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I really like your content and that's why you should be careful with your sponsors. This art invesment thing seems to be a big scam. Maybe it's not, but still, no youtuber should tell people that they should invest their savings into this or that. Y'all should stay with the vpn stuff, it's not great, but at least it's not a complete fraud, like becoming a baron while planting a fake tree.
It’s a scam for many reasons which makes it an incredibly strange ad given the video. 1) why would they pay UA-cam influencers to push this if they really had a waitlist of people hoping to join? 2) They front ended well-performing paintings to show big returns while most paintings don’t receive that
Shocking!! Very unsensitive to push an investment scheme without any critical review. You of all should know best how much dodgy investment advise is floating around on youtube. You present yourself as the oracle of truth and then use that trust to lead people into investing money in your interest?? I like your work but now i'm wondering what your motivation is. Do you want to get rich on youtube pointing fingers at others, or do you want to better the system? Couldn't you find any other sponsor? The prices for art, housing, wine, whiskey, guitars or whatever commodity you pick went up up because of the availibility of cheap money and the need to put that money somewhere - The time of cheap money is probably over and all these prices may come down quickly. I personally hope that they will!
@@TheSupriest I don't think it's a scam but I do think it's embarrassingly distasteful. Edit: I do think it's mostly a scam, just maybe not a *complete* scam. Anyway, it's a false economy taking them as a sponsor, it must massively harm the channel.
Pete, love most of your videos, but please, be careful with sponsors like Masterworks. The fact that these kind of videos are sponsored by them could diminish your content, to say the least.
Yes, it’s quite ironic given the subject of the video. I understand the lure of sponsorship money, but it is wise to research potential sponsors first. With sponsors like Masterworks it shouldn’t take more than a five minute Google search.
I attempted a PhD in cancer biology twice. I quit bith times, partially because I couldn’t get reproducible data from my experiments. Experiements I based on papers like thise mentioned here that have been proven fraudulent. Sigh
We need to have a journal called the reproductible journal dedicated to studies like yours. You might become a famous debunker of papers feared by all. bwahahaha
I just did my master's and during my dissertation I lost my interest in doing PhD cause of things like these, I was so hyped about doing PhD but now nada no chance
"I take credit but not responsibility." "I share in the immediate rewards but refuse any later punishment." Authority without responsibility - the plague of our times.
The plague of our time? This has been a problem in academia long before any of us were born. Who would've guessed that doing nothing about a cancer only makes it worse?
@@Piledriver2006 problem in academia? try problem in government in general, health, education and safety. Police, doctors and educators all have the authority to fuck a lot of shit up before anyone thinks to actually check their authority. If you think this is an "academia" problem, I have news for you - This is how we have decided to govern ourself on land, on the high seas the Authority that fucks up is also the one that takes the blame, the time and the bill, Authority without responsibility never works as intended and that is why you will never see it in practise on the seas, for some strange reason it is practised all the time on land and it always turns into a pile of we didnt do nothing.
"This case reveals yet another tip of the iceberg in the broken peer review system that rewards the quantity of publications over quality" I agree but is there any alternative? Naively I think research data should open for all to see and research shouldnot be conclusive until it is independently replicated. Then data fraud would be impoissible
The scientific journal editors work exactly like cartels (RELX Group, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Wiley-Blackwell , etc.). Public money pays at every levels. They make like 10 time more profit than their revenues. You pay to have access to the publishing, to publish, to share your publication, to review others publications, etc. I'm glad there are pirate websites to f**k them up.
The obvious question arises: what is a better system? We as a society want to build a hierarchy of scientists to give the limited funding to scientists who truly deserve it. How else can we reliably measure their efficiency? Why is a peer review from current experts in the field not working? Or do you as a tax payer want to give your money to somebody doing impactless science? How do we solve those issues?
@@glebanfulIt’s because the academic system as a whole is broken. Almost anyone can get a degree if they have the money or grants necessary to do so. Ergo, they need to be incentivized to be hyper selective. Best way to do this is to pull all federal funding. No grants, no programs, and no federal partnerships.
How broken is mainstream science ? VERY We are in the year 2023 and they still can't admit to Sasquatch The Big Bang Theory idea should have died 80 years ago. Corruption keeps it going. Suppression of science has been going on for the last century Science and politics has been intertwined for a long time.
Thanks for the info. Had suspicions about Masterworks but didn't know anything about them. They're like the Japanese knives and the Scottish lord titles which came out of Singapore. The knives came from China and the Scottish lord titles were false. Be very careful about what you buy on the internet.
The masterworks idea sounds fishy to me when all the UA-camrs were plugging it. I thought it's just another NFT, but timeshare scheme? Did not know that. I will unsubscribe every UA-camr pushing for that from now on! If they can't do their own research before they push that stuff on people, their credibility is in doubt.
Paper-milling is endemic in academia. Researchers want money -> get a grant -> need papers -> generate papers -> need more papers -> rewrite existing papers -> need more papers -> come up with a sexy solution, hope they never read past the abstract -> grant money! -> money for me -> go back to beginning.
56 results for Semenza on pubpeer. Many of these papers were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences which allows members to 'contribute' papers which receive preferential treatment in terms of review. This is probably why Semenza is the only western name on these papers since his primary role was likely to get the paper published by this less stringent route.
as someone who has worked on this side of academia it’s MUCH worse than people can imagine … we don’t even want to get into the topic of the statistical validity
Indeed, I was trained in statistics and experimental design and anymore I can't hardly TOLERATE reading ANY life science article. Probably 80 plus percent either show gross flaws in design/analysis or else report SUSPICIOUS data.
I mean , with the whole replication crisis going on more than 50% of the papers could be bs or have altered results , so your guesses are quite on point , psychology there are fields in which like only 20% of the paper results can be replicated
Life sciences -try the numerically illiterate social "sciences" - sociology and the like - What passes for research there is on a par with a 10 year old's essay - "What I did in the summer holidays " - while on a scholarship from Harvard. 50 pct of academics are a waste of space and suck up taxpayer money when legitimate research goes begging
Thanks so much for these videos, I’m just in my 1st year in Uni and watching these videos have really helped me “touch grass” and take off my rose tinted glasses about academia. Please continue to enlighten me and others with your knowledge and experience, it really helps
At least these scandals have humanized academia from being seen as a pristine institution of geniuses like how I used to view them when I was in high school. Now I see these people as regular adults who sometimes do a great job and sometimes are con artists.
The thing I wished I had in Boston when I was in that world was higher self-esteem. STAY AWAY from people that damage your self-esteem and see the difference in people that don’t. I wish I learned what was in the book “The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem” before I got there. But I fell in love with psychos and they gave me traumatic brain injuries that left me permanently disabled. I really hope you learn from me and don’t get crushed by the academic world that is doing FAR darker things like human experiments still. They are broken and need strong people to fix their issues. I came from a family of academics but I am a mixed Brazilian woman and they are all rich white men that privilege. Women need to be stronger emotionally and smarter to get around them. But if you learn how it really works vs what they want you to think you will go further than I ever could. My arrogance blinded me too much. I hope you go further than I ever could 💖
What strikes me most about the fraud cases I know is how blatantly obvious the fraud actually was. Knowing it would be easy to disguise fraud just a little bit, and knowing this would be sufficient to go undetected in today's world lets me estimate that the actual amount of fraudulent behavior in science may be gigantic
I just wrote a big reply here citing a lot of papers but UA-cam shadow banned it. That probably also says a lot. I'll try to post it in segments (as I am not going to give up)
There is an entire rabbit hole regarding how a lot of the Covid vaccine papers are actually fraudulent (like the one where they concluded hat the virus could not have been a lab leak). The literature on a lot of the treatments (like "bad word that starts with I") is also weirdly all over the place. But in practice it appears that it actually helps (but, in turn, only when given early and especially as a prophylactic). You have vaccine papers with positive outcomes for the vaccines, like these ones:
Members of academia are well aware of the extensive fraud, significant errors, and other instances of low-quality research results in published papers. This revelation often surprises those outside academia, but it's essential to assert that scientists do care about the practices among their peers. In reality, there exists an internal 'control system,' though at times, it can be chaotic and relatively underdeveloped. Given this, I don't believe the root of this problem lies within academia itself. Instead, it often stems from funding bodies and various bureaucratic entities, including university administrations, which exert significant influence over scientists' careers. Unfortunately, these entities are not merely unwitting enablers of fraudulent activity; they frequently display indifference toward scientific rigor and the actions of rogue scientists.
Masterworks has distributed $45 million. How much of that was actual profit to the investors? Meanwhile Mark Lynn CEO pays $30 million for a New York condo.
