The underlying problem for corruption of any field of work is: valuing money over all else. Americans talk the talk about human relationship, love, .... but in the end they hold money as the single most valuable indicator is success. The indicator of national success is the stock market, even while suicide rates are going up, and opioid addiction has sky rocketed. As a physicist, I value scientists for their sincerity and integrity, and their contribution to science and human well being and not by the number of publications or “indices” of publication success. I really don’t care how much funding they have or how big their research team is, or how many patents they have.
It will make a lot of difference if scientists stop thinking of research funds as a the most important measure of success. The truth is they do, overwhelmingly. By making money an indicator of scientific success, they have corrupted science. The solution is simple: stop doing it. Instead of saying he/she has a “big lab” or she/he has “major funding”, talk about how they contributed to science. I know people who have obtained millions of dollars in research funding for medical research: and they produced nothing worth talking about. In my mind, they wasted a lot of taxpayer money. I look with amusement as these people were rewarded by the administrators. In truth, they cheated the taxpayers and are happy about it. They lost an opportunity to live with integrity and honesty.
2
Often overlooked in such discussions is the vastly greater corrosive impact of government-funded science, in cases where government stands to benefit a particular finding.
The textbook example of course being government-funded climate science telling us we face catastrophic global warming - the subtext being : unless there us huge governmental expansion to force us onto renewables.
@Peterk
forget about all the studies and predictions, only look at current and recent observations of ocean temperature, air temperature, ice inventory, Greenland ice pack melting, ice core data, frequency of flooding, permafrost melting and so on and you can see that the change is real. All of these markers increase also coincides in time with the advent of massive industrialization. Not one marker - all of them. Either this is giant coincidence (really really really unlikely by the way) or climate change exists, and is human made, or at least massively human influenced. No need for complex models any more.
1
Corruption in medical research? Not surprising, given the fact that American physicians have sold out the entire country to gather their gold.
[cough] Global warming/climate change [cough]
4
It's not just the biases from the money, it shuts the doors to alternatives. For example the regular use of a nasal spray with xylitol optimizes our primary defenses there and keeps the nose clean. Asthma is a significant health problem that is triggered most often by pollutants in the nose. It goes away if the nose is clean [personal experience]. But no one seems willing to look at what happens when the nose is clean. Local family physicians fear loss of income from sick patients and researchers fear a drying up of institutional funding. These are real threats in our current system.
1
@Common Sense Med
Using a saline spray has similar effects. But no one is going to make a lot of money selling nasal spray with generic ingredients, so no one has any interest in sponsoring research establishing a low cost preventative measure.
1
I wonder why nobody raises the obvious parallel to global warming research. 25-35 years back, it was an ill-funded backwater area of research. Now it became the source of billions in both government and private funding ... as long as one finds support for the party line. If you don't, good luck with future funding, speaking invitations, or even keeping your good name.
4
@Wolf
Global warming policy solutions derived from science have no logic. The Paris accord called for $100 billion per year in foreign aid from democracies to the third world autocratic leaders. America was supposed to be chipping in $40 billion PER YEAR to the fund to be allocated by the UN. To countries hostile to America and to democracy.
Politicians and special interest groups took scientific facts, exaggerated them, and turned them into policy that did more harm than good.
Australia converted from 100% electricity generated from coal to 80% coal/20% wind. it drastically increased electricity costs and resulted in summertime blackouts. People with respiratory problems lost air conditioning on the hottest days of the year.
Compliance with Kyoto caused Europeans to switch from gasoline powered autos to diesel, which generates less CO2 per mile driven but contributes 10 to 100 times as much conventional pollutants. Paris and London are back to air quality of the 1970's. At far higher energy costs.
Kyoto promoted biofuel over fossil fuels. Clearcutting of Indonesia released more greenhouse gases than saved by using palm oil, impoverished the people, polluted the land and water and made oligarchs very wealthy.
The US substituted corn ethanol for fossil fuels, raised food and energy costs, converted marginal farmlands to corn production, which increased farm runoff into the waterways and resulted in algae blooms. Zero net reduction in CO2 produced.
@Wolf
Are you an environmental scientist? Do you have personal experience with this? What is your source for this claim?
1
@William A Mitchell
Climate change is real and it is man-made - the rapid rapid pace of change is not in agreement with the natural climate cycle.
This does not mean that our response and attempt to find solutions is infallible, but you got to start somewhere. And yes, the biofuel stuff was a horrible idea from the start.
1
This is a rare opportunity to blame everything on Trump. Or the way Trump is, the life he represents.
The American Corporate life where, despite Evangelical protestations to the contrary (as opposed to their behavior) money and fame are the only things that matter. Really, its only the money.
Prestige in university settings is now determined on a corporate scale, because we figured out the best universities need be "run like a business".
The bias is not in any way limited to finding or interpreting data. The very choice of questions to research, of populations to study, or methods to be used are predetermined by concerns for funding and prestige, or worries about career and personal power.
When we accept that ignorant Governors of our most ignorant and unproductive states announce that students of poetry and history are a waste of resources and should be shot, well, this is where we end up.
The only non-technical universities in good standing with Washington these days are religious, Ivy League, or their almae matres.
Its a game academics and their institutions rarely win because some big business dog is always galumphing along and stealing their best discoveries for his or her own business. Once successful, they spend their fortune lobbying their government to stop throwing money away on education. And paying for lawyers to let them increase p[rices thousands of per cent a pop, because business.
2
So fer sure let’s believe all that Climate Change science! Everyone (and by everyone I mean NOT everyone) knows it is settled science (by that I mean not science at all). Then, since the science is DONE and no more science needs doing, all those research dollars can be funneled to policy (and by that I mean politics) implementation. Sit back, wait 70 years to be told how that policy actually made things worse for women, people of color and children crossing borders illegally with their parents (and by parents I mean human traffickers). Oh, and to be told how it was your fault, too! I’ll bet that prediction comes closer to the mark than the predictions of today’s climate modelers (and by modelers I mean scientists).
Commercial interests also contaminate research. Drug companies, for example, are notoriously adept at infiltrating academic research by funding projects that align with their aims, and by selecting researchers willing to comply with their stipulations. This corrupting influence robs the word "research" of the credibility it once had.
3
Upshot:
"If an organization has spent decades recommending low-fat diets, it can be hard for that group to acknowledge the potential benefits of a low-carb diet (and vice versa). If a group has been pushing for very low-sodium diets for years, it can be hard for it to acknowledge that this might have been a waste of time, or even worse, bad advice."
Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely.
And not just organizations, but individual professors and academic departments.
Woe unto the postdoc who publishes results that are counter to the dogma of the elderly of his or her department!
In practice this bias in the interpretation of results is far more prevalent—and insidious and serious—than your standard funder bias.
5
It is interesting to see that scientists who have enough political connections to get grant funding consider themselves "successful". Nobel Prizes are not awarded for a scientist's ability to get funding.
