Star botanist likely made up data about nutritional supplements, new probe finds
science.org
science.org
What I find puzzling about this kind of stories is that the pattern of behavior is usually obvious to all who know the person. Yet, it'll take years before they're found out. We all know people like Newmaster. They may not be scientists, but we recognize the more than usual tendency to exaggerate their accomplishments, the padding of the truth, the selective amnesia about giving credits where it's due. Even if you're just getting to know them, hang around just for a bit and you'll see it, even about meaningless stuff. It's what they do. And if you see it even just once with someone, it should be enough to raise your bs alarms about anything they say.
Our entire society deifies charismatic phonies. They are the ones that get elevated to the highest positions in politics and the C-level business suite. They're always the heroic Main Character. They build up cult followings. They often look so good, speak so smoothly and have those irresistible Ivy League mannerisms. You're supposed to like them and help elevate them even higher.
Do you want to expose this person? The Main Character? You better be right, and you better be ready to have the full force of his charm, persuasion, and cult following at your throat forever.
I’ve met some incredibly unlikeable fraudsters. The bottom line is pursuing them would mean giving up months of my life in a tedious process. In many cases, the fraud seems stupid enough that it’s not okay, but just not worth sacrificing life time over.
I have fled a renowned institute for this reason. You are probably going to sacrifice your career over it either way, because if you're not hopping on their gravy train...
The review process is completely broken because it gives the reviewers no actual ability to change anything so 99% of the time it's just a rubber stamp.
What’s the solution? I actually don’t have a great grasp of how it all works right now. Is there a field-specific board that determines how reviews are done? Is there a feedback loop?
Yep, ready to alienate 30-50% of your friends, even though you were 'right'.
Do this enough times and you only have a few percentage left. "These are your true friends". There is no correlation. I watched someone rage over chapstick usage, they were right, but it looked like a silly debate.
I like the Stoics and those of virtue that sacrifice themselves for everyone else. Its genuinely appreciated if I can take a 30,000 ft high view. Best of luck doing it when humans live on the ground.
If your friend is a fraud, that's a separate problem.
I'm not concerned with alienating fraudsters, though the people on their gravy train aren't as easily dismissed. The cost is in collecting the evidence, putting it in the right places, following up, and then continuing to be helpful as someone in a position of authority connects the dots and prepares their response.
Or put in another way: the first person in a group to get agitated about something has to spend a lot of effort justifying their agitation to the group, because by default, the group won't support or even stay neutral - they'll get weirded out, and/or even shun the agitated person.
That is not nonsense — you are doing yourself a huge disservice here by ignoring ideas categorically on ideological grounds.
A lot of people, I'd say most, desperately want friends and will take quantity over quality anytime. Beggars can't be choosers? It works till it doesn't, and life brings SHTF situations from time to time. You can do serious compromises just to keep them, but I wouldn't call that a proper friendship. Freedom of mind and action that certainly isn't.
I'd take 1-2 good friends with similar life views over an army of acquaintances anytime. But that's me. Its extremely hard to find them, most of childhood friends don't qualify since we end up very different and sometimes incompatible people. And nobody is perfect, neither me nor you, so its good to keep it just a bit humble within all that.
IMO the witch hunt is a feature.
If you are dealing with sociopaths of this degree, and institutional tolerance of them, you should have VERY ACTIVE plans to divorce yourself from the situation.
Witch hunts frequently only bring the malfeasance to light and accentuate the magnitude of the problem to the social network associated with the sociopath.
Sociopaths and sociopathic organizations function either on outright control and fear, or lies and misplaced trust. Paranoia is the weapon against both of those, and especially places extensive stress on the sociopath who is working mightily to maintain the web of lies.
It’s the classic “if you’re attractive you’re not creepy, otherwise you’re creepy” where attractive is wholly subjective. The GP is right.
I don't follow. Someone can "attack" me verbally, but not "hurt" me in any way because I know their attack is false.
Your stance feels like saying a crime only exists if the criminal was successful. Attempted attacks are still attacks even if they aren't successful in hurting someone.
==An “attack” could potentially be looked at as constructive criticism, then by some witchcraft, it is no longer an attack.==
Different people can interpret the same event differently. We see this in politics all the time. When called out, they say "I was just joking."
There's a difference between somebody bullshitting at a party and doing so in a professional setting.
