Iowa State AIDS Researcher Admits To Falsifying Findings 141
theodp writes "'With countless lives depending on their work,' writes Brett Smith, 'it seems unthinkable that AIDS researchers might falsify their work. However, that's just what Iowa State University assistant professor Dong-Pyou Han has admitted to, according to federal documents.' Han resigned from the project in October after admitting to tampering with samples to give the appearance that an experimental vaccine was causing lab animals to build up protections against HIV. According to the NIH, Han apparently spiked rabbit blood with human blood components from people whose bodies had produced antibodies to HIV. 'This positive result was striking, and it caught everybody's attention,' said the NIH. However, researchers at other institutions became suspicious after they were unsuccessful in duplicating the ISU results. The Iowa State AIDS research project had been awarded $19 million in federal grants over the past several years. Han has agreed to be banned from participating in any federally-financed research for three years."
Not all Koreans cheat (Score:5, Informative)
Dr. Dong-Pyou Han is a Korean.
He cheated.
So was Dr. Woo-suk Hwang, who fake the data on cloning back in 2006.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwang_Woo-suk [wikipedia.org]
Koreans can never be trusted.
Never !
While it's true that both Dr. Hwang and Dr. Han are Koreans, not all Koreans are cheaters.
Similarly, not all non-Koreans are non-cheaters either.
But I sense something terribly wrong in the set-up at Iowa State U.
You see, Dr. Han's immediate superior is Dr. Michael Cho, and as the supervisor of Dr. Han, Dr. Cho has failed to keep a close eyes on the researches being carried out by his subordinates.
And while Dr. Han has had his wrist slightly slapped (only ban for 3 year). Dr. Cho, the boss, never was reprimanded for his own dereliction of duty.
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Would you like a list of Americans, English, Germans, French, Spanish, etc who have falsified data as well? Guess you can't trust anyone without their results being reproducable.
If only we had a method for that..
Poor Han (Score:1)
Han has agreed to be banned from participating in any federally-financed research for three years.
That's it? I would expect a little more than a slap on the wrist.
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Poor people MUST be punished to the extent of the law.
If you think there is anything "fair" in justice, then you are incredibly Naive.
If you are rich you get away with nearly anything, if you have the ability to fight back they tend to not push you into the ground as hard. But if you are poor and stole a loaf of bread? Expect the death penalty.
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They have far more money for a legal defense than some street rats. Or are you suggesting that the Researchers live in their car's and rummage through dumpsters for food?
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It's really cute that you think academic research-based scientists are rich.
Is this overspill from the whole "climate change is just a cover for scientists to get rich off the back of lucrative grants" stuff?
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From the summary... (Score:2)
The Iowa State AIDS research project had been awarded $19 million in federal grants over the past several years.
There's money in it for someone. And plenty of it.
"Iowa State University assistant professor Dong-Pyou Han" may not have the money for fancy lawyers but "Iowa State AIDS research project" or the "Iowa State University" most probably have some on they payrolls.
Correction... (Score:1)
*their payrolls.
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"Iowa State University assistant professor Dong-Pyou Han" may not have the money for fancy lawyers but "Iowa State AIDS research project" or the "Iowa State University" most probably have some on they payrolls.
Correct, and ISU would much rather see headlines that say "ISU researcher barred from seeking federal grants for three years" than "ISU researcher sentenced to five years in jail for fraud."
I'm not sure why people don't actually go to jail for this, other than the fact that the NIH can't actually brin
Re:Poor Han (Score:4, Informative)
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I am also funded out of such a grant (and the PI is my direct supervisor), but my point was that in the context of this discussion, the oft-repeated cliche that poor people are subject to different rules to rich people is somewhat affected by the fact that very few scientists are rich. Especially research scientists.
When that trope is commonly used, the difference in wealth is usually poor person vs investment banker/senator/etc. By that standard, we're nowhere on the curve.
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well.. some of 'em are...
because they double dip for funding from both meds corps and the state.. the bigger the studies expenses, the bigger their cut.