1
@Total Socialist
How about if you do an analysis of the amount of grant money that has been spent by winners of Nobel Prizes.
They did not come up with their breakthrough additions to human knowledge tinkering in their garages while thinking great thoughts. If they hadn't gotten funding, they would not have been able to do the research.
5
These abuses of science are deeply disturbing and unfortunate especially when science is under duress.
For the non-scientists out there, and for what it's worth, science remains nerdy, tedious, and boring. This basic science is still engaging to the basic practitioners of the discipline. We love the basics of simple, hard-earned discovery. We are not engaged in TED talks or flying around the world or advising drug companies. We work long hours. We wake up thinking about our work. We look forward to going back to the lab. For what? We want to discover something, anything. Discoveries are usually small and of immediate value to only a handful of like-minded scientists. None of us expect our work to immediately change the world. That said, all of us think that the bulk or our work does change the world over time. History supports our hypothesis.
In my opinion, the villains described in this article were never scientists. They were science brokers. They didn't care about how the world works. They only cared about selling an idea. You will judge the scientist by the depth of her conversation and the stupidity of his salesmanship.
16
This article needs to be read in combination with “A Reckoning At Sloan Kettering” and “When Doctors Serve on Corporate Boards,” in today’s NYT. They scratch the surface of the gigantic problem of massive profit driven corruption in health care, which is behind the collapse of American health care and why it costs so much and delivers so poorly compared to the rest of the industrialized world.
1
@Amy Chapman
If you read the articles carefully, it will become apparent that the corruption is not resident in the for-profit organizations but is actually in the non-profit and charity organizations that misrepresent their motives.
With all the money sloshing around at Sloan Kettering, and the personal profit motivations of the participants, it is still where you would go if you had cancer. And they have results worthy of the profit they may have personally derived.
We might do better if we eliminated the majority of the non-profit/charity organizations and just witched to a for profit capitalist structure. That way, individuals could invest in Sloan Kettering and get a piece of the profit rather than allowing their taxpayer money to subsidize the wealth of the governing elite.
@ebmem
While the public does fund a lot of basic research, this is a small fraction of the amount spent to bring a product to market. Individual investors do bear the risk for the companies the Sloan Kettering scientists start, and they do reap the rewards. I work in basic research (incidentally across the street from Sloan) and it is incredibly cheap to fund, done basically by the slave labor of grad students and post docs. We have identified several potential drugs with little more than 100k. To go through clinical trials and development would need several billion more, which the govt will never pay. Opportunity abounds for people interested in investing in biotech, go right ahead!
2
A big research university once recruited me for an engineering faculty position. The caller said "We're looking for someone who can bring in a million dollars a year in grant money." (That was real money in 1978.) I asked "How much are you willing to pay a person who can do that?" "Oh, we'll determine your salary based on your capabilities and experience." "OK," I said. "Find someone else." They did, but he didn't bring in a million.
In my entire career I barely brought in a total of 5 million, and after a while NSF started restricting grants to PIs with that much cumulative funding so that younger researchers could have a share. Then I retired...
4
Bias is pervasive. Fluoridation research is an excellent example. A dozen major scientific findings that low dose exposure even from 'optimally' fluoridated water cause thyroid, kidney, and neurological damage to consumers have been ignored by the media.
On the other hand, there has been widespread coverage of a couple of small and flawed studies that manipulated the data sets to highlight statistics that while there is no significant difference in cavities in most children, the youngest and poorest children had more cavities, i.e. less than one cavity more. Those dental studies, like the media, ignored the latest U.S. government data released in 2017 and published in 2018 that found more than half of US teens have fluoride-damaged teeth, many of whom will seek costly cosmetic dentistry to hide the stains. Those biased researchers will be rewarded while public health suffers.
7
Very nice article professor Carroll. You have obviously progressed through the ranks because of your productive and well-supported research in the topic of using computers for diabetes diagnosis. Now imagine if you wanted to use your computer skills to link fluoridation with increased onset of diabetes. We eluded to that link in our review of the literature when I served on the US NAS Committee on Fluoride in Drinking Water in 2006. @K Spencer is right about fluoridation research. It is not only hard to get that kind of funding but if would very difficult to publish if you found that fluoridation actually did cause an increase in the prevalence of diabetes (which some of us think is actually the case). The reason is simple, as you noted. "If an organization (e.g. CDC , AMA or ADA in the case of fluoridation) has spent decades (over 70 years for fluoridation) recommending (fluoridation), it can be hard for that group to acknowledge the potential (harm from fluoridation)". Public policy is influenced not only by large corporations, drug companies and professional (medical/dental) 'trade unions' but by biased researchers who refuse to do the important research because it might hurt their careers.
10
For the reasons stated in the article and comments, medical research cannot be taken at face value--noisy data and self-preservation make that difficult. But take my field--animal behavior. Low paying, yes, but when someone shows that guppies that live in areas with high bird predation are less brightly colored than those living in areas with less predation, you can be pretty sure that a) there are no conflicts of interest contaminating the research, and b) that other studies will eventually confirm or reject that hypothesis. In other words, we seek to know the actual truth that governs guppy coloration in a specific locale.
2
"companies are, for the most part, interested in making money. That’s not a moral judgment; it’s economics.". for people who either support or oppose wealth creation, making money becomes the basis for a moral judgement.
3
Pandora's Box on steroids, I'd say. Bias in science is akin to praying in church, I'd say as well. The scientific method is rife with bias by the nature of mankind needing social contact, food and water and your suggested rules might improve process and transparence. Science would cease without ego and fame. Further, (David Hume), might have advised that only self-proclaimed (atheism and attendant personalities) be allowed to become a credentialed researcher. Anyone familiar with the education process of minting PhD's recognize how few understand ethics, truthfulness and (seriously now -- the cannons of scientific philosophy and rigors of method). As a profession class, PhD's, underperform as noted in how few ever get a patent or participate in an invention. But, I'm only saying, as China is minting Science and Engineering talent unburdened with nitro-fueled egos and bias. The USA needs to redouble our efforts teaching the hard sciences by identifying very young kids that have the intelligence factors that might lead to very high powered thinkers and researchers. Those high IQ types need to be groomed with National resources and piles of money to mint a new generation of powerful thinkers and doers fueled by gigantic scientific ego's (science ego watches the next ego and discovery marches on).
@terry brady
China is stealing intellectual property and mining it for profits that enable it to continue its totalitarian government and expand its economic and political influence.
Of the five Chinese nationals who have been awarded Nobel science prizes, exactly one received the award for work done in China. The rest had immigrated to the US.
Universities play into this in a huge way by judging academics more on grant funding than on scholarship. Our university president announces the receipt of large grants in his weekly bulletin to all of us but almost never mentions publications.
7
I agree with the comments written about funding. Although I did return to academic research eventually, it was because I could "afford" to: some of my financial support comes from fortunate family investments unrelated to my work. Previously, i Ieft academia to work in the private sector because even as a young scientist, I could sense the funding situation was unstable. My private sector position increased my salary 50%, came with excellent benefits and the chances of partnership within 3 years was pretty much guaranteed. I am not surprised that universities are losing or having difficulty recruiting talented MD scientists.. I could stand the lower pay in lieu of academic freedom but not the uncertainty.
4
The "soft money" model for researchers is now a mugs game, more and more researchers applying for less and less funds. In one review committee I was on, I heard, more than once, someone asking "but will it work?" This utterance is the death of science. Further, there are many in MDs who can work in this environment as they can do clinical work to subsidize the research, or fallow periods in funding, while PH.Ds cannot. I have told many junior faculty to not go into soft money for this reason, it's brutal and getting worse.
7
Dr. Carroll says "an alarmingly high share of experiments that have been rerun have not produced results in line with the original research." I'd like to know how high is what he calls "alarming"? It's normal and reasonable for most results to be irreproducible. Reproduction is the core scientific test of validity. Initial experiments, which are usually only reported when they are successful, are just the first step. Conversely, an unfavorable initial result is not a disproof; that result should be reproducible.
Of course for expensive experiments it can be hard to do a second study, especially if the first is unfavorable, but that is merely a financial obstacle to satisfactory science. We have to deal with finance, but we don't have to let it decide what is true.
Now, think of the advantage to theoretical science, where nothing is needed but pencil and paper and a 1960s superdupercomputer (your laptop)!
2
Very often we overlook that scientists are but humans too who have mouths to feed and amortizations to worry about, who have egos to cultivate. There are several known marks of "success" in the fields of science: number and size of research grants; number of publications; dissertation/thesis students, research assistants and postdocs that get financial support; attendance in conferences; frequency of citations of their publications; and the like,including the number of square meters of their laboratories. It seems little is secret or sacred.
The newly minted PhD probably begins as an idealistic researcher and voyager, not unlike a 21-year old Charles Darwin who even has to pay up and give up the comforts of home to join a scientific expedition on a ship, throws up as the ship is tossed by waves, and still marvels at the mysteries of nature that entice and captivate him for life.
But when he is back in terra firma, the paper chase --- the publish or perish mantra --- overwhelms and transforms him. Sadly, though, unlike the Charles Darwin in the life-changing journey, he becomes one of them. Same old story, which is repeated many times. Once in a while, an Aaron E. Carroll comes along to re-tell it, and we give pause.
11
Thank you for writing about this topic. The reality:
-Politics plays a big role in who gets funded
-Review committees are filled with conflicts of several kinds
-Review committees should include more members and rotate more often and should be more anonymous in some ways and more open in others.
-Many academic faculty are driven by profits, and many universities now reward faculty with bonuses based on generating grant revenue/income
16
Twenty years ago, the cost of sequencing a human genome – just one – was projected by the NIH and its Laureates at three billion dollars...
*ttps://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/05/science/great-15-year-project-to-decipher-genes-stirs-opposition.html
Today, the cost has dropped to below three thousand dollars, and will probably settle out at about three hundred dollars...
In the same way that Nolan Bushnell – founder of Atari – was Steve Jobs’ accidental mentor for a time, so was James Watson to Craig Venter...
*ttps://www.dnalc.org/view/15357-The-relationship-with-James-Watson-Craig-Venter.html
In a few words, Craig did for personal sequencing what Steve did for personal computing...
If the story ended there, it’d end well – but it’s less than half...
See – in the time that the cost of personal sequencing dropped by about 1,000,000X, the cost for “discovering” a single drug rose by about 10X...
*ttps://cen.acs.org/articles/92/web/2014/11/Tufts-Study-Finds-Big-Rise.html
See – just as Craig almost personally willed the reduction in sequencing cost, the entire pharma industry collectively willed the increase in discovery cost...
The contrasting irony – as much as supercomputing was dragged into sequencing analytics, it was virtually walled off from biochemical discovery analytics...
Actually, from both discovery and clinical trial analytics...
It’s gotten to the point where you don’t even need a tablet to figure out the difference...
Biostatisticians, heal thyselves...
8
Yes.
There is another problem here. Virtually all universities now judge scientists by how much external funding they bring in. This is supposed to be justified by the idea that better workers will bring in larger grants, and obviously there is a rough sense in which this is true. But this is not at all the whole story.
The universities depend on those grant dollars. Not the dollars that actually pay for the research or the facilities needed for it (which are fiscally zero sum), but rather the extra money -- miscalled "overhead" -- the university gets as a sort of reward for sponsoring the grant project.
So the pressure from the university administrations is very strongly for projects which require big grants . I'm not for a moment suggesting we do away with such projects -- there is a lot of that work which very much needs to be done. But not all science requires such large funding, and we are rewarding work based on its grant size rather than its intrinsic merit. Sadly, many scientists have the same equality in their minds.
19
@SC Indeed. There are departments and programs outside medicine that make a professor's ability to attract a certain level of funding a condition for tenure and/or promotion.
Additionally, programs that can be expected to attract substantial external funding (hello, STEM) frequently get more internal support, at the expense of the humanities. "Them that's got shall have / Them that's not shall lose..."
4
This is a very interesting article that i will share with students and colleagues. What Dr. Carroll describes (and has been alluded to by some of the commentators) is by no means restricted to Biomedicine, though it may have originated there. With the decline in state support for higher education, colleges and universities become ever more dependent on grants and the "overhead" they generate to make ends meet. This has had a distorting effect on academic science. An ornithologist can get a lot done with a pencil, a notebook, and a hundred buck pair of binoculars. the overhead on their grants however will be trivial. A bench scientist who (legitimately) needs hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment will generate overhead that could fund half the English Department. Deans, struggling to hold their institutions together, would be other than human if they didn't go with the bench scientist. The result is a huge emphasis in so-called "STEM" on education that probably does not benefit 90% of the students who are pushed into it. many of those same students, had they been taught some solid Natural History by the ornithologist -who was pushed into early retirement so that their position could be taken by a more lucrative "bench person" - could have been useful members of their town Conservation Commission, or could have testified effectively in regional hearings on the impact of environmental degradation.
18
@John Anderson
State and government funding to higher education is at higher levels today than it was in 1970.
Unfortunately, colleges and universities have increased their administrative costs so much, that they have consumed all of the additional funding from taxpayers to bloat their own salaries. Today, a federal research grant is used 50% to cover direct costs and the other half goes to overhead. That bench scientist grant is paying for his expensive equipment out of his budget. The "overhead" is the president's salary.
The ornithologist who gets a grant still has to fork over 50% for overhead.
University presidents would not be pulling down seven figure salaries if not for taxpayer largesse.
1
This is the zillionth article to assume that medical research and science are the same thing. Can we please have some understanding that, important as medical research is, it's not all of science, and that the problems which exist in science (and problems do exist in science) may vary from field to field and even from subfield to subfield?
20
@SC -- This is a most important distinction that should provide context for future discussion.
1
@SC This is a great point!! I have taught in business schools for 30 years and the issues we deal with are very different from those found in medical schools or in colleges of Arts and Sciences. Not that what Dr. Carroll writes is untrue, but rather that it is but one area.
It is similar in my opinion to the stories we get every year about students applying to college in the Times - not every student is applying to Harvard and Yale and breathlessly waiting on early decisions.
1
Thank you, SC, for pointing out the relentless medical bias in these articles about “science.” It distorts the public’s perspective. I’m in a more basic biology field (that still attracts MD/PhDs), but a lot of these discussions of bias from marginally significant results are moot because the vast majority of our models and interpretation are properly Bayesian. I got tenure at a great R1 partly by showing a flashy method is really unsound—a huge null result, not published in a glamor journal, unrelated to grant funding. Very well funded assistant profs frequently do not get tenure at my university because their science is not considered solid.
5
Dr. Carroll identifies the big problem, but then, like everyone else, fails to address it. There are intense incentives for grant funding and promotion, which have gotten much worse over the decades. Administrators of institutions (especially medical schools), like Deans and presidents are the main ones to blame (and perhaps the boards employing them). First, pften a very large portion of a researchers salary comes from their grants, up to 90%, putting enormous pressure to obtain grants for ones livelihood as well as ones research program. Some institutions also provide bonuses or salary incentives for obtaining more grant funding. Does it make sense that someone applies for additional grants because he/she needs to put a kid through college rather than because he/she has a really good new idea? Second, institutions have a big incentive to push their faculty/researchers to get more grants, because they receive so called "indirect costs" from the grant; often between 50 and 100% of the value of the grant support for the research project itself. Of course these amounts are meant to pay for things like the electricity and janitorial services of the research laboratories, but institutions seem to thrive on high amounts of indirect cost returns and they pressure faculty to bring in more of them. Finally, it has become much, much too common for institutions to base their hiring and promotion decisions primarily on grant funding, rather than on evaluating actual accomplishments.
15
It is difficult to make a person (even a scientist) understand something if his salary depends on his not understanding it.
So long as science is a "profession" it will be susceptible to bias due to economic interest. It is unavoidable; even scientists have to make a living and they are no "better" than any other human being at being unbiased (sorry, scientists, you're still human).
The only reasonable action is to invest in multiple points of view on any topic with the hope that each individual bias will be cancelled out by another's individual bias.
9
Doctors and researchers who have financial connections to companies should not serve on their boards or write guidelines for their medicines or devices. Many researchers develop life saving techniques, devices, and drugs but protections need to be in place for consumers.
4
@Jacquie Except that those people often know the most about their medicines and devices, so why would you want to exclude their expertise? It's too easy to say they should be excluded. Honestly, I'm not sure I'd be comfortable with guidelines written by people who don't know they medicine or the technology...
9
I agree with One View. I have served on national advisory committees with strict conflict of interest rules but even then it is near-impossible to get experts with no conflicts of interest.
2
Science did not get a demotion. Ethics in science have been in decline for a long time. Reporting or even participating in "consensus" on scientific issues is a lack of ethics. People have always been influenced by money, perhaps we just know about it more now.
6
@vulcanalex
You clearly do not understand consensus in science. It merely means that the scientist takes the view that there is very little likelihood of finding something novel out that would challenge the prevailing view.
So, the fact that I choose to support the consensus view that describes gravity does not mean that there is a conspiracy or that there is an ethical problem to explore.
The problem with medicine is that the data are noisy, and that there is money to be made if certain findings are made.
8
The “science” cited by Community Water Fluoridation proponents (ADA, CDC, and all local, state and federal government public health agencies) is very possibly the biggest scam of all, possibly causing the most widespread harm to public health with public dollars.
2
I'm sorry but I can't disagree more with Dr. Carroll's commentary. The thesis that researchers exaggerate their findings just to get more government support for their work is an old charge and one that totally lacks any supporting data. This is in sharp contrast to the many empirical studies that show that industry supported research differs markedly and in predictable ways from non-supported research. What we have in this article is speculation, pure and simple. These speculations may seem obvious on their face, but science frequently shows us that what is obvious and what is true are often very different things. It's worse than just idle conjecture, though. This article is red meat for conservatives who want to discredit any government supported research that exposes real environmental or occupational hazards. Shame on you, Dr. Carroll. The next time that you talk about conflicts of interest, do what any good scientist does. Bring some data to back up your suppositions.
3
@Steve Simon
A 2015 study published in PLOS ONE followed how many null results were found in trials funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute before and after researchers were required to register their protocols at a public website. This rule was introduced in 2000 in part because of a general sense that researchers were subtly altering their work — after it was begun — to achieve positive results. In the 30 years before 2000, 57 percent of trials published showed a “significant benefit.” Afterward, only 8 percent did.
12
@OneView
So where's your control group? Did researchers not funded by NHLBI publish positive results at the same rate before and after the registration requirement? Or did they see a similar drop in positive results as the funded researchers did?
I am another professor at Indiana University. I mainly like Dr. Carrol's article and I mainly dislike many of the comments it has spawned.
One source of conflict of interest (COI) is when the research affects the value of a company and that company directly or indirectly funds the research. This is a problem that is partly ameliorated by publicly funded research (e.g. NIH). We all get a charge out of proving the competition wrong. Sometimes the COI
is hard to avoid for one researcher, hence the importance of a community of researchers. This one more reason why support for the NIH is so important.
12
@Adam Or when the research results in a company that might be worthless if the research is biased or just is proven not to be correct. Sure NIH is important, but having universities that support their professors who think that science is way more important than being very wealthy as in the past is more important.
2
@Adam
Once again, science is bigger than biomedical science funded by NIH. I wish more commenters were more broad-minded about that.
"When the results are minimally significant..." In my experience, the closer the experimental model is to the in vivo physiological condition, the more subtle the changes found. So many times my colleagues were only impressed when data from Experimentals was >300% of Control... especially true when using in vitro cell culture models - rending it more difficult for my data from in vivo or ex vivo to be accepted. Subtle changes typically require higher n's, meaning higher costs of doing the research = many corners cut.
5
@Pam Good point but if the effect is subtle or due to the situation it must be subtle, the experiment is not worth much in the real world.
the point is that as your experimental system becomes more complex and approaches in vivo conditions the number of variables increases dramatically and requires an ever increasing n to detect significance in any one variable. many solutions relevant to the real world will be multi-parametric and these are the most expensive solutions to detect. they may also be the most relevant to real world application even if the components to the solution are each in and of themselves subtle. similarly, simplistic solutions to complex problems garnered with a low n should be viewed with intense skepticism.
The monetisation of science has ruined its purity and truth.