I've seen several baffling instances of universities taking years to investigate obvious things and then in the end effectively doing nothing. Like really clear falsification situations that should just get several people fired and other people sanctioned for not noticing.
https://www.science.org/content/article/researchers-plan-ret...
Like here, there's people there who should just be booted from the university. It took two years for anybody to even retract the paper. The professor in question had several black marks for what I'd call fraud, and yet still hold a position at the University of Minnesota. Which at this point isn't the researcher's fault but the university's.
It is, but I would say the people in the former basket, are also likely to be found in the second basket.
Many do, but not most. At least not at the parties I attend. And in my experience, it is a strong indicator. Some might manage, to vent out everything BS at parties, but for most their general attitude about appreciation for truth will show in a private setting just as it will show in a professional one. In the professional setting people just care more about hiding that BS.
I don’t know about “everybody”. It depends on your circle I guess. I know very few of these people and none of my friends are like that. I don’t give a shit about being interesting and nobody I value does either.
This is often by design by the fraudster, if one can compromise enough their own governing body, the people in there will need to protect the fraudster out of self preservation.
It's not the charisma that's a problem, it's the zealotry, usually driven by uninformed press looking for the right "type" of story.
> They build up cult followings
Which came first? The cult or the charlatan?
> Do you want to expose this person?
Which, in my estimation, is why people usually fail at the task. Your goal isn't to denigrate the other person for being a liar, your goal is to ensure that people can see the truth regardless of their lies. And the very last thing you want to do is engage of lies of your own to pursue the former goal.
I think it's typically a faux-pas to call out someone's bullshit/faults/shortcomings in mixed company in most situations. It's also not very likely to result in anything constructive or make you look good. Sometimes the truth just needs to be said, but generally you're better off telling people that truth in private or (when it really matters) raising concerns with someone who can do something about it.
Calling someone out in public is high risk with little benefit. Rolling your eyes, biting your tongue, and letting someone dig themselves into a deeper hole is usually a smarter move.
Advertise publicly how huge of a fraud this charismatic phony is.
Look towards the deep south in the early 1900s for how many charismatic phonies (as well as unfortunately many innocents) were treated: lynch mobs, property destruction, exile on fear of permanent injury or death.
It's a worthy model.
An example was when I was a phd student and He came to us to discuss what we were doing. I told him that I was doing simulations and neutral networks in physics (mid 90s'). He laughed and said that this is for the weaker/dumber ones, the ones who can't do theory. To which I said that indeed, this requires to be actually intelligent, not just pretend like the ones who do <his topic>. I looked him in the eyes with a "wanna go that road, pal?" kind of eyes.
Long story short, my phd defense was done when he was on vacation :)
I never considered that a new social phenomena would emerge from a BDSM blog.
1. They were charismatic, charming, and likable. Fun to be around. But they also had an angry/mean side that started to come out when things weren't going their way. People around them were trained to do things that brought out the fun side and avoid things that brought out the mean side.
2. They built their circle out of people who were impressionable and had a lot to gain by being part of the circle: Early career people, people desperate to climb the ladder, and people who wanted a lot of praise. There was an implicit understanding that as long as you didn't rock the boat, you just had to put up with everything for a couple years before pivoting to your dream position. If you exposed the person, your own resume might look questionable, so you had to go along with it.
3. Anyone who actually questioned them was marked for destruction. They would do everything in their power to discredit you, undermine your work, interfere with things you were doing, argue against promotions, and otherwise bring your career to a halt. It was all done out in the open, as a warning shot to anyone else who questioned it. People notice.
For a famous example, look into the Lance Armstrong story. He didn't just cheat, he tried to destroy the lives of anyone who might get in his way. He's a charismatic celebrity, so to this day he continues to whitewash his history by being nice and likable. Even after everything that has been revealed and admitted, people will still jump to his defense by substituting a lesser narrative and defending that. The common defense is "Yeah, well, everyone in cycling does doping!" even though doping is one of the least concerning things Lance Armstrong did.
Another upsetting factor is that people develop parasocial relationships with these grifters and will go to great lengths to dismiss or downplay their problems. Look at the recent issues with Andrew Huberman for a good example. Not only has his grasp of science been called into question on many topics, but his personal life has been exposed as being quite different than the ultra-righteous fatherly figure that he plays on his podcast. Yet despite this, people who love his podcast will rush to his defense and try to downplay the problems. Like the above story, people try to downplay the revelations about his personal life as if he made a mistake and "cheated on his girlfriend", when the actual allegations are more far-reaching and establish a chronic pattern of dishonesty.
