MIT Professor Fired over Fabricated Data 285
karvind writes "CNN is running a story where MIT has fired an associate professor of biology for fabricating data in a published scientific paper, in unpublished manuscripts, and in grant applications. Luk Van Parijs, 35, who was considered a rising star in the field of immunology research, admitted to the wrongdoing. The revelations are a serious blow to MIT, which prides itself on its reputation as a scientific powerhouse. The announcement also serves to answer the rumors that have been swirling on the campus since Van Parijs vanished from the campus more than a year ago and had his lab disbanded without any comment from the university. Readers may remember the infamous Jan Hendrik Schön from Bell labs."
Not at all (Score:5, Insightful)
The revelations are a serious blow to MIT, which prides itself on its reputation as a scientific powerhouse.
Revealing a case of fraud strengthens their reputation. If they had let the case die in the darkness after dismissing him--that would lessen their reputation. But admitting that fraud has happened and that the school will not stand for it--that can only gain respect.
the poor grad students (Score:4, Insightful)
Credibility of Science / Creationists (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Credibility of Science / Creationists (Score:5, Insightful)
"Blow" ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Huh? It is a "blow" to their reputation iff they knew about the misconduct and did nothing about it. In this case it is clear that they took swift action. I would give kudos to MIT for reacting swiftly. Recall the conduct of other organizations like NYT in such instances.
Not new (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:Credibility of Science / Creationists (Score:2, Insightful)
I hope the creationists go crazy about this. (Score:3, Insightful)
Funding. (Score:5, Insightful)
Just try getting a grant for "Doing exactly what this other guy already did, just to make sure."
Yeah, it actually is important, but try explaining that to the bean counters. The best you can do is propose some sort of "continuation" and include the original experiment as a control group, and hope to verify it that way.
Common Stuff (Score:5, Insightful)
We VERY rarely hear of research actually failing, when in fact we should be hearing it ALL THE TIME since taking stabs at new ideas shouldn't be successful all the time. Failure should be a natural part of research, and there really shouldn't be an urge to have to make your research fruitful everytime. Unfortunately, no one would actually do this even if they agreed with the thought - people would only expect other people to follow the rule.
It's not like it matters too much regardless - 90% of research papers are bullshit wrapped in a myriad of technical jargon which makes it seem like they achieved something ridiculously important.
My 2 cents.
All college professors fabricate data... (Score:2, Insightful)
In all seriousness the fabrication of data is not as much of a problem in academia as improper use of statistical methods, poor coding procedures, and poor data collection are.
Re:Not at all (Score:1, Insightful)
Not the greatest timing... (Score:5, Insightful)
What you say is true, however, this isn't really the greatest timing for a story to break on the fact that scientists sometimes fabricate their data. This provides a rather juicy opportunity for the various anti-science forces out there to point to this and say "See, scientists aren't the pristine investigators of truth that they would like us to believe! This one got caught, but how many others are doing the same thing right now? That's why we need to keep an open mind about {intelligent design, alternative medicine, bigfoot, global warming is a myth, etc.}."
You and I may see this story as evidence of the scientific system working the way it is supposed to. I suspect that the public will see this as evidence that science doesn't have a monopoly on the truth and maybe we ought to give those creationists equal time. Like I said, this isn't the greatest time for this story to break.
GMD
Re:Common Stuff (Score:4, Insightful)
Thing is, if you're working on an idea, and the solution you try doesn't seem to work [which happens quite frequently], you just move on, and eventually you'll be able to solve the problem someway. If too much time is spent and no viable solution seems to be found, then it's time to move on, unless you have unlimited time and resources to waste. Havign said that, outsiders don't usually hear about failed ideas because 1). if a solution is found, it is published, the failures are not, 2). a funded project usually doesn't have such explicitely narrow goals that it only would have one and only one solution which means at least some parts will be done/finished/solved/etc and then it's prettier to say it's partially successfull than to say it's mostly a failure.
Re:hrm... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's true that it's possible to sneak fabricated data past the peer-review process, but I think the damage is self-limiting in a way. If your results are significant, people will be interested in duplicating your results... either as a way of understanding them better or to compare against their own work. If nobody is able to duplicate your results, you are likely to have your fraud caught sooner or later.
If your results are not all that significant, it gets forgotten and nobody builds on your bad work so the scientific process itself isn't subverted although the dishonest researcher may have got an undeserved feather in his cap.