The only two creators who I hold in high esteem are Louis Rossmann & Team3DAlpha. The only two channel have never reduced themselves to this level. I cringe whenever I hear someone take these sponsors; mind you these content creators are not starving homeless, living in Skid Row with 10GB internet data. They have respectable professional career. They can decline and it won't have massive affect on their purse. Every content creators, sooner or later, just turn their channel into a mouthpiece and eventually a miniature version of that which they critique.
It must pay good money to sell your reputation.... I get it,money,lots of it, and the risk of losing subs by it small. Greed can take the best of them utubers. Maybe they have a point. After all,"this is not financial advice "😂... That many people believe they can make money out of thin air ,is a fact. Invest(if you must,or even can) wisely.
@@MayorSomI agree, some sponsors are questionable. But not all sponsors are bad . If the sponsor is legit , then there is nothing wrong with the creator doing a deal with them . Let's be real here , these guys have to make a living through these videos so you can't really grandstand when it comes to them doing sponsorships. But I do agree with you that some are questionable and creators should be very careful pushing them .
As former scientist, i always hated that mass production of papers. Some colleagues were usally not deeply interested in their scientific topic, climbing the ladder as fast as possible was more important to them. This (your topic) is what emerges from it. What i most hate about it this is, that the dark shadow of these scandals fall upon all the other (deeply honest) scientists, who try hard to advance science. All the black sheeps should experience fast and hard consequences! Cheating in science is a no-go!
Retraction is not good enough. There needs to be a permanent record of why specifically they were retracted (not generalities but “data was falsified” and how). Authors (names inserted)retracted their peer reviewed paper after caught falsifying the data.
Thanks for the video. This is more disturbing than the others because it goes all the way to the Nobel Prize. Small point: It is "Johns Hopkins," John has an "s" on it.
These people should be in jail. They are committing fraud, which wastes millions of dollars. In any other industry they would not be treated so favorably.
Linda Buck the winner of the 2004 nobel prize, and dicoverer of the family of odorant receptor genes together with Richard Axel, had a posdoc that invented a bunch of results, nature, cell and science level, they were all retracted.
When they let in the normal people to buy an asset class, that's when you know that they are trying offload their investments onto the common people. Do not invest in anything which you don't know how to value or at least why it is valuable.
Yes, that is what Wall Street is all about. Wholesale/Retail and the normal people are the retail. We live in the "Age of Scammers' but as they say on Wall Street "a fool and his money are soon parted."
How hard is it to just not manipulate data? I don't understand why they are even doing it. You can publish a paper, even if you didn't get the result you were expecting or hoping for. That's the whole point of science.
Actually, quite unlikely you'll get published in a high ranking journal if you have a null. Sad but true. Go watch my video with Katy Milkman, she explains. Thumbnail says "Good Data".
You should check up on the "reproducibility project." The fact that no result studies don't get published puts a lot of pressure to publish fake studies with "results."
Exactly what PeteJudo said: very unlikely to publish null results. Even worse: your story needs to be tightly knitted to actually get good chances of being published in major journals. At least in the biomedical sciences, in recent times big journals dislike any type of complexity that may have ambiguity in the results. If you send a manuscript detailing the complexities and showing contradictory data, during peer review you will be asked to perform new experiments to clarify details ad infinitum. That's why there is actually a huge incentive in academia right now to "get right results" (which means positive results that are very clear). You can see in basically all videos in this channel how bad the situation is getting now...
You don't know why? The same reason why it's a s*** show in all other industries. Government, finance, energy, gaming. The list goes on and on. I wish I never watched Pete's video. Because fraud in this industry, give me a healthy dose of despair. And I really do hope AGI comes along Which humans cannot control 😂.
Pete, I would recommend a book called "Medical Nihilism" by Jacob Stegenga. Have you heard of it? I read it a few years ago and I loved it. Opened my eyes to some problems in medical research, especially the influence of non-scientific values and how they penetrate deep within research methodology.
I believe scientific audit should be conducted routinely even and perhaps especially of well-established respected researchers/authors. What's bad is not that it happens, but when it continues so long due to stellar reputation. No one should be untouchable. It hurts everyone including legitimate sound research.
It's supposed to be, but I'm thinking more along the lines of spot checks of overall work from a person or entity. Not every paper, but if the process isn't working as designed, it may need this extra check.@@marinaabad4995
Not surprising. Recently, the paper upon which many doctors based their prescription of statins to lower cholesterol to prevent heart attacks was shown to have misled with and even falsified the data. When examined carefully, the data actually showed there was no benefits from statins for most people. See LDL-C does not cause cardiovascular disease: a comprehensive review of the current literature, Uffe Ravnskov, et al. Expert Review of Clinical Pharmacology, Volume 11, 2018 - Issue 10.
The academic peer reviewed system operates on a voluntary basis and a honour system, meaning people who participate in it are assume to have integrity and honest.
Everyone involved should be held accountable. High profile academics like Nobel Prize winners should be held to a *higher* standard than a random researcher.
Appreciate that you are pulling this information together and presenting it. I believe that I speak for many when I observe that conduct of this nature would go unnoticed were it not for your efforts. It certainly would for me. Shining a light on this fraud is the start to a cure.
About the edited western-blot. It is, actually, verry difficult to see if you are not looking for it. The responsibility should be of the people who committed the fraud... usually when we are reading or reviewing a paper with this kind of experiment, you are looking for the height of each band and the strength of the color. The shape of each colum is easily missed. I dont think it is fair to expect the reviewers or co-author to know that it was manipulated if they aren't directly involved in the act itself.
in addition, those subplots occupied maybe 10% of the total plot area, while there were also around 10 similar figures in many of the retracted papers.
@@iaderesel yes... But a lot of people read the paper and cited without noticing. If the fraud was more sophisticated they could adjust the grey areas to be slightly different. They could try mirroring or tooling with the light and contrasts and then it wouldn't be as obvious even when you show. Usually this is a routine experiment and nobody expect a fraud or mistake. The reviewers are much more concerned with the demanding task that is to search if the proper literature is being cited, if the logic of the arguments being made are solid, if there is some flaw in the methodology and if there is some support for the conclusions made. Science requires some level of trust until proven untrustworthy. And it is very good that somebody is looking for flaws in the system, but we shouldn't throw everyone under the bus because of the misdeeds of probably one author.
@@iaderesel as an autistic I see it straight away, a neurotypical is wired to be 'blind' to this (expectation of sameness). It is form overriding function - neurotypical will not at first abstract from form. Autistics must abstract from form to cutdown on 'noise'. Context for perception.
Most labs have this requirement. However, I'm a doctoral student who doesn't mind it for myself since having my advisor on my papers means that people will find them. 🤷🏽♀️
@@Heyu7her3 well, if he does what the title say then he did contribute to your work, so i dont see a problem there. I assume he does guide you and help/counsel you in your research
(6:51) "the last author on the paper bears the responsibility for everything that goes into that paper" (paraphrased). This doesn't sound right to me. If we're talking about the _first_ author then yes, but the last one is often the one who's the most senior, oversaw the project, or even the one that had the _least_ to contribute to the paper - depending on the field there isn't always someone assigned to this role. None of these mean they're 100% responsible for the paper, though. I think this point could have been made a bit better than just "last name = responsible for everything".
the Last Author is usually the PI (principal investigator) who should be checking the results to make sure they’re not fraudulent. considering this is happening across multiple papers with Greg Semenza being the only common author between them, it’s pretty clear there was top-down involvement in the fraudulent data.
well, you are correct that that was a super sketchy statement. Often, the last author is the project leader but not always. Sometimes authors are just in alphabetical order or according to their contributions. Gregg Semenza has over 160 papers and clearly cannot check all the contents. Those 10 papers not only were not important to his main contributions to the Nobel Prize but also made 0.3% of his total citations.
@@salganik Please. 160 papers is a paper every few weeks/months. You want to tell me that he consented to his name being on every of these papers and didn't have the time to read them and have maybe some trusted associate of his check them for signs of fraud? Maybe people shouldn't just let their name be used like that to grease the wheels of the system if they aren't willing to 100% stand behind the paper and carry the responsibility. Maybe someone's name shouldn't be on 160 papers but only on 30 but ones they really are involved with. Maybe the bad traits of the system don't need to be defended by everyone just brushing off responsibility.
@@SianaGearz 1. No, it is 4 papers per year, nothing exceptional. 2. All you "maybes" would probably work in an ideal universe with perfect ethics and no competition. In real life, most researchers are happy to accept co-authorship in any decent study, where they contributed by providing data, algorithm, funding, or planning the campaign. For most researchers rejecting all such potential collaborations would eventually lead to the end of their scientific career. It is pretty hard to predict which papers are going to be well-cited, so having 30 papers instead of 160 is a suicide. For the "signs of fraud", even the reviewers did not managed to spot the copied images as they were so small. Why would a co-author be able to do so? What you suggest also would make interdisciplinary papers impossible, as a fraction of authors just cannot understand a fraction of a paper outside of their field. If all researchers would need to "100% carry the responsibility" of all their co-authored papers, there would be no collaborations in such a system (or researchers would need to spend all their time redoing and rechecking all such papers).
