Maybe scientific progress shouldn't be driven by money, personal ego (fame, honors, etc.), or as part of a university’s strategy to attract funding or prestige. I think an international organization should collect funds from all UN member countries and pool them together. These resources could then support global labs where scientists work for a fair salary. A senior board (or boards per field) would decide which projects to pursue and which patents to develop. Participating countries would get free access to these patents, while others would pay royalties that feed back into the fund.
Science should be globally coordinated, well-funded, and focused on advancing humanity, not driven by institutional agendas.
This doesn’t solve anything. As long as there is a board made of people making decisions about which projects to fund, egos and jobs are on the line and fraud will be a thing.
> Maybe scientific progress shouldn't be driven by money, personal ego (fame, honors, etc.),
I like the idea. But how is this possible? Pretty much everyone is driven by ego.
Ego dissolution is not easy. And once dissolved substantially most people might not probably care enough to spend their lives in laboratory/university for a future breakthrough instead of enjoying here and now.
So ego is a requirement to engage in this kind of work.
I think there would be a few people that would see research as a great way of enjoying the now -- but ironically, I suspect those are exactly the people that get burned by the current system and often need to escape it so they don't lose their mind.
Personally, I dislike idea, as competition can be a powerful motivator in science. I think three things would go a long way to improving the current situation: (1) more rigorous peer review, perhaps even paid reviews or something like bug bounties, to incentivise scrutiny; (2) the normalisation of replication; and (3) publication of negative results, so the community can quicky identify if something is not replicating.
Hasn't science almost always been driven by exactly those things? There seem to be so few examples of someone doing science for sciences' sake. At the end of the day, they're still humans and will vie for position and power, and if it can't be via money, it'll be via peer recognition and accolades.
I understand the sentiment, but I fear the cure might be worse than the disease. Science being restricted and totally controled by a new world order totalitarian club? What could possibly go wrong?
I see the caution you're highlighting, and I agree that my proposed solution leans toward a utopian vision, one where humanity truly works together to solve global problems. Realistically, I’m not sure we're capable of that level of unity. Take the COVID pandemic as an example—despite the global impact, we couldn’t deliver a unified response. Different countries had varying degrees of success, which ultimately affected the overall resolution for everyone. We see the same for global warming and co2 emissions.
But global problems require global solutions. Without that, many critical challenges may go unsolved, especially when there’s no immediate economic reward driving the effort.
These are the same ideas and intuitions that led to the current situation. "Profit is bad" -> grants. "International orgs should collect and pool money" -> university collaborations. "board decides which projects to pursue" -> granting authorities.
It doesn't work. The understanding of human nature that leads to these suggestions is just incorrect. Profit isn't a bad thing, it's actually the only way to keep people on the straight and narrow.
The motivation for scientific fraud is to extract money out of someone (and secondarily, social status). Science in aid of customer happiness is inherently difficult terrain in which to do fraud because customers don't care why your product works, only that it does, and if you sell them something that doesn't work there are lots of laws on the book that let governments or customers go after you legally.
But academic fraud is deployed against people who care more about how science-y your method sounds than whether it works. Scientists get away with it exactly because they don't promise to deliver anything, so nobody can really claim to have been damaged when they don't deliver.
What kind of people are the softest targets for such fraud? Government bureaucrats, who are tasked to spend tax money so the government can tell voters they're supporting science. What they spend the money on hardly matters. And philanthropic foundations, who are tasked to spend rich guy money so their founder can tell dinner party guests they're a good guy who is funding Alzheimer's research. These two groups of people simply don't care if the research they fund is fraudulent, as can be witnessed by the fact that after a decade+ of these stories the standard outcome is "they are still working in a lab and still publishing papers", whereas people like Elizabeth Holmes are sitting in uniform in a prison camp. The difference: profit driven commerce vs virtue-signaling driven philanthropy.
This stuff has been going on for decades, as can be seen by the frequency with which people at the top of the institutions are found to have engaged in it. What's new is that in recent years the spread of social media (especially X/Twitter), and the creation of sites like PubPeer, has given people who always knew about it a way to get the word out to communities who will believe them. Up until now unfortunately the average person still doesn't believe any claims of academic fraud, and the institutions always sweep it under the rug, so until enough whistleblowers were able to find each other online they were just systematically screwed.
