Six top Alzheimer's researchers accused of fraud

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Committee_on_Int...

Personally, I dislike idea, as competition can be a powerful motivator in science. I think three things would go a long way to improving the current situation: (1) more rigorous peer review, perhaps even paid reviews or something like bug bounties, to incentivise scrutiny; (2) the normalisation of replication; and (3) publication of negative results, so the community can quicky identify if something is not replicating.

Even in underpaid positions competition is fierce and personal ambition sky high. Better fraud prevention systems is likely a better way.

I like the idea. But how is this possible? Pretty much everyone is driven by ego.

Ego dissolution is not easy. And once dissolved substantially most people might not probably care enough to spend their lives in laboratory/university for a future breakthrough instead of enjoying here and now.

So ego is a requirement to engage in this kind of work.

It doesn't work. The understanding of human nature that leads to these suggestions is just incorrect. Profit isn't a bad thing, it's actually the only way to keep people on the straight and narrow.

The motivation for scientific fraud is to extract money out of someone (and secondarily, social status). Science in aid of customer happiness is inherently difficult terrain in which to do fraud because customers don't care why your product works, only that it does, and if you sell them something that doesn't work there are lots of laws on the book that let governments or customers go after you legally.

But academic fraud is deployed against people who care more about how science-y your method sounds than whether it works. Scientists get away with it exactly because they don't promise to deliver anything, so nobody can really claim to have been damaged when they don't deliver.

What kind of people are the softest targets for such fraud? Government bureaucrats, who are tasked to spend tax money so the government can tell voters they're supporting science. What they spend the money on hardly matters. And philanthropic foundations, who are tasked to spend rich guy money so their founder can tell dinner party guests they're a good guy who is funding Alzheimer's research. These two groups of people simply don't care if the research they fund is fraudulent, as can be witnessed by the fact that after a decade+ of these stories the standard outcome is "they are still working in a lab and still publishing papers", whereas people like Elizabeth Holmes are sitting in uniform in a prison camp. The difference: profit driven commerce vs virtue-signaling driven philanthropy.

It's like that top to bottom, from the shittiest uni to the most prestigious institute it's all a big game of thrones, absolutely rotten to the core with a few exceptions here and there.

Centralization like this just makes the matter worse in a larger scale.

Who gets to be on this board? Who gets to decide who gets to be on this board? Being on a board like this which decides all global science funding would be pretty prestigious and likely would be lobbied heavily and come with all kinds of perks. People who are driven by money and personal ego would likely do a lot to be on these boards. Maybe even things that aren't in the best interest for science but will none-the-less put them in a better position to be selected. Who is selecting for these boards again and how?

I have read also PR by a university that claimed about breakthrough because one guy in a phase III clinical trial have reacted extremely well to the drug. The trial was globally a success, but no other of the ~400 patients reacted so well, for most of them the disease progression was more or less stopped but not cured.

In 2023 alone, more than 17,000 papers were published on Alzheimer's disease. The immense majority of these publications are about (complex) factoids that are useless to humanity. Yet their university will claim that each of them is a breakthrough. Most authors will publish only one paper on this subject and jump to an unrelated subject in the next paper.

A shred of evidence is the ratio of proposed drugs by academics and the drugs that can enter a phase III clinical trial as they have shown some efficacy. It's something like 1000 to 1.

The largest problem for leaders is how to organize research. There is a consensus that goals-oriented research is not the most efficient way to achieve great results. Instead, we have a free market and a star system. Most academics are free to work on whatever they want.

I can't think of a solution out of those two obviously broken policies.

This doesn’t feel much different than pretending to be a charity funding Alzheimer’s research and just taking the money to buy cocaine. In fact it’s probably worse because it distracted the people doing real work.