In this day and age, I wouldn’t be surprised if Nobel creates a new prize category for pseudoscience, for example Chemistry or Physics or Medicine. After all, we can scarcely define what is a man or woman nowadays.
This reminds me of the stem cells fraud in SK in the BobbyBroccoli documentary. It had an allegedly hapless Westerner signing off on research he apparently knew little about.
Great Channel idea. These Journals are filled with studies that no one has been able to replicate the same results and these studies are being used to advise gov policy
Thanks for the video. I spent months writing my thesis for a bachelor in applied psychology, I heard 30% of all papers are a problem across all departments, such a shame, but also an opening to rediscover that 30% again with new knowledge, and science will be the better for all these, the more the better as reforms will be needed and the time spent on my 9000-word thesis will not go to vain and the countless others also who did their best being true and honest according to ethics.
Рік тому+4
In the business world, we say there's an apparent conflict of interest when the administration makes decisions that appear to served their individual interests over the broader interests of the various stakeholders. In occurrence, one might argue that there's apparent conflict of interest to be the head editor of an academic journal and publishing within the journal, especially considering the numbers of academic retracted. At the very least there's a deontological case on the basis of undermining the public's trust that can be put forth to the professional order. Criminal charges might be difficult to prove, but it should be fairly easy on the basis of the demonstrate a case for negligence on the proof by balance of probability against the journal and the heads of the editorial team in a civil trial. At the very least, I'd expect the journal to be required to pay substantial penalities considering the nature of the multiples papers under investigation. Ideally, the scientific community should petition for hefty penalities in order to deter future frauds. Furthermore, the legislator should establish public audiences to establish a forum to debate on the credibility and legitimity crisis in the academic world.
The mice thing isn’t animal cruelty, it’s just how the science has to be done. If you’re testing a cancer drug, you need a control group that remains unmedicated until the end of the study. Biology isn’t behavioral science; you can’t just flag down random college students and inject them with tumors and prospective cancer drugs to see what happens. You have to start testing on rats to make sure the drug at least works somewhere and isn’t fundamentally toxic to mammalian life. Then you move up to larger mammals to see if those both hold true. Only then are you ready to undertake clinical trials with humans.
What scares me most about these copy-paste incidents is that it'd be incredibly easy to cover their tracks if they were willing to do so. These people took no effort in hiding it, but it'd be incredibly easy to edit the image so it isn't that obvious that the result was copy-pasted. There might be more cases of fake results such as these around, but considerably harder to track due to the person taking some effort into hiding it.
I just want to say i love the channel. You made things i never gave a sh*t about interesting af. I can honestly say you have made me a smarter person and for that i would like to say thank you. PLEASE DONT STOP THE KNOWLEDGE. Also ty for sharing your college education i could never afford. I mean it your great.
Lawyers can get their license revoked for signing off on false statements. I see no reason why academic researchers do not also face significant repercussions for the same. If their name is on it, they are responsible for it.
Reading a book on UPF at the moment. The author states that, out of every 10 research papers, 7 are flawed, 2 provide useful information, and 1 is actively fraudulent...
Judgments and penalties for being named on a fraudulent paper should be done based on number of incidents. Anyone could have the misfortune of being part of a team where someone on it committed the fraud. Maybe that could have happened a couple of times in a career (assuming that you didn’t learn to be more watchful after the first incident), but if it keeps happening, there should be serious consequences on a sliding scale. Being part of TEN papers isn’t an accident and his Nobel prize should be taken from him and he should lose his positions; even prison time for fraud shouldn’t be off the table as a consequence. Strong consequences are needed to reduce the temptation for others.
We need more people like you bringing this information. Thanks for taking the time to do so :) I'm a huge fan of Elizabeth Bik's work in discovering fraud, but I think making this news available on UA-cam in video format is a huge niche that hasn't been filled. Subscribed for any future videos you make on these topics :) Just a sidenote though, I would potentially reconsider your choice of Sponsor. If you plan on making videos on fraud... definitely stick to the safer, less sketchy sponsors.
The main issue on all these cases of fraud isn`t just "academia pressure" or "peer review failures"; it is the moral of the researchers. It doesn't matter if "academia makes pressure on you to find results otherwise you don't get any sponsors" or "peer reviews is a broken system" - if you don't want to fraud or lie, you simply won't bend yourself down to the system. World may let you on your knees on many ways, but morally, it's always up to you. These doctors ain't no children that couldn't do the right thing "because they're being pressured to do so" like a kid pressured by his teacher. It's always a choice.
Do not think of the pressure as a subjective feeling people can ignore, but as a Darwinian selective pressure. Those who di not cheat or are willing to get eliminated from the game early on, leaving only the unethical ones
@@alicianieto2822 I believe that if you're excellent enough (which is tremendously hard) this won't be the case. Again, really hard, but still possible.
This comment has only 13 likes because it assumes that morals are absolute, which is an unpopular idea. It's unfortunate that the world is so wrong about this
Science is a process, and there is no competition for the scientific process. We can’t trust every paper, but in the long run science will get it right.
Thank you Pete for talking about this subject. I think acknowledging the problem is the first step in fixing it. Once the problem has greater recognition increased steps to prevent it can be implemented. As a science PhD student myself, what stands out to me is that those long lists of authors who likely include PhD students, Post-Doctoral researchers, maybe some undergraduates. If any of those students don't get their name on a published paper it could mean their career is over. It may mean they are not allowed to graduate. It may mean they can't get hired even if they do graduate. That seems to be a major aspect of this false data phenomenon. There should be a counterbalance to that where things like the counterfeit data that you showed is met with loss of research funding. The guy you talked about seems to be a major enabler; that's not who should be on scientific publication boards.
When Obama was given a Nobel prize for peace after being in office for three months was when i lost all faith in the nobel system. Then the final nail was driven in by not giving one to Trump who signed three, THREE peace treaties with arab nations.
The worst consequence of sci fraud is the many projects that have been denied access to funding on the basis that their 'lines' of research didn't quite fit the mainstream ideas on the problem at hand. The reviewers who decide on funding are fully on the bandwagon of active research, very wary of alternative views that might represent a threat to them. Funding is mostly - perhaps rightly so - a competition for limited resources, usually leading to 'a few get it all' solutions that favor the most cited, accepted lines pursued by a select few.
I said this in a previous video and I'll say it again, the "publish or perish" approach is killing academia and therefore, research fields. At some point all the low hanging fruits get picked, and what's left after are hard to solve problems that take years of hard work just to make a marginal improvement on. Yet academia only values the ones that can pump out consistent, novel publications. That's now how science progresses. This is why i left academia. I was also in cancer research and I got the feeling that it was more about getting the articles out over the actual results a few years in. Still makes me sad to think about
Science has been overwhelmed by politics, power and money. It just not science anymore - was it ever? I think it was, but as political operators became more aware of the the power of subsituting e.g. "The Bible says" with "Scientists Say", along with apocalyptic doom forecasts, well...... the temptation was just too much.
Hey man, don’t spoil the party! That’s how this 1% thing works~gotta get those grants! 😂 (In all seriousness, thanks to the two women doing these investigations)
The best way to stop this is to make the last author liable for the return of the funding. Funders should quite simply sue for the return of the money that paid for the study. If this were the case and I was the last author I make sure I was thoroughly familiar with the contents and if I doubted it would not put my name to it.
You are assuming the people who funded the paper didn't 'buy' the result, not the paper. If you don't give them the result they want, they don't fund you ever again. The whole thing is smoke and mirrors.
Aside from the dishonesty of the author(s) doing fraud, the true problem is the peer review process. There should have less scientific papers, but each one should be verified in their entirety instead of blindly trusting the data presented.