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He will, however, be the darling of pharmaceutical and private medical clinics for his research methodologies.
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The government never does anything to any established university or the elites that populate them. This has to be counted as an industry, like the Too Big To Fail banks and the oil companies and the telcos, whose members are elites and have an entirely different set of rules applied to them.
Consider the price of university; it's purely a product of government subsidies with no relation to either the overall economy or the customer's ability to pay. In order to sustain these prices, bankruptcy protec
Re:Poor Han (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's not. After this no one will touch him; his career as a researcher is over. For professors, three years of no federal grants is generally enough to kill the entire lab, and a three-year lapse in publishing is enough to kill any career on its own, with the possible exception of the most hard-boiled tenure.
True, but he attempted (?) to defraud the federal government out of several million dollars. If you tried that with Medicaid, you'd go to jail. On the other hand, considering that our jails are alread
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Well, it's sort of complicated.
On one hand—it's probably worth pointing out that the American punitive system is absolutely insane, and the mildness of this should not be taken as evidence of a defective process simply because it doesn't follow suit. Indeed, there are some fairly involved legal and philosophical reasons as to why the punishments aren't more extreme. Here [arxiv.org] is a paper on it. (I haven't read all of it, but it seems sensible enough from the first few pages.) One of the key points is that a
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The university should have to pay back the grants (Score:1)
...and that kid barred from practicing medicine or research EVER. Getting caught cheating in a professional field where people's lives are at state should be a capitol offense.
Re:The university should have to pay back the gran (Score:4, Funny)
...Getting caught cheating in a professional field where people's lives are at state should be a capitol offense.
You got that right, this is the kind of offense regularly done at the Capitol..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Capitol [wikipedia.org]
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...and that kid barred from practicing medicine or research EVER. Getting caught cheating in a professional field where people's lives are at state should be a capitol offense.
Or just give him AIDS and let him decide if he wants to fuck with the research again.
[Sorry, that was really mean.]
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LOL, what is shows is you can't get away with cheating in science in the long run. There is always the underlying reality that will catch up to you sooner or later. The fact that in 20+ years no one has been able to show any substantial fraud in climate research means you aren't likely to find any. The thought that all of the thousands of climate researchers are in on a multi-decade conspiracy to hide the truth is ludicrous. It puts you firmly in the camp of conspiracy theorists. [wikipedia.org]
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If you have secret information that it's going to as you say "really start to chill out ca 2020" you should publish it so we can all see it. So far geophysical reality is not cooperating with your hypothesis. Climate scientists may be wrong about some things but if they are they're honestly wrong, not deliberately falsifying their work. With the scrutiny climate science has been getting over the past 20+ years if there was some fundamental problem with it we would have found it. Climate scientists may b
re:small potato (Score:2)
Mostly the GW "cognoscenti" have withheld physical evidence and records (see ClimateAudit), fudged data (increasingly funky "adjustments"), done poor stats, ignored critics, shepherd
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If you think the global climate models are "busted" then it probably has more with your lack of understanding of what climate models are designed to do than it has with any failure of the models themselves. For instance many say the climate models haven't predicted the slow down in atmospheric warming since 1998. But climate models are not (and probably cannot be) designed to predict the unpredictable natural variations such as ENSO and volcanic eruptions. They aren't expected to predict climate on that
setting the record straight (Score:2)
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If you have done credible research with a natural conclusion against the current consensus, you get to call yourself a heretic. If you can at least show why there is legitimate doubt about the current consensus you might just qualify as an ultra-conservative or naysayer. Otherwise you're pure psycho-ceramic.
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Simple extrapolation based on a small amount of data doesn't always work so well. Ask any bungee jumper.
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Conspiracy theorists? Those guys who thought the NSA was intercepting all our email?
