create a system where nobody validates a result for 16 years.

If academic science were in a healthy state, novel results would be validated 100s of times. The current system is setup such that only novel results are rewarded. There is no reward for validation. During my PhD I was actively discouraged from performing experiments/studies that weren't "new". Everything ultimately comes back to the funding model. Scientists are only funded for groundbreaking work, measured by the number of publications. In turn, journals will only accept previously unpublished work.

The fraudster's refusal to confess for 16 years as they saw the field go astray and elderly people suffer is a crime against the health of so many people. If I were a prosecutor I would try to get them for fraud, criminal negligence, or even manslaughter. If I were a vigilante, I would have some strong "words" with this perpetrator who caused so many elderly people to suffer. I hope they are brought to justice within their lifetime while they are still alive to be punished.

Hold on a second. In no way did this person “cause” people to contract Alzheimer’s. Let’s remember that all of medicine is an intervention. There’s nothing to say that research going in a different direction would have lessened the suffering of people with the disease.

I’m not saying this person is faultless, but scapegoating is hardly a sound response to what is clearly a systemic issue of misaligned incentives.

1,000% agree. I hope he is brought to justice and sees time behind bars.