Western blot is one of the worst techniques that we have but unfortunately essential. Not only is it easy to be fabricated, the nature of the experiment actually makes it hard to present because of all the noises and inconsistency of the technique. It's also hard to provide a statistical analysis of the results. One can see a difference between two bands when another person would call that BS because of that. There is software to measure the band intensity but from my experience it's complete BS. Unfortunately that is one of the cheapest and easiest method to implement when it comes to protein quantification. I think this put even more incentive to some researcher to fabricate the data (not that anyone should do it at anytime). As for the animal study, from what I know, the US has one of the loosest control over animal use in research in the developed world (this is hearsay please don't sue me for libel). Same as Hong Kong (this is my personal experience). In the UK, we have a license for the establishment holding the animal facility, license for each project and license for the personnel. The animal welfare officers and vets are also more attentive and more caring to the animals than what I know those in Hong Kong and US would be. The animals in the picture you shown were most definitely way pass the humane endpoint for ANY cancer related experiment. The vet/staff at the animal facility should know. I think they are accomplices (intended or not) as well. If the animal has weight lost of over 10% usually they would be culled by one of the methods listed in the guideline issued by the Home Office. For solid tumour, there is also a maximum size of the tumour and animal must be culled immediately when the endpoint is reached. Speaking of waste of money, they are too many non-reproducible data out there. Most of them are not the results of data fabrication but all the uncontrollable factor of the reagents and cell lines we use. Also the negative results were never published so people waste time to repeat the experiments done in like ten other different labs without knowing. Effort has been made to minimise that, including a database with negative results (it's better than the journal of negative results imo). Hope this could minimise money wasted and more importantly plastic wasted (if you have never worked in a molecular biology lab you wouldn't believe how much plastic is used a day)
Usually in a decent paper Western blots are not the only proof you provide for the validity of your hypothesis. There must be evidence provided that was obtained by different methods that further support you claim. Not that these other methods are much harder to fake than Western blots but I would always look out for a "network" of mutually supportive data obtained by different methods. And Western blots are relatively easy to replicate. Especially if you're working in the same research area. If you repeatedly fail to replicate a Western using the pulished materials and methods you know something smells fishy.
How could these papers, with obvious flaws in the data pass peer review? In my opinion, the 'peer reviewers' should be disqualified. Maybe a vigorous overhaul of the review system is needed.
At the risk of drawing fire I opine, having worked in industry with overseas teams, that being asian or Chinese is quite likely a factor and anyone putting their names on such papers must be extremely diligent. I have found such teams to be very driven to provide whatever result they perceive a client wants (at least superficially) by any means necessary (but also to commodify and sell any IP that they happen across). I don't know if it's got better in the last couple of decades but it was strong in the culture back then. It's not that they can't do good work, but more about what they think good work means to you.
Every author is responsible for ALL of the content of every paper. That's the way it works. Now if someone is an author on several retracted papers, and in each case they contributed data for a certain type of experiment that they specialize in (let's say proteomics for example) AND that data is not suspicious AND the fraudulent data was contributed by someone else AND that person is not the senior author, I think most people would cut them a break, even if technically they are responsible for all the content. But that is certainly not the case here, as by convention (as well as the letter of the law), the senior author (i.e. last one listed) is directly accountable for any data manipulation or fraud.
This is why I snicker when people whine "Trust the science!" because in reality you're actually trusting the scienTISTS. And even then, science is completely limited to the subjective human experience.
@@kyle857 Them pointing it out does not mean science doesn't have the wrong incentives inside which might produce results which should be taken skeptically but most people don't as people like you keep saying trust the science and when something like this happens you fall back to "well atleast its the best method we have so we can ignore the downsides"
@@kyle857 Incorrect. In fact, science itself has shown that higher intelligence is correlated with MORE bias, not less. Bias is not "reduced" by having more science. Wtf does a pastor have to do with this? Science is the HUMAN study of the universe, which means it's subjective to the human experience and limited by human flaws and human perceptions.
Cutting and pasting individual bands on Western blots is very bad practice and probably an indication of fraud. Especially if the process has not been indicated clearly in the published version for all readers to see and understand. You may cut out entire lanes and shift them elsewhere but again this must be indicated clearly. Cutting and pasting individual bands is very iffy if not clearly marked as such and provided with a reasonable explanation. And it depends on what you attempt to show with the blot. If you compare two different treatment conditions and you cut (and paste) individual bands of the resulting Western blot you're most likely making things up on purpose. That's is not sloppiness
What is very surprising is the referee not saying nothing.... I had referee remarks and questions because of captions not precise enough, graphic color not be contrasted enough etc.. and here 2 pictures identical and the paper went through... it is very suspicious..
I would understand it if someone tries to forge or ‘adjust’ the data but saving time by copying and taking images from other papers. That’s truly crazy!
5:30 Well, I don't know if you were aware of it before my comment on one of your previous videos, but now I can see you definitely know about retraction watch now. Scary place, isn't it?
Woukd you agree? Nassim Taleb wrote, for many academics (including those involved in peer review), there is no "skin in the game". If they are wrong or lazy or corrupt in the peer review process, there are no negative consequences. No repercussions. The peer reviewers remain anonymous and not accountable. Agree or disagree?
Taleb is a genius and he has revolutionized the practice of financial statistics. JF PH.D mathematics, NSF postdoc, IT consultant..... However his ideas are somewhat hard to follow.
"Science" for many 'scientist', is a money-go-round, where what is actually good science is overcome by meh-science, done for prestige and, of course, grant money.
I'm a biochemistry student and doing sds-page and/or blot is easy and standar procedure. It usually takes me half a day to a couple days of work depending on how much purification you need before hand.
A big part of the problem is replication studies are not encouraged. If they were more common, you would have another mechanism in place to evaluate the impact of a researcher. But that’s just scratching the surface of all the problems in this field.
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blue chip art... never have I heard of an uglier concept
I really like your content and that's why you should be careful with your sponsors. This art invesment thing seems to be a big scam. Maybe it's not, but still, no youtuber should tell people that they should invest their savings into this or that. Y'all should stay with the vpn stuff, it's not great, but at least it's not a complete fraud, like becoming a baron while planting a fake tree.
It’s a scam for many reasons which makes it an incredibly strange ad given the video. 1) why would they pay UA-cam influencers to push this if they really had a waitlist of people hoping to join? 2) They front ended well-performing paintings to show big returns while most paintings don’t receive that
Shocking!! Very unsensitive to push an investment scheme without any critical review. You of all should know best how much dodgy investment advise is floating around on youtube. You present yourself as the oracle of truth and then use that trust to lead people into investing money in your interest?? I like your work but now i'm wondering what your motivation is. Do you want to get rich on youtube pointing fingers at others, or do you want to better the system? Couldn't you find any other sponsor? The prices for art, housing, wine, whiskey, guitars or whatever commodity you pick went up up because of the availibility of cheap money and the need to put that money somewhere - The time of cheap money is probably over and all these prices may come down quickly. I personally hope that they will!
@@TheSupriest I don't think it's a scam but I do think it's embarrassingly distasteful.
Edit: I do think it's mostly a scam, just maybe not a *complete* scam. Anyway, it's a false economy taking them as a sponsor, it must massively harm the channel.
Pete, love most of your videos, but please, be careful with sponsors like Masterworks. The fact that these kind of videos are sponsored by them could diminish your content, to say the least.
Yes quite the irony considering the content of his video
@@afib4968yep and if it ever goes bottom up I’m sure people will say it wasn’t his responsibility lol.
Yes, it’s quite ironic given the subject of the video. I understand the lure of sponsorship money, but it is wise to research potential sponsors first. With sponsors like Masterworks it shouldn’t take more than a five minute Google search.
I don't care if the Sponsor is the WEF but this content is key and unfortunately not many people wanna sponsor such content!
Sadly, if you want to make money on YT, there is no other way.
I attempted a PhD in cancer biology twice. I quit bith times, partially because I couldn’t get reproducible data from my experiments. Experiements I based on papers like thise mentioned here that have been proven fraudulent.
Sigh
We need to have a journal called the reproductible journal dedicated to studies like yours. You might become a famous debunker of papers feared by all. bwahahaha
@@Mady-lo6qbi agree
You should debunk the papers you'd really make a career out of it
You'd need to make sure you're thorough as fuck but wouldn't it be a good thing if you debunked such papers?
I just did my master's and during my dissertation I lost my interest in doing PhD cause of things like these, I was so hyped about doing PhD but now nada no chance
"I take credit but not responsibility."
"I share in the immediate rewards but refuse any later punishment."
Authority without responsibility - the plague of our times.
Goes right along with the Silicon Valley mantra - "I'd rather beg for forgiveness than ask for permission."
Authoritarianism more like.
Everything cultural Marxism touches it corrupts.
The plague of our time? This has been a problem in academia long before any of us were born. Who would've guessed that doing nothing about a cancer only makes it worse?
@@Piledriver2006 problem in academia? try problem in government in general, health, education and safety.
Police, doctors and educators all have the authority to fuck a lot of shit up before anyone thinks to actually check their authority.
If you think this is an "academia" problem, I have news for you - This is how we have decided to govern ourself on land, on the high seas the Authority that fucks up is also the one that takes the blame, the time and the bill, Authority without responsibility never works as intended and that is why you will never see it in practise on the seas, for some strange reason it is practised all the time on land and it always turns into a pile of we didnt do nothing.
Nobel prize is a joke
This case reveals yet another tip of the iceberg in the broken peer review system that rewards the quantity of publications over quality.
"This case reveals yet another tip of the iceberg in the broken peer review system that rewards the quantity of publications over quality"
I agree but is there any alternative?
Naively I think research data should open for all to see and research shouldnot be conclusive until it is independently replicated.
