80% of current drug applications in China failed to meet analysis requirements
sciencealert.com
sciencealert.com
I spent a good part of a year trying and failing to replicate an English study, and looking around for materials referenced in another study that simply don't exist, finally being told by the principal on that study that they mischaracterized the materials in the paper. Sometimes when you get the results you are hoping for, you publish, and you don't care if they were wrong, right?
Perhaps it would be better if scientists generally took a more skeptical view of others' publications and tried to replicate them in house. At conferences, instead of asking, "Where do we go from here", with the first study, ask, "What do I need to do to replicate this?"
For example, if you do a real literature review on a medical topic (not just credulously take their word for it) you are almost sure to find that one of the primary assumptions/claims was actually never studied. One paper refs a second which refs a third that speculated about it in the introduction, but now "everyone knows it".
My question is that what is the cause of this general fraudulent behaviour? Does it have some historical roots? Does it come from lack of actual functioning oversight?
Another anecdotal case: try asking for directions in China. Even when person does not know the correct directions, they do not mind to direct you, and when confronted, they refuse to admit that they do not know. Is this mindset result of constant fear of repressions, or it runs deeper into the history of the society (say it is also present in Taiwan?).
I am not accusing anybody in anything, I just would like to understand.
So the problem is we reward so-called scientist too much (in terms of money or status). Scientists were historically not rewarded by money or status. In fact I don't think there is traditionally a career of science. People then were doing science on the side of their regular jobs (such as engineers or teachers or nobles who don't really need a job). Only when the reward of doing science is detached (to certain degree) from the reward of money and fame, can we truly prevent the fraudulent behavior.
On the other hand, the allure of money and fame probably can never be truly detached for any normal human, so fraudulent behavior is part of the human nature. It ebbs and flows. There is no need to make a big fuss about it.
PS: from what I heard, China today has so much (relative to its capacity) science money floating around and that got to distort the goal of science significantly.
The problem is the imbalance- a postdoc really really wants to get tenure someday, because the only alternative is for his career to peter out and to end up working ignominiously in industry (as a second-rate software engineer, most likely.) And the number of tenure positions that could possibly be available is an order of magnitude fewer than the number of smart people competing for them. So he'll possibly "cut corners" to get there, despite the devotion to his field that made him choose that career and not something reasonable, like finance or software engineering. Academia is tenure or bust- there's no stable middle option.
There is a correction under way as people start to realize that academia is no longer a feasible career path, in the same way that the NFL isn't. So I'm hopeful that things will stabilize in regards to scientific integrity regardless- but, then we'll have to figure out who is going to do the science when we can't rely on an army of poorly paid geniuses.
The current science career is more of an engineering career, where people have clear goals with constant feasibility assessment and motivated and encouraged to seek short cuts.
So I am not saying we are paying scientists too much. I am saying scientists don't need to be paid, only need to be sustained. Not a many people would be happy for a career that is merely sustained, but not many people are truly born to be a scientist -- think about Einstein being happy at a patent office.
EDIT:
So I agree that look at the way today we do science, it is of concern. However, I think that is largely a mislabeling. Today's science career is more of a engineering practice; and look at the way we do engineering, we are doing fine today. Some place some people build a shoddy bridge, it is something of gossip, but not much of concern.
Think about it: science is not supposed to produce a product (medicine in this context) but it is supposed to answer some questions (not given by the society but of one's own). To answer a demand or solve a question (with a belief it can be answered), that is engineering.
Of course, engineering is important. And there is nothing wrong for a few people pursuing science on the side while doing their engineer jobs.
When we say science progress is built on top of giant's shoulder, that giant don't have to be and often is not just other/previous scientists. Engineering, culture, or even witch crafting all have contributed to science.
We need a lot of rank-and-file ordinary-human doing their ordinary works out of ordinary motivations, they will provide the basis necessary for the a few true scientists to question the known and explore the unknown.