Anyway, a bunch of climate researchers got caught in a conspiracy to do a number of things, in particular including manipulating the peer review system to keep contrary research out of peer reviewed journals. Since the warmists are in charge,
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That's another LOL. I presume you're talking about the controversy over the Soon & Baliunas paper published in the journal Climate Research in 2003. That paper has methodological flaws that should have been caught in review and weren't. They used precipitation and drought proxies without assessing their temperature sensitivity and conflating regional temperature change proxies with global changes. Even the publisher of Climate research admitted as much. Five editors resigned from the journal rather
Unsurprising. (Score:2, Troll)
It is the same society, or should I say global system of power, which features:
- pollution for a theoretically and practically impossible continuous growth model;
- introduction of new substances with incomplete testing;
- laws against honest labelling...
Unconscionable (Score:2)
Re:Unconscionable (Score:4)
It likely that this is just a standard procedure which fits the general category. Since this is pretty eggregious, I doubt that he will ever get a research grant again. For one, he will need to be a part of a research institution to get a grant. Which research university will hire him now, given the competitiveness of these positions? He might be able able to teach in some low level place, but his research career has ended.
Re:Unconscionable (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, surely lives should not depend on unverified and non-peer reviewed research as the summary sensationally implies. Because of the due process the falsified results were revealed before any actual danger. Most likely the falsified results were also publicized for immediate consumption well before any verification, which actually created new ground for false hopes.
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You would have a different point of view if you were in the labs that took the risks to check, in hopes of being early publishers. We are talking Post-docs who every minute spent on wasted time is that far behind on the next possible position. Or is your time that valueless that this concept is difficult.
Society and science wins in the end - of course, but like war - there really is no winners when it comes to parent-less or destroyed families.
Let's open our perspective to include the little guys.. cause if
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Lives depend on it because they need a successful cure. Fraud like this siphons off research money that might lead to the cure and puts it in the hands of people who produce only fraud.
Wait, 3-year ban? (Score:5, Insightful)
For many researches it takes more than 3-years to get a federal grant (if they don't falsify results that is), how is a 3-year ban from federally-financed research any sort of punishment for such dishonesty?
Re:Wait, 3-year ban? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a defacto lifetime ban. Short of moving to another country he will have the stigma of this for as long as he tries to get a job in science. Any research he previously reported will now be subject to significant scrutiny.
Just imagine him, or anyone attached to a group he's attached to, trying to get future federal funding; "We've decided to turn down your application for [insert any reason]."
He's now a liability to any university or research group. The only people who might hire him are some unscrupulous company who need a yes-man who will provide 'sympathetic' findings. Even then the work will most likely be under a pseudonym and will have to survive all of the extra scrutiny a 'sponsored' research study gets.
Thankfully, science is a self-correcting mechanism as this uncovering has demonstrated.
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I'm reminded of a saying... "justice without mercy is tyranny".
I agree there needs to be a penalty, but in the end, this was caused only by very poor judgement on his part about what is really important. I'm not saying he should just be let off without penalty, only that while trying to carry out an appropriate punishment, that room for eventual forgiveness be present.
That said, I think that the ban should be long enough that when he's allowed to try to do it again, he'll basically be starting from ze
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So what you're saying is that his academic career is over but he has a bright future in industry "research"?
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It's a defacto lifetime ban.
Absolutely. No matter how he spins this, everyone will know Han shot first.
Re:Wait, 3-year ban? (Score:5, Interesting)
I would agree to an extent that quantity of research is being pushed as the be all and end all (as Prof. Higgs lamented). In the UK people are attending university to get a sheet of paper that proves their marketability. There are an increasing number of 'fluff' degrees requiring an increasing number of lecturers who can teach 'fluff' who are being pushed to prove that their fluff not only is valuable fluff but is the best fluff by the accountants and marketers running the universities. As a result you get researchers pushing out reams of crap in journals with low impacts simply to give the illusion of productivity and allow marketers to print a long list of studies beside their photos in university profile pages.
The knock on result is that all researchers are being pressured to publish an equivalent number of papers as anything less just proves they're lazy and unproductive in comparison to the fluff producers by bureaucrats who equate all studies as equal.