Then data fraud would be impoissible
peer reviewing is a farce as it is academic publishing. IdeeRotolanti channel, I discussed it in Italian
The scientific journal editors work exactly like cartels (RELX Group, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Wiley-Blackwell , etc.).
Public money pays at every levels.
They make like 10 time more profit than their revenues.
You pay to have access to the publishing, to publish, to share your publication, to review others publications, etc.
I'm glad there are pirate websites to f**k them up.
The obvious question arises: what is a better system? We as a society want to build a hierarchy of scientists to give the limited funding to scientists who truly deserve it. How else can we reliably measure their efficiency? Why is a peer review from current experts in the field not working? Or do you as a tax payer want to give your money to somebody doing impactless science? How do we solve those issues?
@@glebanfulIt’s because the academic system as a whole is broken. Almost anyone can get a degree if they have the money or grants necessary to do so. Ergo, they need to be incentivized to be hyper selective. Best way to do this is to pull all federal funding. No grants, no programs, and no federal partnerships.
having a scam artist as a sponsor for a video about another scam artist is top notch irony lmao
Agreed. It seemed so out of place in this vid.
Whatever pays the bills?
Yeah I'd be embarrassed to share these with anyone I know in academia with those sponsor segments.
They've got to so many UA-camrs it's kinda sad
How broken is mainstream science ?
VERY
We are in the year 2023 and they still can't admit to Sasquatch
The Big Bang Theory idea should have died 80 years ago. Corruption keeps it going.
Suppression of science has been going on for the last century
Science and politics has been intertwined for a long time.
You know masterworks is timeshare scheme? Bc you don't truly own the pieces and it's impossible to sell and you have to pay management fees
Thanks for the info. Had suspicions about Masterworks but didn't know anything about them. They're like the Japanese knives and the Scottish lord titles which came out of Singapore. The knives came from China and the Scottish lord titles were false. Be very careful about what you buy on the internet.
@@josephnardone1250any company that sponsors UA-cam videos immediately seems suspect to me.
People who watched this documentary already knew it 👉The Connections (2021) [short documentary]❤️
The masterworks idea sounds fishy to me when all the UA-camrs were plugging it. I thought it's just another NFT, but timeshare scheme? Did not know that. I will unsubscribe every UA-camr pushing for that from now on! If they can't do their own research before they push that stuff on people, their credibility is in doubt.
lol, got em.
Paper-milling is endemic in academia. Researchers want money -> get a grant -> need papers -> generate papers -> need more papers -> rewrite existing papers -> need more papers -> come up with a sexy solution, hope they never read past the abstract -> grant money! -> money for me -> go back to beginning.
You forgot to add that journals also need sales and subscription money. Groundbreaking articles mean more sales.
They are necessary for the legitimacy of their overlords, so plenty of cash thrown their way
Nothing to add.
They don't just "want money". For many, it is their income. Their living.
@@SolidSiren Yes, and scam artists also do what they do for a living. The problem is that it isn't honest.
How many patient treatment protocols have been affected by fraudulent papers.
Millions of people affected during the last couple years … and it’s still happening.
@douginorlando6260 Mord like Billions but eventually the truth will seep out of multiple orifices, belatedly so but it will.
Kissinger?
their treatments burn your body out. So that you really can never return to health even if the cancer disappears.
56 results for Semenza on pubpeer. Many of these papers were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences which allows members to 'contribute' papers which receive preferential treatment in terms of review. This is probably why Semenza is the only western name on these papers since his primary role was likely to get the paper published by this less stringent route.
as someone who has worked on this side of academia it’s MUCH worse than people can imagine … we don’t even want to get into the topic of the statistical validity
Indeed, I was trained in statistics and experimental design and anymore I can't hardly TOLERATE reading ANY life science article. Probably 80 plus percent either show gross flaws in design/analysis or else report SUSPICIOUS data.
I mean , with the whole replication crisis going on more than 50% of the papers could be bs or have altered results , so your guesses are quite on point , psychology there are fields in which like only 20% of the paper results can be replicated
Life sciences -try the numerically illiterate social "sciences" - sociology and the like - What passes for research there is on a par with a 10 year old's essay - "What I did in the summer holidays " - while on a scholarship from Harvard. 50 pct of academics are a waste of space and suck up taxpayer money when legitimate research goes begging
Thanks so much for these videos, I’m just in my 1st year in Uni and watching these videos have really helped me “touch grass” and take off my rose tinted glasses about academia. Please continue to enlighten me and others with your knowledge and experience, it really helps
At least these scandals have humanized academia from being seen as a pristine institution of geniuses like how I used to view them when I was in high school. Now I see these people as regular adults who sometimes do a great job and sometimes are con artists.
Watch "Dr.. John Campbell" about Covid. Almost all of his episodes are reviewing research ... and teaching his audience about research design.
The thing I wished I had in Boston when I was in that world was higher self-esteem. STAY AWAY from people that damage your self-esteem and see the difference in people that don’t. I wish I learned what was in the book “The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem” before I got there. But I fell in love with psychos and they gave me traumatic brain injuries that left me permanently disabled. I really hope you learn from me and don’t get crushed by the academic world that is doing FAR darker things like human experiments still. They are broken and need strong people to fix their issues. I came from a family of academics but I am a mixed Brazilian woman and they are all rich white men that privilege. Women need to be stronger emotionally and smarter to get around them. But if you learn how it really works vs what they want you to think you will go further than I ever could. My arrogance blinded me too much. I hope you go further than I ever could 💖
@@veramae4098 "Dr. John Campbell" is a fraud himself.
People who watched this documentary already knew it 👉The Connections (2021) [short documentary]❤️
What strikes me most about the fraud cases I know is how blatantly obvious the fraud actually was. Knowing it would be easy to disguise fraud just a little bit, and knowing this would be sufficient to go undetected in today's world lets me estimate that the actual amount of fraudulent behavior in science may be gigantic
I just wrote a big reply here citing a lot of papers but UA-cam shadow banned it. That probably also says a lot. I'll try to post it in segments (as I am not going to give up)
There is an entire rabbit hole regarding how a lot of the Covid vaccine papers are actually fraudulent (like the one where they concluded hat the virus could not have been a lab leak). The literature on a lot of the treatments (like "bad word that starts with I") is also weirdly all over the place. But in practice it appears that it actually helps (but, in turn, only when given early and especially as a prophylactic). You have vaccine papers with positive outcomes for the vaccines, like these ones:
@@vampir753happens to me a lot when I speak unspeakable truth.
@@vampir753 interesting, looking forward to your videos
Members of academia are well aware of the extensive fraud, significant errors, and other instances of low-quality research results in published papers. This revelation often surprises those outside academia, but it's essential to assert that scientists do care about the practices among their peers. In reality, there exists an internal 'control system,' though at times, it can be chaotic and relatively underdeveloped. Given this, I don't believe the root of this problem lies within academia itself. Instead, it often stems from funding bodies and various bureaucratic entities, including university administrations, which exert significant influence over scientists' careers. Unfortunately, these entities are not merely unwitting enablers of fraudulent activity; they frequently display indifference toward scientific rigor and the actions of rogue scientists.
Masterworks has distributed $45 million. How much of that was actual profit to the investors? Meanwhile Mark Lynn CEO pays $30 million for a New York condo.
taking Masterworks as sponsor is a L on this channel
The only two creators who I hold in high esteem are Louis Rossmann & Team3DAlpha. The only two channel have never reduced themselves to this level. I cringe whenever I hear someone take these sponsors; mind you these content creators are not starving homeless, living in Skid Row with 10GB internet data. They have respectable professional career. They can decline and it won't have massive affect on their purse. Every content creators, sooner or later, just turn their channel into a mouthpiece and eventually a miniature version of that which they critique.
It must pay good money to sell your reputation....
I get it,money,lots of it, and the risk of losing subs by it small.
Greed can take the best of them utubers.
Maybe they have a point.
After all,"this is not financial advice "😂...
That many people believe they can make money out of thin air ,is a fact.
Invest(if you must,or even can) wisely.
Yeah, Agree with u
Highest bidder for a reason
@@MayorSomI agree, some sponsors are questionable. But not all sponsors are bad . If the sponsor is legit , then there is nothing wrong with the creator doing a deal with them . Let's be real here , these guys have to make a living through these videos so you can't really grandstand when it comes to them doing sponsorships. But I do agree with you that some are questionable and creators should be very careful pushing them .
As former scientist, i always hated that mass production of papers. Some colleagues were usally not deeply interested in their scientific topic, climbing the ladder as fast as possible was more important to them. This (your topic) is what emerges from it. What i most hate about it this is, that the dark shadow of these scandals fall upon all the other (deeply honest) scientists, who try hard to advance science. All the black sheeps should experience fast and hard consequences! Cheating in science is a no-go!