Ironically some of the best to directly work with have been famous assholes or completely obscure.
Really, we should look down on adoring people too much. It’s one thing to respect and admire accomplishments of other, and another to become a sycophant.
The one I lionize that I suspect is legit is Jeff Dean, partly because he has had that same colleague over the years (Sanjay Ghemawat), but he has also made what can be argued to be mistakes (the hashing in leveldb) which are in areas that probably have no objective right answer. I am intensely suspicious of those that have apparently perfect track records.
Working to out them requires work and yields an outcome that's going to be somewhere between neutral to highly negative for you. Because it's entirely possible you'll fail, and now you have a "star botanist" with 0 values, who's likely out to get you. Note the article mentions that he had already been investigated following whistleblowing by no less than 8 peers in ~2021. A probe of his activities revealed "insufficient evidence" of misdeeds.
It's very easy to fabricate data but extremely difficult to prove with all sorts of means of plausible deniability ranging from randomness to human error during experimentation.
It seems about right.
Because the system is working according to plan.
Academy takes at least 30% of each grant that this people can suck from private investors or government.
Scammers have the talent to bring grants efficiently, because they just can fake the work or appropriate others work, and sell brilliant results that never happened. Universities are extremely pleased to have this people in their teams, as long as they keep bringing money and prestige. Politicians love them also, because everybody likes to be in the winner's photo.
If problems arise, they will just act shocked. Detach themselves from the scam, and apart of a small scandal that will last for a week, this is all the negative consequences for them. A real bargain. Academy has plenty of new people to select and find several replacements that fit in the new zeitgeist and keep bringing grants.
This money is also a life-saving for young researchers under the umbrella of the big charismatic boss, that just use them and lie about their own merits. Is either accepting the crumbs so they can keep a career while wait for their day, or going home.
Far from being looked down on they were promoted over and over again and praised for their high output regardless of how pointless and meaningless the actual papers were.
It's not exactly easy either to take it upon yourself to be the "usurper" (for lack of a better word).
> Their influential paper in BMC Medicine, and subsequent work based on Newmaster’s approach, found that many supplements lacked ingredients listed on their labels and that toxic contaminants tainted others. Some stores pulled products from their shelves, and several major supplement companies embraced Newmaster’s work, paying large sums for quality testing by companies Newmaster established just prior to the publication of the paper.
Damn, this guy didn't just defraud for the citations or clout or speaking or even consulting fees; he used it to kickstart his own business empire.
> Thompson, now a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, sparked the initial inquiry. As an undergraduate, he and Newmaster co-authored a 2014 paper on forest plant diversity, published in Biodiversity and Conservation. Years later, while completing his Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Thompson began to suspect that Newmaster had repurposed data from a different study by another student. He asked that the paper be retracted, and the journal did so in 2021.
And the guy who exposed him wasn't a spectator or a spurned rival, but an untenured academic who opted to torch one of his own early and well-cited papers on principle.
To make 1kg of a common type of gingko extract, you take 20kg of dry plant matter, grind it all to a very fine powder, extract it in a boiling solvent (often hexane or methanol), filter it under pressure, boil off as much of the solvent as you can, and then you spray-dry or freeze-dry it.
This process would leave essentially no intact DNA.
I think that the "DNA barcoding" notion was formulated by somebody who didn't understand how extracts are made, and the media just ran with it.
What's funny is that rice flour is used as a common filler ingredient in supplements. Imagine barcoding a gingko product and getting "100% Rice" in your DNA report. And yet that would have been possible with even the most scrupulously honest products.
Also, it doesn't seem that his errors are any validation of the supplements industry
"Their influential paper in BMC Medicine, and subsequent work based on Newmaster’s approach, found that many supplements lacked ingredients listed on their labels and that toxic contaminants tainted others. Some stores pulled products from their shelves, and several major supplement companies embraced Newmaster’s work, paying large sums for quality testing by companies Newmaster established just prior to the publication of the paper. "
So, he basically generated demand for testing through his own companies. I mean, if this guy was selling cleaning products, tires, or perfume, all's fair in love and war. I think the trick is his academic appointment. If a PhD material scientist or chemist at a university said what the average tire or perfume commercial says, she'd probably find an academic investigation coming down on her head too.
