N.Y. Times report on corruption in academic science

1st Official Post

    I mentioned here that I believe there is great deal of corruption in academic science. Several cold fusion researchers, biologists and others have told me about incidents such as harassment, publishing fraudulent data, stealing data during peer-review, and so on. Academic science has a public reputation of being ethical and directed only toward "learning the truth." I believe it is more political than the public realizes.


    Anyway, the New York Times today published an article about an important scientist who has been accused of unethical behavior:


    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0…e/cancer-carlo-croce.html


    Years of Ethics Charges, but Star Cancer Researcher Gets a Pass


    Quoting the lede:


    "Dr. Carlo Croce is among the most prolific scientists in an emerging area of cancer research involving what is sometimes called the “dark matter” of the human genome. A department chairman at Ohio State University and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Croce has parlayed his decades-long pursuit of cancer remedies into a research empire: He has received more than $86 million in federal grants as a principal investigator and, by his own count, more than 60 awards.


    With that flamboyant success has come a quotient of controversy. Some scientists argue that Dr. Croce has overstated his expansive claims for the therapeutic promise of his work, and that his laboratory is focused more on churning out papers than on carefully assessing its experimental data.


    But a far less public scientific drama has been playing out in the Biomedical Research Tower that houses Dr. Croce’s sprawling laboratory on Ohio State’s campus in Columbus.


    Over the last several years, Dr. Croce has been fending off a tide of allegations of data falsification and other scientific misconduct, according to federal and state records, whistle-blower complaints and correspondence with scientific journals obtained by The New York Times. . . ."

    • Official Post

    Someone told bme it was a good training for politics.


    Note that this is no news, but some "evidences" of scientific misconduct (trying to kill a competitor's career, to kill a journal, tweaking data, destroying data) in controversies, are legitimated/minimized when politically supported.


    Today I've found that article

    https://theconversation.com/sc…-bad-idea-heres-why-73305


    science is a market, and be published is more important than reality.


    I'm among the few who consider businessmen, entrepreneur, industrialists, finance newspapers, industry applied researchers, are more honest than academic researchers , NGOs, politicians, opinion newspapers , journalist... because the first category is more judged on result in real world, and the other on opinion of their victims.

    anyway today even businessmen can fool their clients , exploiting ideas from NGOs or politicians. no matter if the cat is green or yellow, provided it makes money.

    Even engineers have to sell their soul to the new fashion, like academic do for funding since 80s.


    in same vein

    http://news.stanford.edu/2017/02/21/the-threat-from-within/

    http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/3/9/160384

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…ntists-fu_b_10106104.html

    http://rense.com/general58/darkage.htm

    http://www.theguardian.com/sci…prize-chemistry-interview

    http://www.innovationtoronto.c…-patterns-time-to-evolve/

    http://osc.centerforopenscienc…15/anonymous-peer-review/

    https://www.city-journal.org/h…al-war-science-14782.html

    http://www.theguardian.com/com…ience-cell-damage-science

    http://www.theguardian.com/sci…-boycott-science-journals

    http://phys.org/news/2013-11-funding-prone-formation.html

    http://conversableeconomist.bl…learn-to-write-badly.html


    http://home.isr.umich.edu/rele…equalities-science-field/

    http://www.innovationtoronto.c…g-scientists-bureaucrats/

    • Official Post

    I think one of the best summaries of many of the problems besetting science, scientific credibility, and the pressures of orthodoxy is 'The Republic Of Science' By Michael Polyani. Polyani's original motivation for writing this piece was to contrast what he saw as the rigid bureaucratic oversight and control of scientific endeavour in the old Soviet Union with the more 'free-wheeling' approach that was evident elsewhere. Written in the 60's many of his observations and comments on scientific progress and the present day culture of institutional science in capitalist democracies are perhaps more pertinent than ever, particularly good IMHO are some of the analogies he sees between the best methods to solve both simple problems and complex ones. He also looks at the phenomenon of rejection of unorthodox beliefs by the scientific establishment. 20 pages long, eminently readable, a free download, and reccomended.


