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I’m a Biologist, years ago our lab got federal funding to research glyphosates potential as a neurotoxin and its capabilities to be used as a weapon. The DoD was concerned enough about this chemical that they poured the most funding I’ve ever seen at my university into a project.
So it should be called “Round Down,” as in it rounds down your IQ?
The damage done.
someone plz ELI5 the topic for me.
Monsanto paid a bunch of scientists to “discover” that Glyphosate, the patented active ingredient in their RoundUp weedkiller is safe for humans, but the article was ghost-written by Monsanto employees without acknowledgement. The article claimed that Glyphosate does not cause cancer, but The World Health Organisation found that it does. Some people have trouble figuring out who is lying between the company making vast profits and the organisation tasked with keeping people healthy across the globe. RoundUp is used a LOT on genetically modified foods made by guess who to be “RoundUp ready” - resistant to RoundUp. These genetically modified foods were also found to be safe initially, but guess who funded that research who are only now, 25 years later, found to be ghost writing the articles instead of letting the scientists do their own work and draw their own conclusions.
A paper was written by a lab that received guidance and likely funding from the company whose product it was researching. Paper was published and despite red flags, it was allowed to influence 1000+ papers before it was finally redacted. Even though a correction has been made, Monsanto was still allowed to befuddle the water for so long.
ELI5: Imagine the class was asked to make a drawing of an apple, but one student that is quick and sneaky, draws an orange. The other students still learning about fruits, copy that students drawing of an orange. The teacher discovers a mistake was made, but by the time things get figured out, its too late, the assignments over and the paintings can’t be undone. All that time spent on oranges.
…and the kid who drew the orange was paid by the…local orange juice cartel, or something…who were making tons of money off of this entire kerfuffle.
Yeah forgot that part lol “and also the kid paid the teacher 14 billion dollars to accept the paintings of an orange as an apple”.
It takes AGES for malfeasance to get consequences. The Wakefield MMR study (responsible for energizing the modern anti vaccination movement), published in 1998, wasn’t retracted until 2010. (He was also stripped of his license to practice medicine and has consistently doubled down since which has paid off dearly, marrying supermodels and being a literal millionaire).
The amyloid plaque hypothesis for Alzheimer’s that was based on falsified data from 2006 wasn’t retracted until 2024. This had thousands of citations, possibly tens of thousands, and the first author continues to defend the data manipulation as overblown. Essentially something like that the underlying experiments were sound, we just edited the images for clarity, there was no intent, all (8!) of my coauthors agreed to the retraction because they’re laaaaame, basically every drug made based on this hypothesis doesn’t work because of some other reason, trust me bro.
It’s very difficult to counter this. It takes serious effort to generate data contrary to the evidence presented. However, funding would help. But additionally this is something where criminal charges would be merited. Wakefield has created a world in which we moved backward for his own financial enrichment. One could argue that the children dead from measles outbreaks are in part his fault. He lost his license, sure, but this is meaningless. He is an antivax icon, he married Elle McPherson, he does podcasts and documentaries, speaking engagements, etc. he is paid far more than many doctors with none of the stress and liability. And it’s fairly clear his original intent was to discourage people from the MMR vaccine to push them towards a product he had a vested financial interest in. The antivax stuff was not his goal but it worked out because he is a sociopathic grifter.
Lesne is different. He is a scientist that is probably pushed to publish at all costs and did so. Perhaps he is honest and his manipulation was simply to improve clarity. If it was not and he was pushing to get an influential paper out then he is guilty of wasting billions in funding and tens of thousands of hours of researcher time as well as countless lives wasted doing clinical trials for treatments that were never worth exploring.
What’s a viable consequence for these people? Life in prison? This is such a huge crime against society. Similarly the Monsanto and Coca Cola ghost writing research, everything involved in tobacco, Purdue and OxyContin addiction, etc. the last one was treated as a civil matter but are these not criminal? Countless lives were destroyed
The amyloid plaque one had 2.500 citations, by the way, and apparently it’s the second most cited paper to be retracted. The most cited retracted paper is Jiang, Y., Jahagirdar, B., Reinhardt, R. et al.: Pluripotency of mesenchymal stem cells derived from adult marrow, which claimed that adult stem cells could become any type of cell.