10
I am not ready to reveal what I know at this point as I am still part of the system. However, I look forward to documenting what I have seen for many years. The NIH has a element of corruption that favors universities in the Eastern corridor (as far west as Pittsburgh and as far south as Durham, N.C.). I have copies of study section seating plans with primary/secondary reviewers. How does the best friend of a prospective P.I. get his/her best friend assigned as his/her primary reviewer? Easy, just suck up to the committee's NIH administrator. How can this be fair? Can you hold constant the emotions that this reviewer has for his/her dear friend? Also, East Coast researchers routinely visit Bethesda and hob nob with NIH officials. At conferences, check out the sycophants with their noses ready to sniff out unfair advantages. The Wall Street Journal article 15 years ago discussed how Pittsburgh rose from a mediocre research university to one of the top grant recipients. Their administrators expected their researchers to be on study sections and hob nob in D.C. SCIENCE is not the only reason why grants are awarded. Innovation and potential impact can be just as important as science, but these practices show that scientists who are not politicians are at a disadvantage.
Moreover, these sycophants know about "NIH requests for proposals", long before the non-kissers do, a MAJOR advantage.
20
@bigdoc Well said, been there, seen it.
4
@bigdoc
There is a world of science and grant funding outside the NIH. Once again, I say science is bigger than biomedical science.
1
All research funding is policy based. Government agencies and other sources need to prioritize scientific research which addresses climate change solutions, before most other projects become moot.
3
@S. Shalit If you believe that "all" are policy based you must be living in a fantasy alternative reality. And just what potential research would you be thinking of to address climate change? You think that geo engineering is safe??? The government's first responsibility is to national defense, so research on laser, directed energy, and rail gun tech is first for me, not to mention a way to stop those hypersonic weapons of China and Russia.
@S. Shalit
vulcanalex is correct: 'If you believe that "all" are policy based you must be living in a fantasy alternative reality.' I would put it less harshly, but you are wrong, unless by policy you mean trying to guess which areas of pure research are more likely to be productive scientifically.
There is policy-directed research as well, and it tends to be much better funded than pure research. Examples are the NIH and DoD. Both of them, though, do fund some pure research as well as policy-based research.
1
When Dr. Jeffrey Flier says “I believe a more worrisome source of research bias derives from the researchers seeking to fund and publish their work, and advance their academic careers," there should probably be some additional context provided. I think Flier is a thoughtful guy, as is Dr. Carroll, but too often the people saying that non-financial COI are "more important" than financial COI are really using this statement to imply that we don't need to be too vigilant about the effects of financial COI. The notion that unavoidable COI (like intellectual interests) might be even more influential than avoidable COI (like financial conflicts) is very much in debate, but even if it's true it wouldn't mean one should ignore financial COI. And it's worth noting that Dr. Flier presided over both a strengthening and then a significant weakening of financial COI rules at Harvard Med during his tenure as Dean.
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As a former researcher, I want to put my two cents in. There is a perverse symbiosis between corporate interests and interests of the research institutions/researchers. Researchers need and want money for research and corporations want the legitimacy that the institutional research provides. In and of itself it is not a bad concept. Both parties benefit. Implicit in it, however, is the expectation of future funding by the researcher, and of the expected outcomes from his research, by the donor. If the results are not as expected by donors the future funding will likely not be forthcoming, diminishing chances of the researcher's promotion etc.
The Universities these days can not provide all the funding required for research and the NIH/ NSF and other sources have become super competitive. Corporate money is rather easy to get but there is an implicit understanding behind it, as mentioned.
There is no easy way out of it. One possible approach is to have the corporate funding come to the institution's research fund, and not directly to the researcher's fund. This funding can have a dedicated purpose as desired by the donor but the donor's name not be disclosed to researcher. Also, researcher may be allowed to compete internally for this money and an institutional committee makes the decision. This approach is likely not of interest to donor since donor has less control. But if prominent institutions in the country all adopt this policy the donors will have few choices.
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The article starts, "A number of recent news articles have brought renewed attention to financial conflicts of interest in medical science."
It's not just science or research. Greed has taken over our entire medical complex and "tax-free" institutions like universities and religious health organizations lead the pack.
Case in point - I had to go to emergency because a piece of chicken got lodged in my throat and I was unable to swallow. I could breathe and talk but not swallow.
In early December I went to the catholic hospital emergency room and was there for four hours with multiple "providers" attending me. They don't use the Heimlich maneuver, which is free.
Yesterday I got the Medicare summary - over $10-,000 dollars. It is beyond ludicrous.
I've had the same blow up billing by "clinical professors" at the University.
I'm the medical/academic comples "Medicare" welfare credit card. There were about 10 "Medicaid" patients there the same night and I imagine the bills were even higher for them. More welfare. Tax free money.
This medical complex theft must stop before we have Universal Health Care or we will go bankrupt and die.
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I taught at public universities for 32 years. As state funding declined, the universities increasingly pushed faculty to seek research grants that paid "full overhead": which means research grants from the Federal government or from the pharmaceutical and biotech firms. Research grants from foundations were frowned on, as they only paid 25% or so of what the Federal grants paid.
Federal and pharma/biotech research grants have a bias: they predominantly go to researchers who have had previous Federal and/or pharma/biotech grants who were successful in having "success" with their grants: obtaining results that validate their receipt of the grant and resulting in publications.
Innovative and risk-taking research, especially trans-disciplinary research, is rarely funded. There is constant fear of congressmen ridiculing research that they do not understand.
The shift over the 32 years of my career was slow and incremental. When I spoke out against it, I was told to accept it and focus my efforts on getting Federal or corporate grants that paid "full overhead".
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@Brad: I think it is important to clearly explain to everyone how overhead is negotiated between a university and one government agency (each university has one federal agency with whom they negotiate what is attributable to research-i.e., an allowable cost). Universities do not make a profit on overhead. Overhead is a ratio of allowable costs:research volume. Universities like faculty who bring in large amounts of funding because it actually causes the university's overhead to diminish. If you have a grant from a foundation that doesn't pay full overhead, then someone else is subsidizing your grant. This is only feasible to a certain extent.
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@SteveLB
You can't be right that each university has one agency to negotiate with. Different research areas (and sometimes the same area) are funded by different agencies, each of which has its own rules.
@Thomas Zaslavsky SteveLB is right about negotiating the overhead rate. During my time at a big NE research university that agency was the Office of Naval Research (ONR) regardless of the funding agency, except for Defense Department contracts. Then it was DCAA (Defense Contract Audit Agency).
The very basic problem in encouraging research is that the direction of research is decided by available funding and also access to equipment and its infrastructure (for example, access to a Hubble Supertelescope or to a Hadron Supercollider or a Supercomputer), and not necessarily by worthiness of the project. And availability of funding and access to equipment is decided at worst by corporations with an axe to grind, and at best by committees of folks not assessing the work on its merits, but relying upon ancillary factors like number of publications, letters of recommendation, conformance to current enthusiasms, and prejudices of committee members.
Breakthroughs in research often are the result of dedicated pursuit in directions contrary to accepted wisdom and recent fads and with unexpected results scoffed at initially by proponents of orthodoxy. Exactly the activities unlikely to be funded, or funded unbeknown to the fundor.