Chinese nationals were in the top 2 of both measures of dishonesty (which didn't correlate all that well in general, so I'm not sure "honesty" is all that easy to measure), while British nationals were in the bottom 2 of both. One of the correlations they found was that rates of honesty were correlated with rates of Protestant Christianity.
It's also interesting that in situations like the Wells Fargo scandal, honesty didn't even matter. If you were honest, you were simply fired.
If you don't know something and you show your ignorance in this way, then you lose face massively.
If they are involved in this (you ask them for directions) then you are tainting them with your lack of face.
They are hideously embarrassed and will tell you anything to make you go away.
Sounds more like a drop shipper reselling stuff from Aliexpress or similar, not necessarily anything to do with a Chinese seller. They add a hefty markup and ship directly to you. It's particularly popular with counterfeits ("replicas").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Asia
The source cited is Radio Free Asia not the report itself. Radio Free Asia does not link to any additional sources.
That is not to say that the story is inaccurate, but rather that the claims are not well substantiated and that the source is not apolitical.
Of course you should be cautious with what they publish, but this applies to every published information.
data gathered during clinical trials were incomplete, failed to meet analysis requirements or were untraceable, the paper cited a source in the agency as saying.
Outside of China, clinical data is often not shared, suppressed when it does not support the claims, and p-value hacking is used to justify 'off-label' use. This is not usually spun as fabricated, and in commercial drug development my intuition is that 80% of proposed drugs having at least one of these features would be a plausible hypothesis
Isn't it because the turn everything into profit within two years "success or nothing" attitude?
If something ruins the world, it will be two countries that under the surface is way too similar to each other.
That seems to be backward. Doesn't "losing face" come from being caught doing the wrong thing or being dishonest, so that the incentive to fabricate data for something as important as scientific research should be very, very low?
On July 5, an independent investigative commission established by the Japanese Diet issued its final report on the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. Hailed as the definitive word on the subject thus far, the report points to what it calls the "fundamental causes" of the disaster, all of them cultural. The chairman's message in the report assails "the ingrained conventions of Japanese culture: our reflexive obedience; our reluctance to question authority; our devotion to 'sticking with the program'; our groupism; and our insularity." The nuclear disaster, in short, was "a disaster 'Made in Japan.'" News media around the world characterized the report's damning indictment of Japanese culture as unusually candid for the nation known to do anything to save face.[http://thebulletin.org/japan%E2%80%99s-culture-culprit-nucle...]
If this is true about Chinese clinical data? More generally, if there is any simple tag that covers fraud at this scale? Other people working under that tag will experience deleterious effects for years to come.
The only way I see out of this is a rigorous, self-imposed body of standards. Even then I'm not sure that this will be sufficient.
Think of all those people, all of that money, all of the hundreds of thousands of hours of research. For nothing. Actually, it's worse than nothing because it's been flooding the system with fake data.
A couple of years ago, as this story started to break, I would mention it to scientist friends. "Don't worry," they'd say, "We always have the meta analysis to fall back on."
I don't hear that anymore.
ADD: A critical issue here, which you touch on tangentially, is the mix of motivation and milieu. If I'm making stuff up -- bad data -- other people can identify it and delete it. But if my goal is to appear to be doing good science instead of actually doing it, then it can become extremely problematic both to identify and remedy what I've done.
A lot of "normal" science is done around the margins, with not-so-incredible hypotheses and pedestrian-looking data. Bad science with really poor data fits seamlessly into that model without having any distinguishing characteristics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem#First_C...
I wonder if the huge %age is due to a lot of low-quality applications mixed in with the serious ones. If the barrier to apply is sufficiently low, you would expect a Sturgeon's law dynamic.
I doubt it. Most clinical trial data in the U.S. is similarly fraudulent, but there isn't really any concept of high-quality vs low-quality applications like you might see with YC or whatever.
Instead, pharma companies tend to rely on the same set of 20 or 30 tricks to take chemical compounds that might be no better than placebos and make them look like wonder drugs. I've been keeping a tally of these tricks on my website: