In academia the phrase “publish or perish” is often the mantra. What separates PhD graduates being considered for tenure track positions from similar candidates who are merely offered part time adjunct teaching slots is often their record of publications. Once employed by a university the way faculty obtain tenure isn’t necessarily how popular they are with students (although that never hurts). Tenure is often granted on a candidate’s record of research publications. Another factor is research grants, that lead to publishing. Liberal arts colleges may hire professors mainly for teaching students, but those positions don’t come with the pay and prestige that research universities offer. Thus, it should come as no surprise that scholars will sometimes do almost anything to publish research papers to advance their careers. Sometimes that includes faking the results to make a failed experiment appear groundbreaking to journal editors.
Publishing one’s findings from research allows others to test the theories and build on them in future research. This collaborative approach often roots out bogus findings, but sometimes safeguards fail, and researchers are led down the wrong path.
Four years ago, a landmark study published in the journal Nature was later called into question. The findings were that cancers of all types have unique microbiological signatures or traces of bacteria or viruses that could be tested with a single drop of blood. Imagine a blood test that could discover you have cancer months, possibly years before it could be found on an x-ray.
The discovery captured the attention of the scientific community, as well as investors.A prestigious journal published the research. More than 600 papers cited the study. At least a dozen groups based new work on its data. And the microbiologists behind the claim launched a startup to capitalize on their findings.But independent researchers had begun raising alarms.One red flag was that some microbes the researchers flagged as components of cancer signatures weren’t known to exist in humans, prompting further scrutiny.
The paper was retracted in June 2024. Numerous other papers that relied on faulty science may have to be retracted as well. At the very least it calls into question the researcher’s validity and contribution to the academic literature.
Salzberg, the computational biologist, and a team analyzed a handful of the cancer types and didn’t find most of the bacteria reported in the Nature study.
The bogus research wasted millions of dollars in investments based on flawed science and wasted years’ worth of scholars’ research efforts.
“It has polluted the literature,” said Steven Salzberg, a computational biologist at Johns Hopkins University, whose critique, written with other colleagues in the field, led to the study’s retraction.
Earlier this year it was discovered a research scientist used fraudulent data to obtain a $16 million research grant. The bogus data was being used to underpin a new drug in stage III clinical trials. New drugs cost more than a billion dollars to bring to market, meaning this drug company wasted a lot of money. If the drug had been brought to market, taxpayers would have wasted billions every year on a drug that was not helping patients. Worse yet, cancer patients would have wasted precious time while taking ineffective therapies.
Several years ago, it came to light that a landmark 2006 Alzheimer’s study contained doctored graphics in a journal article. The study and others published by the same authors were responsible for a shift in Alzheimer’s research towards drugs and therapies to reduce plaque called amyloid beta. The paper promoted interest in the theory that removing plaque from the brains of Alzheimer’s patients was the key to slowing the disease. Although there have been drugs developed based on that theory, nothing has been shown to significantly reduce Alzheimer’s symptoms. Nobody knows for sure whether the paper has led researchers down the wrong path for 18 years. Researchers are hopeful that the controversy has not resulted in two decades of wasted research efforts.
Science: Blots on a field?