    "Any attempt at guiding scientific research towards a purpose other than
    its own is an attempt to deflect it from the advancement of science. Emergencies
    may arise in which all scientists willingly apply their gifts to tasks
    of public interest . It is conceivable that we may come to abhor the progress
    of science , and stop all scientific research or at least whole branch es of
    it , as the Soviets stopped research in genetics for 25 years. You can
    kill or mutilate the advanc;e of science, you cannot shape it . For it (science) can
    advance only by essentially unpredictable steps, pursuing problems of its
    own , and the practical benefits of these advances will be incidental and
    hence doubly unpredictable . "


    https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites…780262690201_sch_0001.pdf

    I'm sorry but I have a view here that is much more positive than Jed's. Firstly, of course there are corrupt scientists. People are not perfect, and some are bad apples. There are quite a number of incompetent scientists who should be doing something else - thus it is in any area of professional life.


    I see no evidence anywhere here that the number of corrupt scientists is higher than expected in any other field. And there is quite a bit of evidence that being attracted to and successful in science requires facets of personality diametrically opposed to corrupt practice: curiosity, love of ideas for their own sake independent of reward, hard work.


    There is then the separate issue of whether scientific institutions and processes (funding etc) encourage innovation, or are corrupt. I'm not sure it makes good sense to talk about a process being corrupt. Rather, you can say that a process leads to non-optimal outcomes. I'd agree, scientific institutions can never be optimal, scientific funding can never be optimal.


    That is because if you want to fund pure research - the outcome is unknown and will often be zero, in measurable terms. But, when it is non-zero, this is so important we want to go on doing it. Selecting winners is pretty well impossible except on past performance. That is a catch-22 because we want to enourage novelty, from new players, working in new fields. The mechanisms we have (at least in the UK) do this a little. there are imperatives from government for direct industrial applicability that tend to push out pure research except in fashionable fields. But the academics involved still try to counterbalance this. They don't get it right. How can they - it is inherently impossible to get it right.


    Finding new things is hard, and worthwhile. One aspect of this is to realise that for every one person claiming to have found a major new thing there are 1000 such claims that turn out in the grand scheme of things to be of no great significance. If you shoot for major novelty, at least in pure science, you are buying a lottery ticket. Which is why scientists are also about process, good work, finding out tiny little improvements in what there is. The lottery tickets get bought in the process of doing these other things and just occasionally they pay off.

    • Official Post

    Where I agree with THH is that there is no individual problems.

    There are few crook in science, who are not the most toxic.

    The most toxic are normal people playing the game, backstabbing, bending, running after fashion to get food, and make their passion survive. It is too easy when you starve people to laugh at them when they battle for bread.


    Before the 19th century, most research was done with own money, or paid by crazy dreams or tastes of a king, who ignored what the crazy scientists was doing in his cave. Then it became funded by business, which led to applied science, or to inventors exploiting tycoon dreams.

    Then state took the control of most money, convinced private companies it was no more needed to fund basic science in their own labs, then state decided what was good and bad science, good and bad scientists, good and bad paper, good and bad discovery, real or not real evidence...

    and we are today.


    The worst horror come from network of incentive and normal people, not from sociopath.

    Quote from AlainCo

    Before the 19th century, most research was done with own money, or paid by crazy dreams or tastes of a king, who ignored what the crazy scientists was doing in his cave. Then it became funded by business, which led to applied science, or to inventors exploiting tycoon dreams.

    Then state took the control of most money, convinced private companies it was no more needed to fund basic science in their own labs,

    This progression was necessary because scientific research has become more expensive. Researchers in the 18th and 19th century did brilliant work, but they were harvesting "low-hanging fruit." They made simple, cheap devices such as electromagnets to discover wonderful things. They used relatively simple tools such as optical microscopes. To push beyond what we know today, in most cases you need more expensive instruments such as SEM. (Although you can still use an optical microscope for some purposes.)


    In other words, it isn't anyone's fault that research costs more than it used to, but that's how things are.


    The cost may come down in the future when robots assist researchers, and when the intellectual property for instruments such as the SEM expires, and the technology enters the public domain.