Re:Credibility of Science / Creationists (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Credibility of Science / Creationists (Score:1, Insightful)
Also, saying scientists "try very hard" to uncover falsified data implies that they scrutinize the published results... the professor here was turned in by colleagues who knew what he was doing. It sounds like he was only exposed due to others' ethics, not their attempts to verify his conclusions. I'd chalk this one up to morals, not the discipline of the scientific community at large. (If the scientific community had any level of discipline around verifying results, would we have these reports of what % of published research results are ultimately found incorrect?)
Re:Common Stuff (Score:1, Insightful)
Another problem is that simply redoing work of others does not make for a good publication, and neither does reporting that "this approach did not work". Everyone is painting their latest work as a momentous advance, since that is what is expected.
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Most great leaps in science have been governments funded/nobility patronaged. Most incremental improvement of exsisting technlogoies come from corprate enviroments. Corprate research goes to where the money soon will be, this leads to near sighted research into only a few fields. We get better cars, but we won't derive new energy sources. This is where academic government funded research is for. They research the things that aren't profitable but are interesting to science. Gov. funding should never be eliminated unless you want science to degenerate into nothing more then incremental improvements of consumer products.
Re:I hope the creationists go crazy about this. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm just suggesting that their review of scientific material by such creationists is beneficial to all scientists. Their attempts to prove science wrong will weed out the results and data that may be falsified. That in turn will bolster the quality of scientific material.
Indeed, we ideally would see a case where the intelligent design people completely prove themselves wrong, all due to their attempts to prove science wrong (but at the same time strengthening science by helping to eliminate bad data).
The problem with this is Creationists often wouldn't understand the data. Just like a person with out a biological science degree wouldn't proteonics, a person with out a physics degree couldn't interpret linear collider data, ect... So the benifit would be 0. The information is already there to scrutinize but the Creationists wave their hand at it and say it's all fake/lies/the devil/clever trick by god to test faith/work of aliens ect...
Academic Structure (Score:2, Insightful)
The unfortunate side effect of this is that the people who can invest enough time/money into reproducing results usually do so because they have some vested interested in seeing some particular result.
The fortunate side effect, I think, is that the structure kind of keeps a check on things. Since it's such a close-knit community, you have to either be making really subtle falsifications that the people in your group won't see through, or you have to be duping a whole bunch of people into playing along.
Re:Not the greatest timing... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Intellectual Design (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually that sounds about right, especially from my experience at secondary school (aka High School). If you do a lab experiment, do something wrong and write up the results as you observed then you actually get a bad mark on your write-up. This actually encourages people to fudge the write-up and make it as the teacher expects. This is where I would like to see write-ups marked independently of the experimentation, to give more value to the procedure and observations, no matter how wrong the results mighte be. Maybe also encouraging the students to explain why they think the results differed from the expected results, to help make up for any experiemental errors.
We learn from our mistakes as well as others, but if we chuck them into trash then no one stands to learn from them.
Re:Not the greatest timing... (Score:5, Insightful)
I would think that such people are, by definition, not scientists.
Why is this modded Insightful?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think including alternative medicine with the other topics you mention is pretty short sighted. To think that we have all the medical answers, and that there aren't other medications or treatments that western medicine might not know about is ignorant. Take for instance pressure points: no western doctor or treatment explains or addresses them.
This is almost precisely the same argument used by the Intelligent Design folks to get creationism taught in schools! I'm flabergasted that this got modded up. Yes, yes, yes -- neither evolution or western medicine has all the answers. Scientists fully admit this. However, the fact that those fields don't have all the answers doesn't mean that we should start relying on creationism or alternative medicine. You need to provide verifable evidence that sticking needles into people can cure ailments and not rely on "well, you guys don't have all the answers" arguments. Alternative medicine most definitely belongs with the other things I listed. Not because it's all crap. Because all of those things openly (almost pridefully) reject the scientific method.
However, I'll tell you right now that there are a great many instances where accupressure/puncture can make huge differences in a number of maladies.
Oh boy, take a guess what my next question is going to be. Can you provide references to multiple peer-reviewed studies verifying your claim? You "can tell me", huh? And who the hell are you? Some guy on slashdot? I'm going to take medical advice from User 549286?
redfieldp, I think you misunderstood my post. Maybe I should have left UFOs out of the list. My point was that alternative medicine is anti-science. Alternative medicine practitioners apply their techniques to the public at large without scientific evidence that these methods work or are even safe. Having scientists publically outed for falsifing data is only going to provide more ammunition to those who claim they deserve equal status and recognition. Alternative medicine is welcome to use the scientific method to verify their claims. Until that time, it belongs squarely in the "anti-science" camp.