He is an antivax icon, he married Elle McPherson, he does podcasts and documentaries, speaking engagements, etc. he is paid far more than many doctors with none of the stress and liability.
Similarly the Monsanto and Coca Cola ghost writing research, everything involved in tobacco, Purdue and OxyContin addiction, etc. the last one was treated as a civil matter but are these not criminal? Countless lives were destroyed.
Attention is all you need.
Philosophical questions of liability don’t matter anymore; optics do. Wakefield didn’t just win that game; he blew it away. Monsanto, big tobacco, even Purdue drug their public sentiment battles on long enough not to win, but not to lose.
I mean no offense, but I keep seeing scientists ask “why is all this happening?” on Twitter, as they presumably pass mobs of folks glued to algorithms and influencers gaming them on thier phones, and politicians now emulating thier behavior.
Hence I hate to sound so cynical, but I think your question:
What’s a viable consequence for these people? Life in prison?
Is pointless.
Science and journalism aren’t front-and-center anymore. Frames of reference are intimately manipulated. To quote AOC, “everything feels increasingly like a scam.” And pondering what these massively wealthy entities deserve is a waste of energy until that festering problem is addressed.
Well but what about all the other researchers that didn’t recreate this study?
Basically a big problem in especially medical science is that studies are not redone and retested like in a lot of other stem fields. It’s not only some bad actors it’s a kind of broken system.
Replication as you describe isn’t done in most fields, that’s part of the “serious effort and funding” I mentioned. If I am applying for a grant to do research what do you think gets funded? Novel proposition or rudimentary replication? Funders want to be a part of glory just as much as institutions which is part of the systemic issue here.
There are researchers that aim to replicate but the numbers of them have shrunk across all fields because funders and universities are pushing for novel research.
Aside from this though one does not need to fully replicate a study to disprove it. In both the studies I pointed out people were sounding alarms for years about discrepancies in the data that in wakefields case should not have passed peer review. The lesne paper is more subtle and one could argue it still should’ve been caught in peer review. But in both cases it took ages of people saying “hey hey hey this shit is fucked” and that is the problem. In the case of Wakefield it was more decisive, in the case of lesne it was more insidious (kind of a sunk cost fallacy because the field bought into the hypothesis without verifying so hard)
The thing that always annoys me in this toxic cycle is the insistence on applied research. I’ve seen people across a few different fields run into this problem.
Let’s say that they do some really interesting applied research, where they build on existing basic research to come up with some really cool applications. Yay, science! But this brings them to the boundary of what we know in that area — there’s no more basic research to build upon. What they need to do (and what is very clearly cued up by what they just published) is take this applies research and just do a bunch of structured “fuck around and find out” and see what happens, hopefully producing some additional basic research that they, or other researchers, can then figure out how to apply that in interesting ways.
But noooooooooo. It’s like that meme comic with the dog where it has a frisbee and it says “no take, only throw”. Everything you make has to be useful, or you will struggle to get funding. The area I know most about this is in protein structure stuff, and it drives me mad to see papers complaining about how many potentially druggable targets there could be in the “dark proteome” — the large array of human proteins that we don’t know shit about. Countless papers lamenting how we’re not researching proteins where we’re most likely to find new and useful stuff, but rather we’re just doing more and more research on proteins we already know a heckton about, i.e. “searching in the areas where we have the best light”[1]. But of course people are doing that, when someone who wants to go and search in the dark are expected to produce useful results right away.
The way it’s meant to work is that some people go spelunking in the dark, and they say “hey, I might have found something here”, and that causes other people to head over there to shed light on the area so we can evaluate things better. We need to start somewhere!
[1]: To be clear, I’m not blaming the researchers who write these papers or editorials, because there’s very little that they can do to change it. Hell, writing these papers is likely their attempt to change this unreasonable system of expectations. Unfortunately, the root problem here is how capitalism and our funding model for research leads to toxic cycles such as “publish or perish”.
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Sometimes I feel sad I am incapable of chicanery like this, it sounds like the only path to an affluent life.