Escape from such conundrums is possible given the will to form the appropriate mechanisms, but such developments are not feasible at the moment, neither by corporate laboratories nor by government sponsored academics.
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@John Brews ..✅✅
But funders don't want to fund junk science either which waste good money and time on very expensive and high demand equipment.
How can one tell the difference between a "new paradigm" (unexpected breakthrough) and "junk science"? That's the heart of the problem and I'd be keen to know of what mechanism would solve this conundrum.
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"Unfortunately" scientists are people, with all the biases and emotional drivers that come with being human. Fortunately, scientists are among very few humans who are encouraged and trained to act in non-human ways to overcome these biases. Any good scientist strives for objectivity and rational thinking, and applies an open-minded skepticism. There are no "truths" in science that should not be challenged, including one's own work.
Yes, some scientists commit fraud, whether intentionally or not. And some scientists, and their pet ideas, hold onto authoritative status far too long. But even with the flaws in our current system, including funding, for every fraud and fading fossil, there are dozens of eager young (and not so young) challengers at work.
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@Bob Krantz Thanks Bob.......there is fraud everywhere in this country, at all levels......corporate, religious, community and family. It needs to be continually called out and exposed!
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"In the 30 years before 2000, 57 percent of trials published showed a “significant benefit.” Afterward, only 8 percent did"
This seems to be a bit of an apples vs oranges comparison. It has always been difficult to publish negative results. The registration of trials made that a lot easier. It would be good if an article about honesty didn't leave lay people with a wrong impression of investigators trying to hide negative results.
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Everyone agrees: Money corrupts. This includes scientists. Yes, full disclosure of data and competing interests prevent some corruption. The heart of the problem, though, is an increasingly capitalistic academia. Universities and other research institutions have become so addicted to the overhead and bright lights of huge research grants that everything else suffers -- the arts, humanities, and all the basic science that is too inexpensive to afford (you read that right). There is a simple solution: slash university overhead. That way there is more money to go around, more research, and some intellectual balance.
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The constant effort to win grants and publish papers has distorted the mission of science. I have been an academic scientist for over 30 years, and I don't know anyone who got into this field with such a goal in mind. But we quickly learned that this is the path to tenure and subsequent professional advancement. Administrators contribute to this upside down logic because, although they aren't doing the research, they measure their own success by how many grant dollars were obtained on their watch. In contrast, I would point to one of my colleagues who has very little funding (sometime none), but has a veritable army of undergraduates (and a couple of graduate students supported on TAs) who are eager to participate in the scientific endeavor for the sheer excitement of it. They do pure science. She is not the only one with this philosophy. (Luckily, she is safely tenured, on the strength of her numerous publications, all done on a shoestring budget.) It is true that some science is very expensive, but the QUALITY of the work and the PRODUCTIVITY of the researcher have no correlation with dollars spent. A recent study verified this. And because of the chaotic and unpredictable nature of science, anyone who claims to be capable of predicting which research will have to most impact is delusional. History has shown again and again that major breakthroughs sometimes come in through the side door, a result of unfunded research.
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@chuck Oh man, you have nailed it. After 40 years of watching this deteriorating trend, I gave up and retired. I got tired of the stress of trying to cope with the 'system'. Happy New Year:)
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@chuck
As a former academic doc, I can say that this comment is absolutely spot on. Unfortunately for those still judged by a promotions committee every 5 years, this preoccupation with grants reigns supreme.
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nice article but it's not all about advancement and promotion, it's about keeping your job.. It's ironic that Jeff Flier is concerned about this since Harvard (and similar medical schools like Hopkins) are amongst the worst offenders in promoting this type of behavior. most people probably don't know that university medical schools like those listed above do not pay one penny of salary support to the vast majority of their faculty. This is known in the business as 'soft money', meaning that all of one's salary has to generated via outside sources (e.g., research grants) or clinical income, and both of these sources are shrinking continously. perhaps if Harvard and other similar medical shools used some of their massive financial resources (Harvard endowment is 10 billion?) to financially support their faculty then this type of behavior would lessen..
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@poins I totally agree, but I would add Duke and Pittsburgh to the mix. They are the Harvard-Hopkins wanna be's.
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A key factor that drives especially younger, not tenured academic researchers (the majority of academic scientists) to not go against the prevailing orthodoxies is that their professional survival largely depends on getting research grants, which actually pay for their own salaries. This dependency on so-called soft money means that the very people who we would expect to make many of the scientific leaps and breakthroughs that come from thinking outside current doctrine have to be willing to loose their job doing so. That might be an option for some, but the typical assistant professor (junior research faculty) at major universities is in their 30s or early 40s, oftentimes married with children, and trying to buy or pay for their first home. Few outside academia realize that the vast majority of these researchers are on time-limited employment contracts (tenure-track) and are expected to finance their research and their own salaries through research grants within three years after hire. That's enough pressure to squash a lot of creative energy and creativity.
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@Pete in Downtown
A system of soft-money positions admittedly breeds grant-chasing. This is why my institution has only hard-money tenured positions, with 100% of the faculty member's salary coming from the university, and no additional grant-derived salary even allowed.
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@DeGra
Canada's whole research support system is different from the U.S.'s. The U.S. directs much more money to highly paid senior scientists and much less to the rest. This begins with salary supplementation, which is a percentage of academic salary. In Canada the principle is very different. I believe there is no or little salary supplementation.
@DeGra Your institution is doing what's right. And, I wish that some very well-funded institutions here in the US would do likewise. Harvard, Stanford, Yale and others - you got the endowments, here is a great use for some of that money. At least get rid of this "get major outside funding in three years or you're out" nonsense.
1
After years of training and practice, scientists become very good at knowing what constitutes credible research data that are found acceptable by their peers. But for some researchers, that awareness allows them to bias their data in subtle ways that avoids detection, at least for a time.
I think that some scientists' love of money and accolades exceeds the joy and exhilaration of scientific discovery. If the latter doesn't do much for you, you should not be a scientist.
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Scientific research in academia transitioned from a primarily intellectual activity to a business about three decades ago, as universities discovered the dollars they could reap. Once carried out by modestly-paid public servants seeking truth and discovery, wealth and power have now become major goals. Promotions and positions are essentially sold to the highest bidders. There are many negative ramifications of this trend for society, too many to mention in a comment. Perhaps the most sinister is that PhD training, once reserved for the "best and brightest" with the reward of academic freedom for those who survived, competes poorly with other paths to wealth attainment, and thus has become less attractive to the brilliant minds we need to discover biological targets for disease cures. The fantastic discoveries of the 20th century were mostly the product of intellectual curiosity, not profit.
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NIH should be included as shaping research in specific directions because of its choices on funding and the way it structures review processes. Do we have a situation of regulatory capture of NIH by researchers who benefit from its funding that also shapes what research gets done? Perhaps we need to critically analyze how all funding streams affect research and implement mechanisms to guard against regulatory capture of NIH by researchers forwarding their own interests.
