11/22/23, 11:18 AM There is a scientific fraud epidemic — and we are ignoring the cure

Opinion Science
There is a scientific fraud epidemic — and we are ignoring the cure
Rooting out manipulation should not depend on dedicated amateurs who take personal legal risks
for the greater good

ANJANA AHUJA

© Andy Carter

Anjana Ahuja 6 HOURS AGO

The writer is a science commentator

The dossier was so unsettling, one neurologist revealed, that he couldn’t sleep after reading it.
It contained allegations that an experimental drug meant to curb damage from stroke — and
eyed up for regulatory fast-tracking for fulfilling an unmet medical need — might instead have
raised the risk of death among patients receiving it.

The dossier, assembled by whistleblowers and obtained by an investigative journalist, was

recently submitted to the US National Institutes of Health, which is finalising a $30mn clinical
trial into the medicine. The whistleblowers allege that the star neuroscientist driving the
research, Berislav Zlokovic from the University of Southern California, pressured colleagues to
alter laboratory notebooks and co-authored papers containing doctored data. The university is
investigating; Zlokovic is, according to his attorney, co-operating with the inquiry and
disputes at least some of the claims.

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11/22/23, 11:18 AM There is a scientific fraud epidemic — and we are ignoring the cure

The facts of this particular case, set out in the journal Science last week, are yet to be
established but research is fast becoming a catalogue of mishaps, malfeasance and
misconduct. Rooting out mistakes and manipulation should not have to depend on
whistleblowers or dedicated amateurs who take personal legal risks for the greater good.
Instead, science should apply some of its famed rigour to professionalising the business of
fraud detection.

Zlokovic is not the only high-profile scientist to have hit the headlines for the wrong reasons.
In June, Francesca Gino, a behavioural scientist at Harvard University, was accused of data
irregularities by three US academics who run the Data Colada blog. Gino, on administrative
leave, is now suing both Harvard and her accusers for defamation. The Data Colada trio have
so far crowdsourced more than $376,000 for a legal defence fund.

As the Oxford university psychologist Dorothy Bishop has written, we only know about the
ones who get caught. In her view, our “relaxed attitude” to the scientific fraud epidemic is a
“disaster-in-waiting”. The microbiologist Elisabeth Bik, a data sleuth who specialises in
spotting suspect images, might argue the disaster is already here: her Patreon-funded work
has resulted in over a thousand retractions and almost as many corrections.

That work has been mostly done in Bik’s spare time, amid hostility and threats of lawsuits.
Instead of this ad hoc vigilantism, Bishop argues, there should be a proper police force, with
an army of scientists specifically trained, perhaps through a masters degree, to protect
research integrity.

It is a fine idea, if publishers and institutions can be persuaded to employ them (Spandidos, a
biomedical publisher, has an in-house anti-fraud team). It could help to scupper the rise of the
“paper mill”, an estimated $1bn industry in which unscrupulous researchers can buy
authorship on fake papers destined for peer-reviewed journals. China plays an outsize role in
this nefarious practice, set up to feed a globally competitive “publish or perish” culture that
rates academics according to how often they are published and cited.

Peer reviewers, mostly unpaid, don’t always spot the scam. And as the sheer volume of science
piles up — an estimated 3.7mn papers from China alone in 2021 — the chances of being
rumbled dwindle. Some researchers have been caught on social media asking to
opportunistically add their names to existing papers, presumably in return for cash.

AI is a godsend to this modern racket. In 2021, a team of researchers tracked the rise of AI-
generated “tortured phrases” in the literature, such as “counterfeit consciousness” in place of
“artificial intelligence”. As language models improve, machine-generated text will no longer be
obvious gibberish. When rotten results and dodgy data sets flood the literature, they become
the flawed building blocks for further analyses — undermining the science yet to come.

Impropriety also ranges wider and deeper than blatant deception. It can be sloppy analysis or
cherry-picked data. It could be the well-meaning conviction of an academic that, if only he can
recruit the right patients and tailor his trials in the right way, he will crack the terrible
problem of dementia. Factor in that medical regulators seem willing to revisit the cost-benefit
trade-off in hard-to-treat conditions, and it becomes an environment in which the artful
presentation of trial outcomes can potentially make or break a billion-dollar drug.
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11/22/23, 11:18 AM There is a scientific fraud epidemic — and we are ignoring the cure

And that, really, is the problem: the lack of due diligence means the rewards for bending or
breaking the scientific rules tend to outweigh the incentives to observe them.

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