    Research has grown more expensive relative to other kinds of labor because it cannot easily be mechanized. That is also why things like teaching children and playing live music with a symphony orchestra are much more expensive than they used to be compared to jobs such as growing food or manufacturing an automobile.

    Quote from THHuxleynew

    I see no evidence anywhere here that the number of corrupt scientists is higher than expected in any other field.

    I think there is more corruption because there is less oversight, less accountability, and because most scientific research turns out to be inconsequential, so it is ignored.


    Take another profession such as programming. Most programs are inconsequential to the world at large, but they are vitally important to the company that makes them, and to their customers. If a program fails, people find out immediately. It costs a lot of money. Whereas if an experiment cannot be replicated, it is usually forgotten. For understandable reasons, failure is more the norm in scientific research. No one holds it against a researcher if it turns out the effect cannot be reproduced or it is an error. There is nothing wrong with that, but as an unfortunate side effect, it gives lazy, stupid or corrupt people an excuse to do sloppy work. Programmers and automobile mechanics are held to higher standards, because of the nature of their work and needs of society. A sloppy mechanic may kill the driver. A sloppy researcher publishes papers that no one reads.


    Peter Hagelstein described some of the political problems in science, here:


    http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Hagelsteinontheoryan.pdf

    • Official Post

    One example of inconsequential act of academic is rejecting ideas that they don't like.

    For a business, it is the biggest stupidity upon earth not to try a possibility at an affordable cost (eg testing e-cat, even if they have negative hint)... Since most companies are driven by employees, it can happen because employees are not benefiting enoug from their success, than they can be damaged by failures.


    Anyway the ratio of success benefit over failure cost, make even employees more risk-taking than academic.

    Groupthink theory of Benabou also put the reason of academic Groupthink in the peer-review and peer-pressure, preventing a lone-scientist to benefit from his finding, as a company can do against competitors.

    If a scientists like Michael McCulloch can predict better than darkmatter the behavior of dwarf galaxies, academic can anyway not care of his finding.

    If Shawyer or Chinese space academy succeed in making a sattelite move upward, NASA or Boeing cannot reject it.


    Jed is right, as the reason of change is mostly the cost of research.

    Ther is also the problem that big-science not only started to be required, but it became really practical for the professional caste of academic.

    LENR is not really big science, it could be done as required in a corporate lab, like it happened for battery technology, but ITER requires state funding and organization.

    My intuition is that this is why LENR is rejected, it is a bit old-fashioned mid-sized-science, entrepreneur science "à la Edison", endangering internationalized big-science, funded by UNO, negotiated at the planet-scale, eventually funded by international taxes.

    Quote

    One example of inconsequential act of academic is rejecting ideas that they don't like. it is the biggest stupidity upon earth not to try ... a testing e-cat, even if they have negative hint)


    We can see it even here, at this forum: Jed Rothwell is supporter of cold fusion, he did a lotta work for its popularization, yet he considers Rossi a fraudster obstinately. And maybe he really is, but his technology should be validated first. It even doesn't require to know how the ECat is working, the scientists could analyze the ECat like black box. Instead of this, they did choose the way of obstinate ignorance and doubting all LENR results.


    Jed is right, as the reason of change is mostly the cost of research.


    Such an experiments wouldn't cost more than any other calorimetry. A. Rossi should be invited at some university with isolated and guarded laboratory, during one or two days the experiments with his heater could be done and once the overunity would be proved with no doubt, then the research of nickel fusion should be established with all seriousness. It's as easy/cheap as it is. Every other attitude is just a better or worse masked attempt for cold fusion dismissal.

    • Official Post

    Jed, like me, have supported the investigation on e-cat, more cautious than me, but was open (and is still on some points).

    Like him I judge the investigation have been conclusive, let many evidences, and we know whether it works or not.

    Reducing uncertainty is always good. Someone have to try to replicate, pay to see, and eventually buy the rope for the hanging.

    Quote from Zephir_AWT

    A. Rossi should be invited at some university with isolated and guarded laboratory, during one or two days the experiments with his heater could be done and once the overunity would be proved with no doubt, then the research of nickel fusion should be established with all seriousness. It's as easy/cheap as it is. Every other attitude is just a better or worse masked attempt for cold fusion dismissal.


