Category: academic fraud

Research Fraud in China

Seth Roberts9 Comments

From the New York Times:

Last December, a British journal that specializes in crystal formations announced that it was withdrawing more than 70 papers by Chinese authors whose research was of questionable originality or rigor. . . . “Even fake papers count because nobody actually reads them,” said Mr. Fang, who is more widely known by his pen name, Fang Zhouzi, and whose Web site, New Threads, has exposed more than 900 instances of fakery, some involving university presidents and nationally lionized researchers.

Recently a Tsinghua colleague asked me to fix the English in his paper. Most paragraphs required a few changes every sentence but here and there were whole paragraphs with no mistakes. Presumably he copied them from somewhere else. The material in them was boring — it was like copying from the phone book — so it was hard to care (he wasn’t taking credit for anyone else’s ideas) but I wonder if he realized how obvious it was. I don’t mean this is typical. I have looked at several other papers by Chinese authors and found no patches of perfect English.

The article begins with a false claim by a Chinese doctor — and of course these are truly damaging. In my experience, false claims by American doctors are common. An example is my surgeon recommending an operation that, she said, evidence showed would benefit me. There was no such evidence. One value of self-experimentation is that you can find out if a medicine works, rather than take your doctor’s word for it. I became impressed with self-experimentation when it showed me that an acne medicine (tetracycline, an antibiotic) my dermatologist had prescribed didn’t work. Not at all. He didn’t express any doubts when he prescribed it. Call it forensic DNA testing (e.g., The Innocence Project) for the rest of us.

Perhaps the Chinese people, faced with even more false claims than Americans, can benefit even more from self-experimentation.

Thanks to Tim Beneke.

Shamelessness in Chinese Academia

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Professor Wang Hiu, a Tsinghua faculty member in the Chinese Language Department, was accused of plagiarism several months ago. You can read about it here. Professor Wang is no stranger to controversy:

Wang Hui was involved in controversy following the results of the Cheung Kong Dushu Prize in 2000. The prize was set up by Sir Li Ka-shing, which awards one million RMB in total to be shared by the winners. The 3 recipients of the prize in 2000 were Wang Hui, who served as the coordinator of the academic selection committee of the prize, Fei Xiaotong, the Honorary Chairman of the committee, and Qian Liqun, another committee member. Wang Hui was then the editor-in-chief of Dushu magazine, which was the administrative body of the prize.

He awarded the prize to himself! And his fellow committee members. Wang was editor in chief of Dushu for ten years. During that time, he published many hard-to-understand articles by his friends. The influence of the magazine shrank considerably.

Academic Horror Story (Duke University)

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Duke University officials have known since 2009 that there were serious problems with Anil Potti’s research — serious enough to believe it is fraudulent. Here is how one researcher put it:

The Duke investigators said their data showed that expression of a particular gene, ERCC1, correlated with response to some agents. However, the commercial microarray chip the Duke investigators said they used in their experiments does not include that gene. “I admit this is one for which I do not have a simple, charitable explanation,” [said] Dr. Baggerly.

Potti, you may remember, lied about having a Rhodes Fellowship. Duke’s first investigation found him innocent.

Later events caused Duke officials to reconsider. They are still making up their minds. This is a horror story because a clinical trial based on Potti’s research is in progress. A hundred cancer patients are getting treated according to Potti’s research — that is, according to research that is probably fraudulent. Duke has done nothing to warn the patients or stop the trial.

The whole thing reminds me of UC Berkeley researchers taking weeks to tell a woman she had a large lump in her brain. As if their legal liability were more important than her life.

Is Science Self-Correcting?

Seth Roberts12 Comments

Lots of scientists say science is self-correcting. In a way this is surely true: a non-scientist wouldn’t understand the issues. If anyone corrects scientific fraud, it will be a scientist. In another way, this is preventive stupidity: it reassures and reduces the intelligence of those who say it, helping them ignore the fact that they have no idea how much fraud goes undetected. If only 1% of fraud is corrected, it is misleading to say science is self-correcting. A realistic view of scientific self-correction is that there is no reward for discovering fraud and plenty of grief involved: the possibility of retaliation, the loss of time (it won’t help you get another grant), and the dislike of bearing bad news. So whenever fraud is uncovered it’s a bit surprising and bears examination.

