A portion of this topic was covered in the April 2018 blog, but enough additional material has surfaced that this information needs to be covered again.\u00a0 The reproducibility issue covered in April is one thing.\u00a0 The ability to slant results through the use of statistics [Ref. #1] has been known for a long time.\u00a0 The omission of data points that don\u2019t support the conclusions is another method.\u00a0 It is always possible to come up with an argument that supports changing of results, but is that proper?<\/p>\n
The National Institutes of Health Clinical Center Department of Bioethics has a brochure [Ref.2], which has 7 key steps for ethical development of research.\u00a0 Two of these are Scientific Validity and Independent Review.\u00a0 The impact on society is a key consideration for the overall research.\u00a0 Medical research is directed at saving lives and improving the quality of life for impacted people.\u00a0 Consider the following situations:<\/p>\n
Professor Brian Wansink of Cornel University was considered a leading researcher in eating behavior.\u00a0 He resigned earlier this year due to findings that he misreported research data, employed problematic statistical techniques, did not properly document and retain research results.\u00a0 The main contention of his statistical work was that he employed one technique (p-hacking) that involves running statistical analyses until statistically significant results are obtained and the other (HARKing) is hypothesizing after the results are known. [Ref. 3]<\/p>\n
The head line reads: \u201cHarvard Call for Retraction of Dozens of Studies by Noted Cardiac Researcher.\u201d [Ref.. 4] \u00a0Dr. Piero Anversa published results suggesting that damaged heart muscle could be regenerated with stem cells.\u00a0 Although his work could not be replicated by independent researchers. There were numerous awards for clinical trials.\u00a0 The questioning of his work resulted in more than 30 published papers that were in question.\u00a0 The result was that an entire field of study developed by Dr. Anversa is called into question.\u00a0 His institution, Brigham and Women\u2019s Hospital – A Harvard medical School paid #10 million for research fraud. [Ref. 5]<\/p>\n
Duke University had a researcher in the lab of a prominent pulmonary scientist arrested on charges of embezzlement.\u00a0 [Ref. 6]\u00a0 The investigation turned up some unusual things.\u00a0 The end result was the 15 or the scientist\u2019s papers were redacted.\u00a0 It was claimed that the research in these papers had enabled Duke University to obtain over $200 million in grants.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, these are not isolated cases.\u00a0 The onlineuniversities web site provides more details of the \u201c10 Greatest Case of Fraud in university Research.\u201d [Ref. 7]\u00a0 It is worth a quick skim to see the areas of research and the impact on people.\u00a0 Remember these sentences in the second paragraph?\u00a0 The impact on society is a key consideration for the overall research.\u00a0 Medical research is directed at saving lives and improving the quality of life for impacted people.<\/em><\/p>\n Other areas of scientific research are not immune from \u201cinteresting\u201d shenanigans.\u00a0 A recent article in the Washington Post [Ref. 8] contains a claim by a scientist that the oceanographic study recently released contains errors that increased the possibility of the project results.\u00a0 The response was that the scientists were work quickly to create the report and may have included inadvertent mistakes.\u00a0 Understandable.\u00a0 However, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has refused to provide the research data, notes, etc., to Congress.\u00a0 [Ref. 9] As a federal agency, NOAA receives its budget from Congress and Congress has oversight responsibility.<\/p>\n The last reference has a number of interesting observations. [Ref, 10]\u00a0 A key point is that developing crises results in the need to investigate and understand the cause and impact of the developing crises.\u00a0 There is a reference from Al Gore\u2019s book quoting Upton Sinclair.\u00a0 It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.\u201d<\/p>\n If we can\u2019t believe that scientific research is driven by facts, hypothesis development and testing, and then valid conclusion based on reproducible experiments, how can we trust the actions presented as needed by the results?<\/p>\n References:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A portion of this topic was covered in the April 2018 blog, but enough additional material has surfaced that this information needs to be covered again.\u00a0 The reproducibility [..]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc-ramblings","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nano-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nano-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nano-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nano-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nano-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=315"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.nano-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":316,"href":"http:\/\/www.nano-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315\/revisions\/316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nano-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nano-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nano-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n