Retraction is not good enough. There needs to be a permanent record of why specifically they were retracted (not generalities but “data was falsified” and how). Authors (names inserted)retracted their peer reviewed paper after caught falsifying the data.
Thanks for the video. This is more disturbing than the others because it goes all the way to the Nobel Prize. Small point: It is "Johns Hopkins," John has an "s" on it.
Yes. Johns Hopkins (the person after whom the university is named) was so named because a SURname in his family history was "Johns." IIRC, that is.
People who watched this documentary already knew it 👉The Connections (2021) [short documentary]❤️
That's interesting. Did he have multiple personalities?
These people should be in jail. They are committing fraud, which wastes millions of dollars. In any other industry they would not be treated so favorably.
Better, have the individuals responsible, refund ALL of their grant money, not just the fraudulent findings. That hurts more than being in jail.
Linda Buck the winner of the 2004 nobel prize, and dicoverer of the family of odorant receptor genes together with Richard Axel, had a posdoc that invented a bunch of results, nature, cell and science level, they were all retracted.
When they let in the normal people to buy an asset class, that's when you know that they are trying offload their investments onto the common people. Do not invest in anything which you don't know how to value or at least why it is valuable.
What I've read is that the subjective nature of art valuation makes it a good vehicle for money laundering.
Yes, that is what Wall Street is all about. Wholesale/Retail and the normal people are the retail. We live in the "Age of Scammers' but as they say on Wall Street
"a fool and his money are soon parted."
How hard is it to just not manipulate data? I don't understand why they are even doing it. You can publish a paper, even if you didn't get the result you were expecting or hoping for. That's the whole point of science.
Actually, quite unlikely you'll get published in a high ranking journal if you have a null. Sad but true. Go watch my video with Katy Milkman, she explains. Thumbnail says "Good Data".
You should check up on the "reproducibility project."
The fact that no result studies don't get published puts a lot of pressure to publish fake studies with "results."
Exactly what PeteJudo said: very unlikely to publish null results. Even worse: your story needs to be tightly knitted to actually get good chances of being published in major journals. At least in the biomedical sciences, in recent times big journals dislike any type of complexity that may have ambiguity in the results. If you send a manuscript detailing the complexities and showing contradictory data, during peer review you will be asked to perform new experiments to clarify details ad infinitum. That's why there is actually a huge incentive in academia right now to "get right results" (which means positive results that are very clear). You can see in basically all videos in this channel how bad the situation is getting now...
You don't know why? The same reason why it's a s*** show in all other industries. Government, finance, energy, gaming. The list goes on and on.
I wish I never watched Pete's video. Because fraud in this industry, give me a healthy dose of despair. And I really do hope AGI comes along Which humans cannot control 😂.
Indeed, but you can't get recognition for not finding something.
I lost confidence in the Nobel Prize when they started handing them out to celebrity politicians
Pete, I would recommend a book called "Medical Nihilism" by Jacob Stegenga. Have you heard of it? I read it a few years ago and I loved it. Opened my eyes to some problems in medical research, especially the influence of non-scientific values and how they penetrate deep within research methodology.
Medical nihilism: The limits of a decontextualised critique of medicine
PMID: 31345652 DOI: 10.1016/j.shpsc.2019.101189
Just bought a copy. Thx!
People who watched this documentary already knew it 👉The Connections (2021) [short documentary]❤️
>complains about fraudsters
>advertises masterworks
Cmon
I believe scientific audit should be conducted routinely even and perhaps especially of well-established respected researchers/authors. What's bad is not that it happens, but when it continues so long due to stellar reputation. No one should be untouchable. It hurts everyone including legitimate sound research.
Isn't peer review a scientific audit?
It's supposed to be, but I'm thinking more along the lines of spot checks of overall work from a person or entity. Not every paper, but if the process isn't working as designed, it may need this extra check.@@marinaabad4995
Sometimes you need to set up a process to "watch the watchers" or gatekeepers.@@marinaabad4995
Were any of Semenza’s retracted papers cited in his Nobel?
Not surprising. Recently, the paper upon which many doctors based their prescription of statins to lower cholesterol to prevent heart attacks was shown to have misled with and even falsified the data. When examined carefully, the data actually showed there was no benefits from statins for most people. See LDL-C does not cause cardiovascular disease: a comprehensive review of the current literature,
Uffe Ravnskov, et al. Expert Review of Clinical Pharmacology, Volume 11, 2018 - Issue 10.
Thank you for these reveals. The world of academia is difficult to keep a finger on. You're doing marvelous work.
It really is!
The academic peer reviewed system operates on a voluntary basis and a honour system, meaning people who participate in it are assume to have integrity and honest.
Everyone involved should be held accountable. High profile academics like Nobel Prize winners should be held to a *higher* standard than a random researcher.
Appreciate that you are pulling this information together and presenting it. I believe that I speak for many when I observe that conduct of this nature would go unnoticed were it not for your efforts. It certainly would for me. Shining a light on this fraud is the start to a cure.
Yeah, totally agree. I am also like this
About the edited western-blot. It is, actually, verry difficult to see if you are not looking for it. The responsibility should be of the people who committed the fraud... usually when we are reading or reviewing a paper with this kind of experiment, you are looking for the height of each band and the strength of the color. The shape of each colum is easily missed. I dont think it is fair to expect the reviewers or co-author to know that it was manipulated if they aren't directly involved in the act itself.
Interesting point. It does look blatantly obvious once you've seen it right? Still strange to me how no-one saw it for years
in addition, those subplots occupied maybe 10% of the total plot area, while there were also around 10 similar figures in many of the retracted papers.
@@iaderesel yes... But a lot of people read the paper and cited without noticing. If the fraud was more sophisticated they could adjust the grey areas to be slightly different. They could try mirroring or tooling with the light and contrasts and then it wouldn't be as obvious even when you show.
Usually this is a routine experiment and nobody expect a fraud or mistake. The reviewers are much more concerned with the demanding task that is to search if the proper literature is being cited, if the logic of the arguments being made are solid, if there is some flaw in the methodology and if there is some support for the conclusions made.
Science requires some level of trust until proven untrustworthy. And it is very good that somebody is looking for flaws in the system, but we shouldn't throw everyone under the bus because of the misdeeds of probably one author.
@@iaderesel as an autistic I see it straight away, a neurotypical is wired to be 'blind' to this (expectation of sameness). It is form overriding function - neurotypical will not at first abstract from form. Autistics must abstract from form to cutdown on 'noise'.
Context for perception.
@@carly09etYou should get a job in an editor's office. Scanning biomed papers for fake Westerns.
Being a author on a paper you did not contribute to is almost as disgusting as him doing the fraud himself 🤮
It's a default
Dr Mann of Climate fame doesn’t seem to have a problem with that concept
Most labs have this requirement. However, I'm a doctoral student who doesn't mind it for myself since having my advisor on my papers means that people will find them. 🤷🏽♀️
@@Heyu7her3 well, if he does what the title say then he did contribute to your work, so i dont see a problem there. I assume he does guide you and help/counsel you in your research
In my lab there may be only one person involved and 7 other people in the paper 😂
(6:51) "the last author on the paper bears the responsibility for everything that goes into that paper" (paraphrased). This doesn't sound right to me. If we're talking about the _first_ author then yes, but the last one is often the one who's the most senior, oversaw the project, or even the one that had the _least_ to contribute to the paper - depending on the field there isn't always someone assigned to this role. None of these mean they're 100% responsible for the paper, though. I think this point could have been made a bit better than just "last name = responsible for everything".
the Last Author is usually the PI (principal investigator) who should be checking the results to make sure they’re not fraudulent. considering this is happening across multiple papers with Greg Semenza being the only common author between them, it’s pretty clear there was top-down involvement in the fraudulent data.
well, you are correct that that was a super sketchy statement. Often, the last author is the project leader but not always. Sometimes authors are just in alphabetical order or according to their contributions. Gregg Semenza has over 160 papers and clearly cannot check all the contents. Those 10 papers not only were not important to his main contributions to the Nobel Prize but also made 0.3% of his total citations.
@@salganik Please. 160 papers is a paper every few weeks/months. You want to tell me that he consented to his name being on every of these papers and didn't have the time to read them and have maybe some trusted associate of his check them for signs of fraud? Maybe people shouldn't just let their name be used like that to grease the wheels of the system if they aren't willing to 100% stand behind the paper and carry the responsibility. Maybe someone's name shouldn't be on 160 papers but only on 30 but ones they really are involved with. Maybe the bad traits of the system don't need to be defended by everyone just brushing off responsibility.