You're nodding along with me now as I'm painting a pretty bleak picture that agrees with your assessment. However, your blanket statement that nobody cares about research quality is profoundly incorrect. I know many many scientists who get their work done despite the aforementioned pressures and who 'care'. I know it's easy to tar everyone with the same brush but many of us are still doing science because we want to learn and report new things.
Taking a cynical view is easy but as TFA points out, there are more than enough people that care ensuring that fabrications are discovered.
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Given that you consider all scientists and the peer review process to be entirely corrupt who would you trust to be knowledgable and honest enough to sit on this 'Truth Panel'?
I'm not sure if you're a troll or you are just deeply cynical. I just hope that at some point you recognise that we all have an inbuilt bias to inflate the effect of negative aspects of reality and miss the positives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias [wikipedia.org]. Then again, I can see the benefits of being a pessimist: You're going to
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It doesn't take 3 years to get a grant accepted, it takes 3 years to fail to get a grant a few times before it is accepted. Also, 3 year ban basically wipes out any of the current students that the researcher may be working with, forcing them to start with a clean slate.
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I think most researchers usually start submitting grant proposals 3 years before their previous grants run out to ensure continuous research funding. The researcher in this article already had federal grants, which have now been revoked. The 3 year ban on participating in federally funded research will ensure that the researcher will not be able to get any new grants to replace the funding that was just revoked.
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The ban is for participating. He will certainly never be awarded a grant as a principle investigator ever again, which has already crippled his career. At best, in the future, he might be able to limp along somewhere as a second-rung researcher.
What this means he can't work for any federally-financed research in any capacity (as an employee, collaborator, in-kind supporter, etc.) for three years. Since pretty much all research in his field includes some federal component, that's a three year exile from his
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Since pretty much all research in his field includes some federal component, that's a three year exile from his entire career, and about as close as you can get to a career death sentence.
And since pretty much any prospective employer is going to find out about this, even the privately-funded research groups will treat him like he's radioactive.
shame shame shame (Score:2, Insightful)
What about the $ 19 million ? (Score:1)
Calling it "fraud" is a stretch. Saying "potentially endangered lives" is a wildly fanciful leap of hyperbole.
While I agree that what Dr. Han did was not "endangering lives", you gotta tell us what about the $19 million grant that he got because he falsified his test data ?
Dr. Han has cheated. No matter how high that guy has achieved in his academic study, he has failed something much more important than scholarly status - he does not have even one iota of moral cell in his body.
He should be in jail (Score:3)
He basically stole $19M. That's $19M that could have been used for *real* research to help people.
He's a piece of crap.
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Reading the article he was just one member of the team. It seems like he has fallen on his sword and taken full blame to protect the school administrators and other members of the team. It also seems like investigators are suspicious of these.
This of course is the inevitable result of pushing too much competition in research, where the reality is negative results and as necessary and positive results in achieving the final solution but right wing knee jerk thinking demands only positive profitable result
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If you can guarantee a result it's not research.
This problem is more common than you think... (Score:1)
in 2009, the FDA paid for a test on electronic cigarettes. The test came back screaming formaldehyde, acrolein and heavy metals. What the public later found out, the tests were done on dry e-cig cartridges (ie: no liquid was used, so the cartridges burned up), but to this date, the FDA claims that "they don't know what's in them". The recent CDC study on teen e-cig use is also as equally flawed.
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Adequate would be
1. Firing from his job
2. Removal of his Ph.D. due to severe scientific misconduct
3. Retraction of all related publications
Yes, harsh, but what he did is about the worst thing a scientist can do.
Segue to an older topic (Score:2)
Criminal fraud? (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't understand why he's not being charged with criminal fraud.
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Indeed. With the light slap on the wrist he got, he is free to commit more fraud soon, with better technique this time.
No Deposit, No Return? (Score:1)
Han may sounds Asian ... (Score:2)
But "Han Dong Pyou" is not a Chinese.
Chinese names do not have any spelling that even approaching "pyou".
I am a Chinese, I know.
BTW, I never cheat in my study. I don't have to.
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(well technically they do, #define what_it_takes Daddys_money_buying_a_new_gym)