What I notice is that science is often corrected by insider/outsiders — people with enough (insider) knowledge and (outsider) freedom to correct things. As I’ve said before, Saul Sternberg and I were free to severely criticize Ranjit Chandra. Because we were psychologists and he was a nutritionist, he couldn’t retaliate against us. Leon Kamin, an outsider to personality psychology, was free to point out that Cyril Burt faked data. (To his credit, Arthur Jensen, an insider, also pointed in this direction, although not as clearly.) The Marc Hauser case provides another example: Undergraduates in Hauser’s lab uncovered the deception. They knew a lot about the research yet had nothing invested in it and little to lose from loss of Hauser’s support. This is another reason insider/outsiders are important.

Plastic Fantastic by E. S. Reich

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World by Eugenie Samuel Reich, a science writer, tells how a young physicist named Jan Hendrik Schoen, working at Bell Labs on making electronic devices from organic materials, managed to fool the physics community for several years, publishing many papers with made-up data in Science and Nature. This podcast summarizes the story, with the new detail that after his disgrace — even his Ph.D. was revoked — Schoen managed to get a job as an air-conditioning engineer in Germany.

I enjoyed the book, partly for the drama, partly for the physics, and partly for the light it sheds on the culture of physics and Bell Labs. When anyone says “science is self-correcting” I’m amused because, as the speaker must know, the amount of fraud that goes uncorrected is unknown. It may be far larger than the amount that is detected.

The author’s website.

The Marc Hauser Case

Seth Roberts11 Comments

It would have been harsh to title this post “Marc Hauser, RIP”. However, unless the following is shown to be in error, I’ll never believe anything he writes or has written:

According to the document that was provided to The Chronicle, the experiment in question was coded by Mr. Hauser and a research assistant in his laboratory. A second research assistant was asked by Mr. Hauser to analyze the results. When the second research assistant analyzed the first research assistant’s codes, he found that the monkeys didn’t seem to notice the change in pattern. In fact, they looked at the speaker more often when the pattern was the same. In other words, the experiment was a bust.

But Mr. Hauser’s coding showed something else entirely: He found that the monkeys did notice the change in pattern—and, according to his numbers, the results were statistically significant. If his coding was right, the experiment was a big success.

The second research assistant was bothered by the discrepancy. How could two researchers watching the same videotapes arrive at such different conclusions? He suggested to Mr. Hauser that a third researcher should code the results. In an e-mail message to Mr. Hauser, a copy of which was provided to The Chronicle, the research assistant who analyzed the numbers explained his concern. “I don’t feel comfortable analyzing results/publishing data with that kind of skew until we can verify that with a third coder,” he wrote.

A graduate student agreed with the research assistant and joined him in pressing Mr. Hauser to allow the results to be checked, the document given to The Chronicle indicates. But Mr. Hauser resisted, repeatedly arguing against having a third researcher code the videotapes and writing that they should simply go with the data as he had already coded it. After several back-and-forths, it became plain that the professor was annoyed.

“i am getting a bit pissed here,” Mr. Hauser wrote in an e-mail to one research assistant. “there were no inconsistencies! let me repeat what happened. i coded everything. then [a research assistant] coded all the trials highlighted in yellow. we only had one trial that didn’t agree. i then mistakenly told [another research assistant] to look at column B when he should have looked at column D. … we need to resolve this because i am not sure why we are going in circles.”

The research assistant who analyzed the data and the graduate student decided to review the tapes themselves, without Mr. Hauser’s permission, the document says. They each coded the results independently. Their findings concurred with the conclusion that the experiment had failed: The monkeys didn’t appear to react to the change in patterns.

They then reviewed Mr. Hauser’s coding and, according to the research assistant’s statement, discovered that what he had written down bore little relation to what they had actually observed on the videotapes. He would, for instance, mark that a monkey had turned its head when the monkey didn’t so much as flinch. It wasn’t simply a case of differing interpretations, they believed: His data were just completely wrong.

As word of the problem with the experiment spread, several other lab members revealed they had had similar run-ins with Mr. Hauser, the former research assistant says. This wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. There was, several researchers in the lab believed, a pattern in which Mr. Hauser reported false data and then insisted that it be used.

If taken literally, this description seems to imply that Hauser was making up data — writing down results much more favorable to his career than the actual results — and not realizing it! As if someone else was marking the data sheet. Since the videotapes are being coded by more than one person the fabrication/delusion/whatever would come to light, you might think, but he does it anyway! And then gets “a bit pissed” when things don’t work out perfectly.

I would love to hear Hauser’s side of this story, and see the videotapes being coded. So far Hauser has said nothing to make me doubt the straightforward interpretation: He made up data. After Saul Sternberg and I published a paper implying that Ranjit Chandra had made up data, Chandra retired.