GMD
Re:Not at all (Score:4, Insightful)
I know this is /. and RTFA is not common but I'll ask anyway. Did you RTFA? I suspect not as there's something pertinent at the end of it:
The California Institute of Technology has launched its own investigation into Van Parijs' research, including work with Cal Tech President David Baltimore "on problems in immunology," said school spokeswoman Jill Perry.
Van Parijs, who earned a doctorate in immunology from Harvard in 1997, was a postdoctural student at Cal Tech from 1998 to 2000.
From this it appears this guy has done this before but never been caught. He had a clean record, and apparently had squeaked through peer reviews many times in the past already. On the other hand this may be just a red herring and it will turn out the guy was squeaky-clean before he was hired by MIT. In either case you can't blame MIT's hiring process.
If the guy had been fabricating data in the past and gotten through peer review then he simply appeared to be an honest scientist. If he didn't fabricate data in the past but started after MIT hired him this also isn't the fault of the hiring process. The fault lays squarely at this guy's feet. He tried to cheat the system and he was finally caught. Until a fraudster is caught there's no way to know he's a fraudster so how exactly did you expect MIT's hiring process to magically figure out he was something other than he appeared to be based on his history?
This incident doesn't make me think any less of MIT or their hiring process at all. In fact their handling of this bests most universities. He was put on immediate leave, locked out of his lab and given no opportunity to hide his misdeeds. They spent a YEAR investigating the charges thoroughly and are even turning the results over to the Feds for further action. While they can't magically figure out someone has committed undetected crimes/fabrications they can, and did, make sure that any allegations of such are taken VERY seriously.
This MIT guy should move to Australia... (Score:3, Insightful)
scientist, who falsely reported data from "experiments" that
had never been conducted, ie, committed scientific fraud.
An ethical Asian female co-researcher quite rightly
"blew the whistle" on the unethical researcher.
The results:
- He (the "bad guy") is STILL employed by his university / research institute
- She (the "good guy") LOST funding & access to her research facilities & experimental animals
- One of the investigative journalists announced that
HE'LL WILL NEVER REPORT ANOTHER CASE (see below)
He's host of ABC's weekly "Health Report" show:
Norman Swan: "I will never do a case of scientific fraud
ever again.
And the reason for that is just
the failure of institutional responses.
If the University of NSW can get away with
something like this what is the point?
Im not going to do another one because
I just dont think that the institutions in
this country have responded seriously to this."
(Just imagine the kind of world it would be, eg, if ALL
journo's, police, judges, et al. felt like this guy...)
Excerpt from The Science Show:
"What happens to the Whistleblowers?"
The program aired on 3 September 2005.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/stories/s1451
So, I'd say the MIT researcher could do well
in at least ONE Australian research university.
Australia's embarrassing tradition continues...
- After WW 2, AU accepted Nazis from Germany,
apparently forgiving their atrocities [as long as
they brought enough of their spoils to live well here]
- today, at least one Australian research institution
seems to forgive scientific fraud [as long as they
can still attract research grant money]
"Past is Prologue"
Re:What about philosophy professors? (Score:3, Insightful)
He also doesn't qualify under the initial caveat of "If you write a good story"...
Not necessarly MIT's fault (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What about philosophy professors? (Score:3, Insightful)
But selling it in this environment, you have to push the areas that they'll apreciate. And frankly, just getting people to understand that there is practical philosophy is an accomplishment.
I'll name 10 (Score:3, Insightful)
2. Astrology
3. Acupuncture
4. Alternative energy (Cold Fusion, Zero Point Energy, etc.)
5. Alternative medicine (Homeopathy, Reikki, etc.)
6. Cattle Mutilation
7. Crop Circles
8. Energy awareness (Chi)
9. Human history through true archeolgoy
10. The true nature of space and time.
Of course, Science itself and real scientists aren't afraid to examine such areas, and indeed, they have done with spectacular results. But how often do such studies get funded and how often are the findings allowed to affect the status quo or even reach the main stream? This is where the fear is manifest. A room full of biased men in lab coats who go through the motions of research are *not* true scientists. They are frightened men who are willing to observe and measure the Universe only so long as it does not stray outside the comfortable, pre-conceived parameters dictated by society.
Interestingly, those who are not enslaved at the civilian level are allowed to study without restraint.
-FL