The usual proposed solution is more replication. Every HN thread on scientific fraud has people proposing this fix. Unfortunately, replication studies can't fix science and can in some situations make things worse. I wrote about why not here:
I am highly interested in ALS research (retired engineer, not a scientist), once I found that in the same lab of a star scientists of the ALS domain, two papers were published in the same year that contradicted each other. The name of the star scientist was listed as author in both papers. He probably never read any of these papers.
I have read also PR by a university that claimed about breakthrough because one guy in a phase III clinical trial have reacted extremely well to the drug. The trial was globally a success, but no other of the ~400 patients reacted so well, for most of them the disease progression was more or less stopped but not cured.
In 2023 alone, more than 17,000 papers were published on Alzheimer's disease. The immense majority of these publications are about (complex) factoids that are useless to humanity. Yet their university will claim that each of them is a breakthrough. Most authors will publish only one paper on this subject and jump to an unrelated subject in the next paper.
A shred of evidence is the ratio of proposed drugs by academics and the drugs that can enter a phase III clinical trial as they have shown some efficacy. It's something like 1000 to 1.
The largest problem for leaders is how to organize research. There is a consensus that goals-oriented research is not the most efficient way to achieve great results. Instead, we have a free market and a star system. Most academics are free to work on whatever they want.
I can't think of a solution out of those two obviously broken policies.
> I am highly interested in ALS research (retired engineer, not a scientist), once I found that in the same lab of a star scientists of the ALS domain, two papers were published in the same year that contradicted each other. The name of the star scientist was listed as author in both papers. He probably never read any of these papers.
Very likely. Any student that helped with this wasn’t searching for something that works. These people are disgusting.
This doesn’t feel much different than pretending to be a charity funding Alzheimer’s research and just taking the money to buy cocaine. In fact it’s probably worse because it distracted the people doing real work.
Maybe scientific progress shouldn't be driven by money, personal ego (fame, honors, etc.), or as part of a university’s strategy to attract funding or prestige. I think an international organization should collect funds from all UN member countries and pool them together. These resources could then support global labs where scientists work for a fair salary. A senior board (or boards per field) would decide which projects to pursue and which patents to develop. Participating countries would get free access to these patents, while others would pay royalties that feed back into the fund.
Science should be globally coordinated, well-funded, and focused on advancing humanity, not driven by institutional agendas.
This doesn’t solve anything. As long as there is a board made of people making decisions about which projects to fund, egos and jobs are on the line and fraud will be a thing.
> Maybe scientific progress shouldn't be driven by money, personal ego (fame, honors, etc.),
I like the idea. But how is this possible? Pretty much everyone is driven by ego.
Ego dissolution is not easy. And once dissolved substantially most people might not probably care enough to spend their lives in laboratory/university for a future breakthrough instead of enjoying here and now.
So ego is a requirement to engage in this kind of work.
I think there would be a few people that would see research as a great way of enjoying the now -- but ironically, I suspect those are exactly the people that get burned by the current system and often need to escape it so they don't lose their mind.
I believe this approaches some of the ideas put forward for the forerunner of UNESCO:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Committee_on_Int...
Personally, I dislike idea, as competition can be a powerful motivator in science. I think three things would go a long way to improving the current situation: (1) more rigorous peer review, perhaps even paid reviews or something like bug bounties, to incentivise scrutiny; (2) the normalisation of replication; and (3) publication of negative results, so the community can quicky identify if something is not replicating.
Hasn't science almost always been driven by exactly those things? There seem to be so few examples of someone doing science for sciences' sake. At the end of the day, they're still humans and will vie for position and power, and if it can't be via money, it'll be via peer recognition and accolades.
I understand the sentiment, but I fear the cure might be worse than the disease. Science being restricted and totally controled by a new world order totalitarian club? What could possibly go wrong?
I see the caution you're highlighting, and I agree that my proposed solution leans toward a utopian vision, one where humanity truly works together to solve global problems. Realistically, I’m not sure we're capable of that level of unity. Take the COVID pandemic as an example—despite the global impact, we couldn’t deliver a unified response. Different countries had varying degrees of success, which ultimately affected the overall resolution for everyone. We see the same for global warming and co2 emissions.
But global problems require global solutions. Without that, many critical challenges may go unsolved, especially when there’s no immediate economic reward driving the effort.
The immediate economic reward of solving Alzheimer's would be enormous. There's no economics problem to solve here.
