Worker’s compensation medical care in California is based upon “evidence based medicine” or EBM. This is an approach to medical practice intended to optimize decision-making by emphasizing the use of evidence from well designed and conducted research. EBM is regarded as the gold standard of clinical practice.
But, scientific integrity took another hit last month when an Australian researcher received a two-year suspended sentence after pleading guilty to 17 fraud-related charges. According to the story in the Washington Post, the main counts against neuroscientist Bruce Murdoch were for an article heralding a breakthrough in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. And the judge’s conclusions were damning. There was no evidence, she declared, that Murdoch had even conducted the clinical trial on which his supposed findings were based. Plus, Murdoch forged consent forms for study participants, one of whom was dead at the time the alleged took place. Plus, Murdoch fraudulently accepted public and private research money for the bogus study, published in 2011 in the highly reputable European Journal of Neurology.
While criminal cases against scientists are rare, they are increasing. Jail time is even rarer, but not unheard of. Last July, Dong-Pyou Han, a former biomedical scientist at Iowa State University, pleaded guilty to two felony charges of making false statements to obtain NIH research grants and was sentenced to more than four years in prison. Han admitted to falsifying the results of several vaccine experiments, in some cases spiking blood samples from rabbits with human HIV antibodies so that the animals appeared to develop an immunity to the virus.
In 2006, Eric Poehlman, an expert on aging and obesity at the University of Vermont, became the first American scientist sentenced to jail for research misconduct not involving fatalities. He received a one-year plus one-day prison term for fraudulent obesity research that, stunningly, spanned a decade.
Four years later, Scott Reuben, a prominent Massachusetts anesthesiologist and researcher, was found to have faked data in at least 21 studies. Several of them touted positive results from popular painkiller medications. Reuben received six months in prison.
Between 2004 and 2005, Professor Hwang Woo-Suk, a highly regarded, highly funded South Korean researcher at Seoul National University, achieved international fame for his work on embryonic stem cells His reputation quickly unraveled and his research activities were halted when his success in somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) became mired in scandal, particularly when it emerged that many of his data on SCNT were fabricated.
The blog Retraction Watch, run by the Center for Scientific Integrity, does keep an unofficial list of the worst offenders. Of the top-30 — 28 of them are male — by far the most retractions belong to Yoshitaka Fujii, with a mind-blowing 183. An anesthesiologist, formerly of Toho University in Tokyo, Fujii’s fraudulent research on responses to drugs after surgery, spanned 20 years.
And then there is the problem of the “replication crisis” in science. Reproducibility is the ability of an entire experiment or study to be duplicated, either by the same researcher or by someone else working independently. Reproducing an experiment is called replicating it. Reproducibility is one of the main principles of the scientific method.
A recent article in the Economist pointed out that “a rule of thumb among biotechnology venture-capitalists is that half of published research cannot be replicated. Even that may be optimistic. Last year researchers at one biotech firm, Amgen, found they could reproduce just six of 53 “landmark” studies in cancer research. Earlier, a group at Bayer, a drug company, managed to repeat just a quarter of 67 similarly important papers.”
Failures to prove a hypothesis are rarely even offered for publication, let alone accepted. “Negative results” now account for only 14% of published papers, down from 30% in 1990. Yet knowing what is false is as important to science as knowing what is true.