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I left research in my field, physics, in large part because I was solely interested in the truth, but the truth does not get you advancement, only interesting truth like discoveries. So if a researcher goes barking up some tree and finds something unexpected, there is every incentive to say the unexpected thing is real physics rather than an artifact. Further, scientists seem to have a tendency to form camps, and though most scientists in a field may not join a camp, the camps drive the conversation. The camps over state their case repeatedly, mostly in honest ways, but often ignoring their own potential for confirmation bias, which remains hidden. As such, science often follows a path to truth more like the Columbia River than the Nile or even the Mississippi on its way to sea
14
Can you convince the appointmentsand and promotions committee at my medical school (Yale) to consider other factors than funding and publications? This is the root cause because our jobs are at stake. Even temporary loss of funding can cost advancement. Your article did not address the lack of research dollars and the competition that has created this environment.
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STEM will always be controversial because of its exceptionally high impact.
Some areas are harder to commit fraud. For example mathematics.
Maybe we should start a conference on simple ways of highlighting irreproducible experiments?
5
I learned to be very skeptical of most research when I heard a research assistant describe that the rats that did not perform to the desired hypothesis were withdrawn from the study for reasons of “not healthy”, “old age”, or other convenient excuses.
Confirmation bias and manipulation is way too easy to prevalent. And then there is the money and fame temptations. And, of course, when studying biological organisms, there is rarely a one size fits all answer.
The suggestions put forth here are a very good start.
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@Tricia
At my institution that research assistant would be out of a job instantly if that conversation were overheard.
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@DeGra
I hope it would not be the research assistant, who was merely blowing the whistle on bad practice. It should be the lab chief who is fired. The assistant should perhaps be promoted.
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@DeGra Dear DeGra, I was bullied and lost job at MIT as I complained of research misconduct (Picower Institute). Please see my Facebook (ID: Dilip Dey). Thank you.
1
In the scientific community success is measured by the number of major grants you hold, publications in reputed journals, membership in scientific organisations or editorial board of journals and etc etc. This has created to some extend unethical practices among the scientists to rise to the top.
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@MK
Only partly true. Do you know this generalization for a fact? -- and if you know from experience, how do you know your experience and your friends' experience is typical? I say this because it is definitely not my experience nor my friends' experience.
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I’ve personally seen the “mob” culture encouraged by academic science. Researchers latch on to whatever topic is hot to publish as much as possible. In materials science that was graphene, then quantum dots, now it’s “perovskites”. The result is thousands of publications, most of them meaningless, on fad topics.
This piece almost touches on that topic. The fact is that funding priorities are determined based on input from academic “luminaries” who then benefit financially from grants. The result is a patronage system that protects incumbents and the status-quo. Why else would publicly funded research still land behind private pay-walls?
Instead of poking at the morass of academic conflicts of interest, this piece circles right back to bashing anyone low enough to exit the corrupt world of academics for industry. Somehow doing science for an economic purpose, and facing the business end of regulatory machines, suddenly disqualifies a scientist from later-career advisory roles despite our experience dealing with those bodies.
This kind of academic chauvinism is why I left.
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@Zachariah
"Somehow doing science for an economic purpose, and facing the business end of regulatory machines, suddenly disqualifies a scientist from later-career advisory roles despite our experience dealing with those bodies."
This may have been true in the past, but I think it's less and less the case nowadays. I have experience in medical and public health research in both US and European institutions, and see an increasing willingness, at least in Europe, to welcome advice and collaboration from well-regarded researchers who have experience in academia, industry, regulatory, and other research and advocacy agencies.
Frankly, for better or for worse, this open-mindedness seems most likely to continue increasing as universities on both sides of the pond succumb to "commercialization."
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I think that Zachariah, and a few others here like David Hahn, hit a nail squarely on the head: academic chauvinism. Here's the best example I know: a colleague of mine at the University of Massachusetts was a true luminary in her field. Her ideas on the endosymbiotic origin of the eukaryotic cell were so revolutionary and prescient, done entirely with light and EM microscopy, that she could never get an NSF grant. That was Lynn Margulis, who was eventually awarded the National Medal of Science. Given America's highest scientific achievement, but no peer-reviewed research grant!
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@David
I don't call it chauvinism. I call it conservatism, or fear of risk-taking. There is more of that than is good for science, for sure.
Another example of the power of dogma: In 1991 the NIH published its first of several guidelines on asthma, stating that “the root cause of asthma is inflammation” and unrelated to infection. Also in 1991 was published the first of many studies implicating chronic lung infections as a cause for asthma. To this day, NIH review groups decline to fund the kinds of research studies required to test the “infectious asthma” hypothesis.
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@David l Hahn
That sounds bad. Try the NSF. I hope (emphasis on "hope") they are better, but maybe it's the same community evaluating asthma proposals.
@David l Hahn
Yes, I have been reading the article which tempted us with the idea that protecting reputations could lead to burying new information that reverses prior findings. After that intro, the article then says nothing more about it.
NIH money goes to the "dons" who get it for decades. They keep publishing the same views because it is now orthodoxy. It got that way because the funders allowed it, and it brought in the big bucks. Many publications in big name journals, universities promote these researchers for their grant winning. Is this going to cause them to block any new information that would refute the orthodoxy they established? You bet they are, and the funder likewise has a stake in not looking foolish for backing a loser (one who changes his/her mind).
Reputations are not made by disowning previous work, and those who challenge the orthodoxy from the outside are going to be attacked, not funded, not published, not promoted.
It is really too bad such an important aspect of science bias wasn't explored here, or really anywhere. Look at all the medical problems that don't have good treatments or cures....doesn't that tell you orthodoxy can be a dead end? And if it is medical science, dead people can result.
There's a difference between making policy based on science and doing science. Science, itself is probably the only human activity that is, eventually, self correcting. No matter human weakness, the truth will out. Interpreting this science is more in the realm of the political, hence climate change denial, anti vaccine efforts, creationism, erc.
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@Rickibobbi It's not the deniers getting the grants or the tenure.
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@Rickibobbi Self correcting is a comforting idea but it can take a very long time and cause great harm in the meantime while we are waiting for the happy day to arrive. And be resisted greatly by the in-crowd. So, I would like to see those roadblocks to correction be removed.
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@Rickibobbi How do you know that science is self-correcting? Is this knowledge based on scientific studies? If not, how do you justify the claim? What do you even mean by self-correcting? These are important issues, and worth the effort it might take to really understand them.