    There is exactly zero chance that Andrea Rossi will allow a test that would prove without doubt that his devices work. How do I know this? He's had six years of demos and tests with plenty of flaws and for whatever reason has not been bothered to remedy them. I am surprised that there is not overwhelming consensus on this detail, whatever people feel about Rossi.

    Quote

    There is exactly zero chance that Andrea Rossi will allow a test


    This chance was never tested practically. Of course Rossi is extremely distrustful and protective regarding his IP, but these obstacles could be solved - after all, he already allowed one year test.

    Quote from Zephir_AWT

    A. Rossi should be invited at some university with isolated and guarded laboratory, during one or two days the experiments with his heater could be done and once the overunity

    No, he should not be invited anywhere. He will end up suing the university for millions of dollars. That is how he treats people who try to help him -- by stealing from them.


    Rossi has been given too many opportunities to demonstrate he has something. He has caused far too much trouble already. No one should ever deal with him again, or offer to look at what he has. His only goal is to steal more money.

    Quote

    He will end up suing the university for millions of dollars. That is how he treats people who try to help him


    The public demo at university is not for Rossi, but for tax payers who need to convince ignorant physicists into research of cold fusion. A. Rossi would need such a demo for anything and he should be payed for it under regular contract. Of course the university must provide corresponding protection of IP of Andrea Rossi and the test must be made at place which A. Rossi will agree with explicitly.

    Quote from JedRothwell

    No, he did not. That was not a test. It was a fraudulent farce featuring fake data.

    Quote from JedRothwell

    His only goal is to steal more money.

    Quote from JedRothwell

    He will end up suing the university for millions of dollars.


    Jed your affirmation are so strong that become ridiculous. Is quite clear that you have an agenda or you are a new apostle of Saint Mary (Yugo) church.

    If you have not noticed I can inform you that there is an ongoing trial and that is not correct to jump to the conclusion.

    IH has signed a contract after a test that she had approved in Ferrara much before Lugano. No problems were rise on that test.

    So Rossi had never stolen money.

    And the idea of suing Universities is simply out of reality. Have you ever seen anybody doing that ?

    Quote from ele

    If you have not noticed I can inform you that there is an ongoing trial and that is not correct to jump to the conclusion.

    I did not jump to that conclusion. I came to it after careful consideration. I am not bound to reserve an opinion because there is a trial. Whatever the outcome of the trial may be, I am sure that Rossi is a liar and a thief, and his test was a farce. Any person with technical knowledge can see that from the ERV data that he uploaded. If you cannot see it, you are technically incompetent and you have no business discussing this.

    Quote from JedRothwell

    I did not jump to that conclusion. I came to it after careful consideration. I am not bound to reserve an opinion because there is a trial. Whatever the outcome of the trial may be, I am sure that Rossi is a liar and a thief, and his test was a farce. Any person with technical knowledge can see that from the ERV data that he uploaded. If you cannot see it, you are technically incompetent and you have no business discussing this.


    I'd agree with your arguments here Jed, except the last. Technical competence is not a requirement for debate. However posters lacking as much of this as is needed - which on evidence of posting here Ele does - are foolhardy to dispute technical matters with those better informed, unless they directly quote others better informed. Even then, relying on others is not a secure position to take, and makes it difficult to weight contrary arguments.


    A great example of this is Levi (also - it seems very possible - randombit0 et al here) vs others. Levi is clearly and irrefutably wrong over the emissivity vs band emissivity issue. Any honest and competent person reviewing the technical data would agree. From which you can see I securely deduce that on this matter Levi is either dishonest (perhaps unconsciously so, being so overwhelmed by bias) or incompetent. For me it is a sign of a greater incompetence, whatever the bias, if somone cannot acknowledge a basic and irrefutable physics argument when this is patiently and carefully pointed out to them an an interactive format with all questions answered. I cannot know that Levi has read through the various threads here, but if he has, as I think possible, this applies to him.

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