@@SianaGearz 1. No, it is 4 papers per year, nothing exceptional. 2. All you "maybes" would probably work in an ideal universe with perfect ethics and no competition. In real life, most researchers are happy to accept co-authorship in any decent study, where they contributed by providing data, algorithm, funding, or planning the campaign. For most researchers rejecting all such potential collaborations would eventually lead to the end of their scientific career. It is pretty hard to predict which papers are going to be well-cited, so having 30 papers instead of 160 is a suicide. For the "signs of fraud", even the reviewers did not managed to spot the copied images as they were so small. Why would a co-author be able to do so? What you suggest also would make interdisciplinary papers impossible, as a fraction of authors just cannot understand a fraction of a paper outside of their field. If all researchers would need to "100% carry the responsibility" of all their co-authored papers, there would be no collaborations in such a system (or researchers would need to spend all their time redoing and rechecking all such papers).
The ethics of Master Works (the sponsor of this video) could be discussed as well. :) Great video! But I have some reservations about the sponsor.
Thank you for a series of great videos, Pete.
Science has lost its integrity and objectivity, as has politics, journalism and academia.
Research fraud should result in a prison sentence especially when public resources are squandered on it.
In this day and age, I wouldn’t be surprised if Nobel creates a new prize category for pseudoscience, for example Chemistry or Physics or Medicine. After all, we can scarcely define what is a man or woman nowadays.
This channel is so under rated! I hope many people see your content!
This reminds me of the stem cells fraud in SK in the BobbyBroccoli documentary.
It had an allegedly hapless Westerner signing off on research he apparently knew little about.
People who watched this documentary already knew it 👉The Connections (2021) [short documentary]❤️
As a future biologist, I also study those things and i'm ashamed to this... science should not work like that
it flows from the quackery of evolution.
Great Channel idea. These Journals are filled with studies that no one has been able to replicate the same results and these studies are being used to advise gov policy
I think there should be an investigation about this to determine what happened and how.
Thanks for the video. I spent months writing my thesis for a bachelor in applied psychology, I heard 30% of all papers are a problem across all departments, such a shame, but also an opening to rediscover that 30% again with new knowledge, and science will be the better for all these, the more the better as reforms will be needed and the time spent on my 9000-word thesis will not go to vain and the countless others also who did their best being true and honest according to ethics.
In the business world, we say there's an apparent conflict of interest when the administration makes decisions that appear to served their individual interests over the broader interests of the various stakeholders. In occurrence, one might argue that there's apparent conflict of interest to be the head editor of an academic journal and publishing within the journal, especially considering the numbers of academic retracted. At the very least there's a deontological case on the basis of undermining the public's trust that can be put forth to the professional order.
Criminal charges might be difficult to prove, but it should be fairly easy on the basis of the demonstrate a case for negligence on the proof by balance of probability against the journal and the heads of the editorial team in a civil trial. At the very least, I'd expect the journal to be required to pay substantial penalities considering the nature of the multiples papers under investigation.
Ideally, the scientific community should petition for hefty penalities in order to deter future frauds. Furthermore, the legislator should establish public audiences to establish a forum to debate on the credibility and legitimity crisis in the academic world.
The mice thing isn’t animal cruelty, it’s just how the science has to be done. If you’re testing a cancer drug, you need a control group that remains unmedicated until the end of the study. Biology isn’t behavioral science; you can’t just flag down random college students and inject them with tumors and prospective cancer drugs to see what happens. You have to start testing on rats to make sure the drug at least works somewhere and isn’t fundamentally toxic to mammalian life. Then you move up to larger mammals to see if those both hold true. Only then are you ready to undertake clinical trials with humans.
Exactly. If you stop this in the name of animal rights and vegan movement, everything will be lost.
What scares me most about these copy-paste incidents is that it'd be incredibly easy to cover their tracks if they were willing to do so. These people took no effort in hiding it, but it'd be incredibly easy to edit the image so it isn't that obvious that the result was copy-pasted. There might be more cases of fake results such as these around, but considerably harder to track due to the person taking some effort into hiding it.
I just want to say i love the channel. You made things i never gave a sh*t about interesting af. I can honestly say you have made me a smarter person and for that i would like to say thank you. PLEASE DONT STOP THE KNOWLEDGE. Also ty for sharing your college education i could never afford. I mean it your great.
So thank you. I feel this calls for an independent review club. Copy Pasta is the lowest form of data fraud.
Lawyers can get their license revoked for signing off on false statements. I see no reason why academic researchers do not also face significant repercussions for the same. If their name is on it, they are responsible for it.
a person who got the most credit bears the most of responsibility
That would be the first author then
Reading a book on UPF at the moment. The author states that, out of every 10 research papers, 7 are flawed, 2 provide useful information, and 1 is actively fraudulent...
Judgments and penalties for being named on a fraudulent paper should be done based on number of incidents. Anyone could have the misfortune of being part of a team where someone on it committed the fraud. Maybe that could have happened a couple of times in a career (assuming that you didn’t learn to be more watchful after the first incident), but if it keeps happening, there should be serious consequences on a sliding scale. Being part of TEN papers isn’t an accident and his Nobel prize should be taken from him and he should lose his positions; even prison time for fraud shouldn’t be off the table as a consequence. Strong consequences are needed to reduce the temptation for others.
Punishment doesn't work. Jesus christ, Americans are barbarians.
We need more people like you bringing this information. Thanks for taking the time to do so :) I'm a huge fan of Elizabeth Bik's work in discovering fraud, but I think making this news available on UA-cam in video format is a huge niche that hasn't been filled. Subscribed for any future videos you make on these topics :)
Just a sidenote though, I would potentially reconsider your choice of Sponsor. If you plan on making videos on fraud... definitely stick to the safer, less sketchy sponsors.
Sit next to your daughter, who is dying of cancer, and you'll find that research on animals doesn't make you feel sick.
Gee, I'm surprised....that anyone noticed. Having worked in academic research for several years this was almost a normal thing.
The main issue on all these cases of fraud isn`t just "academia pressure" or "peer review failures"; it is the moral of the researchers. It doesn't matter if "academia makes pressure on you to find results otherwise you don't get any sponsors" or "peer reviews is a broken system" - if you don't want to fraud or lie, you simply won't bend yourself down to the system.
World may let you on your knees on many ways, but morally, it's always up to you. These doctors ain't no children that couldn't do the right thing "because they're being pressured to do so" like a kid pressured by his teacher. It's always a choice.
Do not think of the pressure as a subjective feeling people can ignore, but as a Darwinian selective pressure. Those who di not cheat or are willing to get eliminated from the game early on, leaving only the unethical ones
@@alicianieto2822spot on!
@@alicianieto2822 I believe that if you're excellent enough (which is tremendously hard) this won't be the case. Again, really hard, but still possible.
Good point.
This comment has only 13 likes because it assumes that morals are absolute, which is an unpopular idea. It's unfortunate that the world is so wrong about this
Really fascinating, and disheartening, stuff! I hope you'll continue to do these videos!
Trust the science!! Then along comes Pete Judo.
Science is a process, and there is no competition for the scientific process. We can’t trust every paper, but in the long run science will get it right.
@@davidbangsdemocracy5455… unless the science is co-opted for ulterior motives by powerful entities … look at Mr “I am the science”.
Pete Judo chopping down the forest of BS that has taken root in the minds and hearts of Academia
@@davidbangsdemocracy5455 But not before they have destroyed the earth with their idiocy.
Thank you Pete for talking about this subject. I think acknowledging the problem is the first step in fixing it. Once the problem has greater recognition increased steps to prevent it can be implemented. As a science PhD student myself, what stands out to me is that those long lists of authors who likely include PhD students, Post-Doctoral researchers, maybe some undergraduates. If any of those students don't get their name on a published paper it could mean their career is over. It may mean they are not allowed to graduate. It may mean they can't get hired even if they do graduate. That seems to be a major aspect of this false data phenomenon. There should be a counterbalance to that where things like the counterfeit data that you showed is met with loss of research funding. The guy you talked about seems to be a major enabler; that's not who should be on scientific publication boards.
When Obama was given a Nobel prize for peace after being in office for three months was when i lost all faith in the nobel system. Then the final nail was driven in by not giving one to Trump who signed three, THREE peace treaties with arab nations.
The worst consequence of sci fraud is the many projects that have been denied access to funding on the basis that their 'lines' of research didn't quite fit the mainstream ideas on the problem at hand. The reviewers who decide on funding are fully on the bandwagon of active research, very wary of alternative views that might represent a threat to them.
Funding is mostly - perhaps rightly so - a competition for limited resources, usually leading to 'a few get it all' solutions that favor the most cited, accepted lines pursued by a select few.
There must be a price to be paid, or there is no reason for these people to not cheat.