Derek Bickerton says Hauser “fell victim to a soon-to-be-outdated view of evolution”. I am more interested in what this says about Harvard and Hauser’s co-authors. In particular, I wonder what Noam Chomsky, one of Hauser’s co-authors, will say. The incident makes Chomsky look bad. Hauser appears to be a person who pushes aside the truth of things. That Chomsky wrote a major paper with him suggests that Chomsky failed to notice this.

Thanks to Dave Lull and Language Log.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts2 Comments
  • A new paper debunks Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick global temperature graph. “Climate scientists have greatly underestimated the uncertainty of proxy-based reconstructions and hence have been overconfident in their models.” Very well written.
  • “Obscure, contemporary ethics books . . . were actually about 50% more likely to be missing than non-ethics books.” Paper. The study was done entirely online and covered 32 large university libraries.
  • Gladys Reid, Australian discoverer of benefits of feeding zinc to farm animals. “Reid was reluctant to make direct dose recommendations after claiming the Director General of Agriculture had told her she would be taken to court for misleading practices if she did. However she won followers from farming wives in particular. Many would call asking for zinc advice after tiring of seeing suffering livestock and husbands on the brink of suicide from crippling stock and production losses.”
  • Using a treadmill while working
  • The Potti Scandal continues
  • How loud are Sunchips?

Thanks to Don Sheridan and Melissa Francis.

Animal Cognition Paper Retracted

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A paper in Cognition by Harvard professor Marc Hauser and others has been retracted:

The paper tested cotton-top tamarin monkeys’ ability to learn generalized patterns, an ability that human infants had been found to have, and that may be critical for learning language. The paper found that the monkeys were able to learn patterns, suggesting that this was not the critical cognitive building block that explains humans’ ability to learn language.

The note to be published about the retraction says almost nothing about why: “An internal examination at Harvard University . . . found that the data do not support the reported findings.”

Several other papers from Hauser’s lab have also been questioned.

The usual explanation would be that someone in Hauser’s lab made the results better than they actually were. A co-author of the paper said Hauser had told him “there were problems with the videotape record of the study”. That’s consistent with the usual explanation: Someone edited the tapes (via deletions) to make the results appear better than they were. But it’s also possible that many tapes are missing, which might be an accident. When The New Yorker archives were moved from Building A to Building B several years ago, much of the archives was lost.

Thanks to Aaron Blaisdell.

The Joan Evans Scandal

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I came across the Potti scandal while trying to find out about the trouble faced by a woman named Joan Evans because a statistical analysis couldn’t be reproduced. Robert Gentleman had mentioned this in a talk at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Vancouver. Look for The Cancer Letter, Gentleman said.

I now realize that Joan Evans is Joe Nevins, who co-authored a major paper with Potti.

Speaking of Potti, members of the Duke administration are said to “have warned people not to even Google the name ‘Anil Potti.’”

The Potti Scandal

Seth Roberts3 Comments

A Duke University associate professor named Anil Potti who does cancer research turns out to have fabricated numerous details on applications for research money. The first fabrication to be noticed was that he had received a Rhodes Fellowship.

This is interesting because Duke had previously investigated him:

Late last year [2009], there was a crescendo that caused Duke to stop clinical trials on three of his research programs, two involving lung cancer and one involving breast cancer. In each program, Potti was giving patients chemotherapy — determining what drugs might work best and in what dosage — based upon his genome research.

In January Duke let these programs resume after an internal review. [emphasis added] And these are the precise programs where Duke — for the second time — has now suspended new [emphasis added] enrollments. . . . In an official statement on the winter review, Duke said it had determined Potti’s approaches were “viable and likely to succeed.”

Someone who appears to be a total fraud is called to Duke’s attention — and they find him innocent! This is what happened with the SEC and Madoff and Memorial University and Ranjit Chandra. Chandra’s research assistant, a nurse, told Memorial something was wrong and Memorial did nothing, or very little. Chandra then sued the nurse. He went on to write the paper that Saul Sternberg and I investigated.

Someone lies on his resume — it happens. That a prestigious institution like Duke let him continue to get away with it, possibly endangering patients and surely wasting vast resources, after it’s brought to their attention — not so well-known. So far, the New York Times has only covered the false-resume side of the story. You may recall how poorly Duke responded to charges against its lacrosse team.

As this unfolded, Duke had the following headline on its website: “Crisis management 101: What can BP CEO Hayward’s mistakes teach us”. From a CNN story in which a Duke expert was quoted.

Duke.Fact.Checker notes that Potti’s papers have at least 26 co-authors! Many with M.D.’s, who have or will tell thousands of trusting patients “you should take Drug X”. The patient endangerment is not trivial.

The Cancer Letter on Potti. Another issue of The Cancer Letter about it.