The scientists who worked for the tobacco industry so they could convince the public that smoking was harmless didn't become unemployable. They worked for the oil industry to convince people that climate change wasn't real, and are working to convince the government that food additives are harmless. If you're willing to take money to deliver research for a company that wants to hurt people you'll never be out of work.
If this guy had hired someone else to create fake science to drive traffic to his testing centers he'd probably be free and clear.
The typical scenario right now is that you get access to raw data, often through an application, that can take months and requires having an ethics committee to oversee your work. So, unless you are at an academic institution, you can't get access to any raw data that contains personal information. Raw data will be often poorly annotated and you will need to spend weeks to figure things out, and sometimes significant computing resources to preprocess it. Then, good luck running some badly coded scripts to get the results reported in the article.
Studies should provide preprocessed data that has been anonymized and can be freely shared, one-click reproducible results from preprocessed data, well-annotated raw data, and simpler procedures to get access to raw data. For example, a tarball with code, preprocessed data, and a makefile to turn preprocessed data into results reported in the article. Bonus points if dependencies are reproducible, with e.g. a Nix flake.
I think even this part is unlikely? My dad was a statistician involved in research and he didn't provide copies of his SAS programs/scripts to authors.
I believe the papers would list what tests he performed but there'd be no easy to way to reproduce the exact script for tests (and certainly no easy way to reproduce exact charts/graphs/maps).
But there are zero checks made, code is very often incomplete, full of local paths specific to the HPC where things were run in, etc.
Some stores pulled products from their shelves, and several major supplement companies embraced Newmaster’s work, paying large sums for quality testing by companies Newmaster established just prior to the publication of the paper.
They cost society billions if not trillions of dollars in follow up research, industry investments and consumers spendings. Some of them cost lives. Some thousands if not much more.
I'm leaning towards this solution concerning all breaches of pubic trust (e.g., Boeing, Sacklers, etc)
A more fitting punishment is firing and blacklisting from future research posts.
Obstruction of justice is a crime too.
And I'd argue that if they're willing to protect someone faking research they're no better and should follow them in jail.
The thing that is killing me is that the "good science" done by "good scientists" is increasingly being found to be bunk science done by people who have incentives misaligned with their actual studies. I'm rapidly losing faith in the reliability of published studies and their authors because more and more "good" work is being debunked.
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In a 2012 paper, C. Glenn Begley, a biotech consultant working at Amgen, and Lee Ellis, a medical researcher at the University of Texas, found that only 11% of 53 pre-clinical cancer studies had replications that could confirm conclusions from the original studies.[79] In late 2021, The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology examined 53 top papers about cancer published between 2010 and 2012 and showed that among studies that provided sufficient information to be redone, the effect sizes were 85% smaller on average than the original findings.
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One of the most interesting things in modern times is that China now has a higher life expectancy than the US, yet working conditions can be difficult, Traditional Chinese Medicine is still widely practiced, there is extremely widespread poverty, and access to modern healthcare is relatively limited. I'm certainly not appealing to that traditional medicine, homeopathy or anything of the like. Rather I'm appealing to some sort of nihilism - that I think we know far less than we think we do.
SSRIs would be the best example of this - as the actual experimental evidence for their efficacy leaves them comparable to placebos, yet people treat them as the bleeding edge of treatment for the plethora of disorders they're proscribed for, to say nothing of their tremendous side effects. When we look back in time at all the stupid things people did, we often forget that those things were also seen as the bleeding edge of expert treatment at the time. No less than JFK's sister [2] was lobotomized as was the latest treatment for psychological issues at the time, with the result one could expect. And that was scarcely ~80 years ago. It seems quite arrogant to imagine people 80 years from now will not be looking back at us with similar bemusement.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_medicine
My narrative detector is going off.
The guy found that most supplements didn't actually have real ingredients, which is incredibly believable. The guy is now being discredited. Does this mean Supplements were fine all along? Somehow I doubt this! Sketchy people on both sides--why are so many industries like this? Supplements are an obvious one but have you tried buying a mattress/adjustable bed recently?
Possibly his intent was to discredit some supplements in order to boost others?
Sounds legit to me. I think this is more likely explanation due to Occams razor.
You can be on the fench about the efficacy of supplements without supporting a fraudster.
One side has a whole slate of respected a scientists in the field call the research papers BS. The other side has a single scientist who hid his conflicts of interests and has a well established pattern of lies.