1
There is significant issue with medical and biological science research that has not been addressed for long time. Biological system is the most complex self organizing distributed system and this requires very rigorous research methodology. In the physical science research, this complexity was encountered in wireless communication research - the complexity similar to biological system. The madness of research results of different scientists was hampering the progress of wireless research in late nineties. The research method standardized by 3G standard group removed this bottle neck of research and rapid progress in the technology started happening. We very rapidly move to 4G and 5G. The standard boundary condition of experimental measurements allowed the knowledge cumulative on a distributed experimental environment. Today, it is very difficult to add the research knowledge of biological research who are working on same problems. This also make the biological research confusing and open for interpretation. To make progress, knowledge should build up on prior knowledge. This dependence on interpretation, created a vested groups in biological research who are biased to a particular formulation.
5
This is a huge issue in not just the medical sciences but in research together. Universities primary method of selecting tenure at research universities is based on how much money you can bring in. This has lead to not only the scandals and conflict of interest cases discussed but also of people moving to getting money from corporations. Corporation's primary focus is to make money and short/mid-term development work which is not research at all. It also provides tax advantages and can give a good retirement spot for some of their ranking members. I worry that people really do not understand the lack of research we really have now; 50 years ago it was mostly considered development work.
More general funding is needed, likely from the government, to reverse this trend. It should be part of any infrastructure bill that we have moving forward. Let the short-mid term development be done by companies, as opposed to mostly graduate students. Make the bar for creating patents much higher so that only fundamental research owners can hold them. Then let the universities and labs hold those patents.
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@Peter
"Universities primary method of selecting tenure at research universities is based on how much money you can bring in." That is simply not true. In some places, in some fields of study, it is, but by no means everywhere.
Your concern about "research" being oriented away from basic research and towards development in order to get funded does also concern me.
I believe strongly in your commentary regarding the need to eliminate conflicts of interest and the need to publish negative data. However, the competitive nature of our current science establishment is an important driving force for creativity. It is an imperfect system but to challenge it on the basis that the quest for funding and publication in high impact journals is itself a source of conflict of interest would be ignoring human nature. Scientists are some of the hardest working people I know. That drive comes from a combination of needing their creative work to be recognized and feeling they must live up to the investment society has placed on them. As a society, we should continue to invest in individuals who can produce results.
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@Tom So long as those results are based on sound and robust methodology, well documented, and reproducible.
3
@Tom
Just like a little salt is good, I agree that a little competition is part of the drive that move us forward. The problem is that we are way past the point of "more is better" when NIH institutes fund less than 10% of its applications. We need to stop incentivizing universities to hire way more researching faculty than the funding agencies can afford. A good start would be to deny funding for PI salaries and cap the overheads at 40% to ensure that universities have to pay for some of the infrastructure.
8
@Ivan
Again, you seem to think mainly of biomedical research, which has its own funding patterns.
We agree that science research can be tainted by grant grubbing but the entire article is overwhelmingly about medical research written by someone in the medical field. All the public sees is the word science and the headline. Given the scientific illiteracy of the public, this article makes it easy for an uninformed public to paint all science with the same broad brush of fraud. We agree that it is possible for the grantor to affect the grantee in every branch of science but some more than others, mostly when it is a business putting up the money as opposed, for example, to a non profit and secondly, whether it is money for applied research or basic research.
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@tom
The biggest conflict of interest issue is when ego and career are on the line. Losing your job and career is a huge threat, and a strong incentive for bad behavior (to save yourself). It is a much stronger incentive than to gain 3 month salary worth of extra income (witch in my experience is about the max for most of the concerns currently being addressed). The problem of ego/career incentives is, as mentioned by others, made a lot worse when universities destroy tenure and fail to make long-term commitments to their faculty. The options and possibilities to get a job are very limited for a 50+ year old academic scientist who failed to maintain a funded program.
7
@tom
Yes; the idea that medical research is representative of science is a thought killer.
The pressure to be successful in a certain manner (immediately, in terms of numbers of citations, research funds acquired, and doctoral students, as well as in terms of influence in the research community) results in conformism. Conformism is rarely good in scientific research. Research that might at first look like devoted of success, might turn out to be successful at a later timer. Let me give one example: A mathematician at my university, Oskar Perron, worked on topics without the slightest application. One of his result obtained at the beginning . of the 20th century is a basis for Google's PageRank algorithm. What should we do? Be humble and recognize that good scientific research is not necessarily successful after whatever definition of success one might consider and, as a consequence, reject too much recognition in the research business based on success.
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@FFFF
Right-oh! Especially in math, I think, and in theoretical work.
You cannot expect the chef to fairly evaluate his own recipe. If a researcher thinks a study should be done, they should submit the proposal to the NIH. A research proposal deemed worthy of being undertaken should be put out to bid to all institutions to be independently performed and analyzed.
In this system, the overwhelming number of positive research results will decline, but accurate data would see the light of day.
6
@Michael What a great suggestion. Reward researchers based on the potential impact of their ideas and the strength of the proposed study methods, rather than their results. In other words, focus the incentivizes on the most important steps in the whole process.
A recipe for the large, well-endowed research institutions to seize control of the fruits of the 'idea trees' that others planted. Hardly egalitarian! Strengethened peer review and rigor in documentation of both raw data and data analysis methodologies - a big push in the past three or so years by the NIH - should pave the way for robust validation of reported results of seeming significance, in biomedical research certainly. Artificial mechanisms of funding the pursuit of ideas belonging to singular investigative teams is no fair or effective answer. Establishing robust self-consistency of new apparent discoveries with border context just takes time, frankly. Let's not fall into the common contemporary trap of always expecting INSTANT 'results', i.e. conclusions. It is 'RESEARCH' reaching into the lesser known to unkown afterall.
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@Michael "A research proposal deemed worthy of being undertaken should be put out to bid to all institutions to be independently performed and analyzed".
We already have an unofficial version of this: it is called stealing someone else's ideas.
8
An important component of this that isn’t mentioned is how many medical schools and universities now hire faculty who are required to bring in the majority of their salary through grant funding. Negative data does not result in high impact papers or grants, and without these two things it is nearly impossible to gain tenure and keep your job. Stable “hard” funding by the universities for close to 100% of faculty salaries would give individuals the freedom to follow wherever the data leads and publish important (but not flashy) replication studies. To blame the replication crisis primarily on scientists without taking into account the huge pressures induced by the universities shift to soft money (ie, grant dependent) contracts is missing an critical part of the problem.
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Emily Bruce, I agree solidly. When I was an assistant prof in a medical school, there was a full prof who had 2 NIH grants. A great scientist! Both failed to renew. A bad scientist! Now the school was seeking ways to terminate his contract. That was one of the steps on my path to my leaving academia.
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Glad you brought his up, in essence it creates faculty desperate to please funders and their university rather than find the truth. It is even worse in other countries like Brazil that have private schools proliferating like bacteria.
12
@Emily Bruce Spot on! Many academic researchers are, for all intents and purposes, treated like contractors, who are fired (not renewed) if they fail to bring in sufficient outside funding to pay their own salaries. In academic life science research, many if not all institutions have founding targets in form of $ per square foot of laboratory space. Miss those, and it's bye-bye within a year, sometimes sooner.
18