Think about the many rare diseases that are essentially ignored, combined they are a problem but alone they do not merit any significant investment.
> personal ego (fame, honors, etc.)...
Even in underpaid positions competition is fierce and personal ambition sky high. Better fraud prevention systems is likely a better way.
These are the same ideas and intuitions that led to the current situation. "Profit is bad" -> grants. "International orgs should collect and pool money" -> university collaborations. "board decides which projects to pursue" -> granting authorities.
It doesn't work. The understanding of human nature that leads to these suggestions is just incorrect. Profit isn't a bad thing, it's actually the only way to keep people on the straight and narrow.
The motivation for scientific fraud is to extract money out of someone (and secondarily, social status). Science in aid of customer happiness is inherently difficult terrain in which to do fraud because customers don't care why your product works, only that it does, and if you sell them something that doesn't work there are lots of laws on the book that let governments or customers go after you legally.
But academic fraud is deployed against people who care more about how science-y your method sounds than whether it works. Scientists get away with it exactly because they don't promise to deliver anything, so nobody can really claim to have been damaged when they don't deliver.
What kind of people are the softest targets for such fraud? Government bureaucrats, who are tasked to spend tax money so the government can tell voters they're supporting science. What they spend the money on hardly matters. And philanthropic foundations, who are tasked to spend rich guy money so their founder can tell dinner party guests they're a good guy who is funding Alzheimer's research. These two groups of people simply don't care if the research they fund is fraudulent, as can be witnessed by the fact that after a decade+ of these stories the standard outcome is "they are still working in a lab and still publishing papers", whereas people like Elizabeth Holmes are sitting in uniform in a prison camp. The difference: profit driven commerce vs virtue-signaling driven philanthropy.
If you take prestige and personal gain out of the equation, nothing gets done. This has borne out in history over and over again.
This stuff has been going on for decades, as can be seen by the frequency with which people at the top of the institutions are found to have engaged in it. What's new is that in recent years the spread of social media (especially X/Twitter), and the creation of sites like PubPeer, has given people who always knew about it a way to get the word out to communities who will believe them. Up until now unfortunately the average person still doesn't believe any claims of academic fraud, and the institutions always sweep it under the rug, so until enough whistleblowers were able to find each other online they were just systematically screwed.
The usual proposed solution is more replication. Every HN thread on scientific fraud has people proposing this fix. Unfortunately, replication studies can't fix science and can in some situations make things worse. I wrote about why not here:
https://blog.plan99.net/replication-studies-cant-fix-science...
Interesting. So assuming these allegations are true, is this lack of employment consequences common across academia?
I am highly interested in ALS research (retired engineer, not a scientist), once I found that in the same lab of a star scientists of the ALS domain, two papers were published in the same year that contradicted each other. The name of the star scientist was listed as author in both papers. He probably never read any of these papers.
I have read also PR by a university that claimed about breakthrough because one guy in a phase III clinical trial have reacted extremely well to the drug. The trial was globally a success, but no other of the ~400 patients reacted so well, for most of them the disease progression was more or less stopped but not cured.
In 2023 alone, more than 17,000 papers were published on Alzheimer's disease. The immense majority of these publications are about (complex) factoids that are useless to humanity. Yet their university will claim that each of them is a breakthrough. Most authors will publish only one paper on this subject and jump to an unrelated subject in the next paper.
A shred of evidence is the ratio of proposed drugs by academics and the drugs that can enter a phase III clinical trial as they have shown some efficacy. It's something like 1000 to 1.
The largest problem for leaders is how to organize research. There is a consensus that goals-oriented research is not the most efficient way to achieve great results. Instead, we have a free market and a star system. Most academics are free to work on whatever they want.
I can't think of a solution out of those two obviously broken policies.
> I am highly interested in ALS research (retired engineer, not a scientist), once I found that in the same lab of a star scientists of the ALS domain, two papers were published in the same year that contradicted each other. The name of the star scientist was listed as author in both papers. He probably never read any of these papers.
could you please share the two papers?
Has this fraud kept useful work from happening while research went in the wrong direction?
Very likely. Any student that helped with this wasn’t searching for something that works. These people are disgusting.
This doesn’t feel much different than pretending to be a charity funding Alzheimer’s research and just taking the money to buy cocaine. In fact it’s probably worse because it distracted the people doing real work.
We will not forget this.