I said this in a previous video and I'll say it again, the "publish or perish" approach is killing academia and therefore, research fields. At some point all the low hanging fruits get picked, and what's left after are hard to solve problems that take years of hard work just to make a marginal improvement on. Yet academia only values the ones that can pump out consistent, novel publications. That's now how science progresses. This is why i left academia. I was also in cancer research and I got the feeling that it was more about getting the articles out over the actual results a few years in. Still makes me sad to think about
Science has been overwhelmed by politics, power and money. It just not science anymore - was it ever? I think it was, but as political operators became more aware of the the power of subsituting e.g. "The Bible says" with "Scientists Say", along with apocalyptic doom forecasts, well...... the temptation was just too much.
Last author: all the glory, none of the responsibility.
Hey man, don’t spoil the party! That’s how this 1% thing works~gotta get those grants! 😂 (In all seriousness, thanks to the two women doing these investigations)
Pete what's some under rated & top books to read in increasing Self belief ?
The best way to stop this is to make the last author liable for the return of the funding. Funders should quite simply sue for the return of the money that paid for the study. If this were the case and I was the last author I make sure I was thoroughly familiar with the contents and if I doubted it would not put my name to it.
You are assuming the people who funded the paper didn't 'buy' the result, not the paper. If you don't give them the result they want, they don't fund you ever again. The whole thing is smoke and mirrors.
Aside from the dishonesty of the author(s) doing fraud, the true problem is the peer review process. There should have less scientific papers, but each one should be verified in their entirety instead of blindly trusting the data presented.
Western blot is one of the worst techniques that we have but unfortunately essential. Not only is it easy to be fabricated, the nature of the experiment actually makes it hard to present because of all the noises and inconsistency of the technique. It's also hard to provide a statistical analysis of the results. One can see a difference between two bands when another person would call that BS because of that. There is software to measure the band intensity but from my experience it's complete BS. Unfortunately that is one of the cheapest and easiest method to implement when it comes to protein quantification. I think this put even more incentive to some researcher to fabricate the data (not that anyone should do it at anytime).
As for the animal study, from what I know, the US has one of the loosest control over animal use in research in the developed world (this is hearsay please don't sue me for libel). Same as Hong Kong (this is my personal experience). In the UK, we have a license for the establishment holding the animal facility, license for each project and license for the personnel. The animal welfare officers and vets are also more attentive and more caring to the animals than what I know those in Hong Kong and US would be. The animals in the picture you shown were most definitely way pass the humane endpoint for ANY cancer related experiment. The vet/staff at the animal facility should know. I think they are accomplices (intended or not) as well. If the animal has weight lost of over 10% usually they would be culled by one of the methods listed in the guideline issued by the Home Office. For solid tumour, there is also a maximum size of the tumour and animal must be culled immediately when the endpoint is reached.
Speaking of waste of money, they are too many non-reproducible data out there. Most of them are not the results of data fabrication but all the uncontrollable factor of the reagents and cell lines we use. Also the negative results were never published so people waste time to repeat the experiments done in like ten other different labs without knowing. Effort has been made to minimise that, including a database with negative results (it's better than the journal of negative results imo). Hope this could minimise money wasted and more importantly plastic wasted (if you have never worked in a molecular biology lab you wouldn't believe how much plastic is used a day)
Usually in a decent paper Western blots are not the only proof you provide for the validity of your hypothesis. There must be evidence provided that was obtained by different methods that further support you claim. Not that these other methods are much harder to fake than Western blots but I would always look out for a "network" of mutually supportive data obtained by different methods. And Western blots are relatively easy to replicate. Especially if you're working in the same research area. If you repeatedly fail to replicate a Western using the pulished materials and methods you know something smells fishy.
How could these papers, with obvious flaws in the data pass peer review? In my opinion, the 'peer reviewers' should be disqualified. Maybe a vigorous overhaul of the review system is needed.
Is there a place to report fraud that you are aware of?
All the fraud I see in the news is about medicine or psychology.
Would you make a video explaining how research is reviewed before submissions to publisher? And how peer review is currently working.
The LTCM - scandal was the canary in the coal mine for me. Two Nobel-prize winners leading the way to financial ruin.
People who watched this documentary already knew it very well 👉The Connections (2021) [short documentary]❤️
At the risk of drawing fire I opine, having worked in industry with overseas teams, that being asian or Chinese is quite likely a factor and anyone putting their names on such papers must be extremely diligent. I have found such teams to be very driven to provide whatever result they perceive a client wants (at least superficially) by any means necessary (but also to commodify and sell any IP that they happen across). I don't know if it's got better in the last couple of decades but it was strong in the culture back then. It's not that they can't do good work, but more about what they think good work means to you.
It's really sad to see a video of yours sponsored by masterworks, which has been identified as a possible scam
Show me a professor/ head of department who will scrutinize each blot and check them for potential manipulation.
Every author is responsible for ALL of the content of every paper. That's the way it works. Now if someone is an author on several retracted papers, and in each case they contributed data for a certain type of experiment that they specialize in (let's say proteomics for example) AND that data is not suspicious AND the fraudulent data was contributed by someone else AND that person is not the senior author, I think most people would cut them a break, even if technically they are responsible for all the content. But that is certainly not the case here, as by convention (as well as the letter of the law), the senior author (i.e. last one listed) is directly accountable for any data manipulation or fraud.
4:40 Aysha Akhtar has a paper called The Flaws and Human Harms of Animal Experimentation that speaks to how much this kind of thing sets science back.
As long as Science has no moral or ethical foundations this will continue to happen.
It would be hard to argue that Science has no moral or ethical foundations.
No, it would be hard to argue that science has any moral or ethical foundations.@@orka16605
Ive completely lost interest in academia
So much for 'This channel won't become Science Scandals,' eh?
Dr. Vinay Prasad silently nodding in the corner.
This is why I snicker when people whine "Trust the science!" because in reality you're actually trusting the scienTISTS. And even then, science is completely limited to the subjective human experience.
Science is the best way to reduce those biases. And note, it was other scientists that discovered the problem. Not your local pastor.
@@kyle857 Them pointing it out does not mean science doesn't have the wrong incentives inside which might produce results which should be taken skeptically but most people don't as people like you keep saying trust the science and when something like this happens you fall back to "well atleast its the best method we have so we can ignore the downsides"
@@kyle857 Incorrect. In fact, science itself has shown that higher intelligence is correlated with MORE bias, not less. Bias is not "reduced" by having more science. Wtf does a pastor have to do with this? Science is the HUMAN study of the universe, which means it's subjective to the human experience and limited by human flaws and human perceptions.
Is the duplication a result of intentional fraud, or sloppy image preparation where people made mistakes when preparing the image for the journal?
Cutting and pasting individual bands on Western blots is very bad practice and probably an indication of fraud. Especially if the process has not been indicated clearly in the published version for all readers to see and understand. You may cut out entire lanes and shift them elsewhere but again this must be indicated clearly. Cutting and pasting individual bands is very iffy if not clearly marked as such and provided with a reasonable explanation. And it depends on what you attempt to show with the blot. If you compare two different treatment conditions and you cut (and paste) individual bands of the resulting Western blot you're most likely making things up on purpose. That's is not sloppiness
What is very surprising is the referee not saying nothing.... I had referee remarks and questions because of captions not precise enough, graphic color not be contrasted enough etc.. and here 2 pictures identical and the paper went through... it is very suspicious..
you may check those papers. the actual figures were numerous and the actual size of those subplots was super small.
@@salganik Oh ok. Well it seems that someome did ..
I love this channel ! Thanks for bringing all this to light!
I would understand it if someone tries to forge or ‘adjust’ the data but saving time by copying and taking images from other papers. That’s truly crazy!
5:30 Well, I don't know if you were aware of it before my comment on one of your previous videos, but now I can see you definitely know about retraction watch now. Scary place, isn't it?
Woukd you agree? Nassim Taleb wrote, for many academics (including those involved in peer review), there is no "skin in the game". If they are wrong or lazy or corrupt in the peer review process, there are no negative consequences. No repercussions. The peer reviewers remain anonymous and not accountable. Agree or disagree?
Taleb is a genius and he has revolutionized the practice of financial statistics. JF PH.D mathematics, NSF postdoc, IT consultant..... However his ideas are somewhat hard to follow.
This entire video's credibility goes out of the window the moment I listen to his sponsor 😂
I thought the Nobel committee has a policy to wait a while to confirm research after the Fibiger fiasco in 26
"Science" for many 'scientist', is a money-go-round, where what is actually good science is overcome by meh-science, done for prestige and, of course, grant money.
I'm a biochemistry student and doing sds-page and/or blot is easy and standar procedure. It usually takes me half a day to a couple days of work depending on how much purification you need before hand.
IF the researchers were adding his name to papers without his input in the research, it was his responsibility to stand up and say "NO" !
A big part of the problem is replication studies are not encouraged. If they were more common, you would have another mechanism in place to evaluate the impact of a researcher. But that’s just scratching the surface of all the problems in this field.