I sometimes reflect on how an evil version of me would be so successful. I’m actually rather good at a lot of the capitalism type skills, and especially in recent years, I’ve reflected on how those skills combined with my genuine expertise in machine learning would make me exceptionally good at making bank off of the dumbasses who have wholeheartedly drank the koolaid. I went to a university with a lot of effective altruists, and man, they’re easy to scam, and I could be so much more comfortable if I just sacrificed everything I value in life.
It turns out that I’m not actually sad that I have a moral compass, but rather that people with strong values are so often forced to consider compromising on those values because they’re desperate to not live in precarity. It’s grim.
Something significant that has just occurred to me is that the compulsory banking internship I had to do after my first year of university as part of a scholarship might’ve been more useful than I had previously realised. It was a soul killing experience and I reached some extremely low periods that Summer because of it, but I’m realising that it was a useful learning experience. Prior to that, I would’ve been far more likely to consider selling my soul for a comfortable life, but if nothing else, that internship taught me I physically couldn’t live a life like that. Good thing I learned that on a low stakes internship, rather than something more committed.
chicanery
deception through trickery
The appropriate punishment is an extended life inside a torture box, AM style.
Say, a couple of million of years.
Locked in syndrome or prions. :)
Alternatively, the Total Perspective Vortex would be appropriate for the very worst offenders.
Pfft, that’d be my wet dream: to actually know shit, and that’s one way to learn it.
Who can forget that time Patrick Moore tried to convince others it was safe by saying “you could drink a quart and it won’t hurt you” then when someone said “Do you want to drink some? We have some here”, he said “I’m not stupid”.
I’m glad it wasn’t Patrick Moore the much-beloved British astronomer!
lol this is golden
😘👌
Nice bonus to learn the French for “complete jerk” btw 😁
Does anyone know what the ethical objections acrually were here?
I would have thought they would have specifically called out data falsification if that were the problem that resulted in the paper being pulled - otherwise it leaves the door open to misinterpretation
It’s part of a larger issue of science and research being funded and backed by big companies that benefit from it not saying their product as bad. There are defunct research articles that state smoking is healthy for you from long ago. A lot of those researchers and doctors were later found to have gotten kick backs from companies that benefited from the positive research. This is just a modern example of money meddling in research for their benefit despite knowing the opposite.
Recently heard something related in a documentary about ME/CFS where scientific results (research about cell damage potentially causing patients not regaining their energy) was burried in favor of a not very scientific paper from (work)psychologists that instead proclaimed that the issue is mental and the patients just need to be motivated more. This affects the treatment (or better mistreatment) of patients even today.
Money affects which results get published and how far they are spread and this is very dangerous :/
Think about all the unjust, needless shaming and the very severe consequences against ME/CFS victims who are literally damaged at a cellular level, but treated as lazy, so left to DIE if they can’t provide for themselves.
Not only that, but patients who got sicker from overexertion because they were sent to a physical rehabilitation center. Or doctors being careless with overly invasive diagnostics or treatments. And then being left alone because obviously you didn’t want it enough to really try otherwise your situation would improve…
One of the sickest forms of serial killing ever invented, on a mass-scale, and no one realized it.
Honestly, while I agree retractions take too long in almost any case, having something retracted doesn’t stop people from using it to underline their course of action.
I mean, do I have to mention the Wakefield vaccine paper even? Everyone knows its a load of crap. Its already retracted for years, and? Did people stop believing this?
The problem here is not science but capitalism, we should really get rid of this ideology
And more importantly, replace it with a system that makes it impossible for this type of controlling wealth to exist in the first place, otherwise history will repeat itself once again.
Agreed
Amen.
I feel like it unfortunately needs to be brought up that we should not let this event be used as a criticism of science, scientists, the scientific method, or indeed even scientific journals.
If it were considered theological scripture it would have taken centuries before somebody redacted it, and large parts of the religious community would refuse the new scripture regardless.
Science is still the best method for the pursuit of what is true.
We critique out of love, in hope for better futures.
*burns shrine to Bill Nye*
(sobs) “you lied to me. Now I’m godless.”I imagined the person burning the shrine was Arnold Schwarzenegger’s depiction of Conan the Barbarian.
Then people wonder why people don’t trust “science”
Everyone responsible for this should be in jail
Science is fine. How it is published and funded is deeply flawed.
That’s why I used scare quotes
The problem is, how it’s published and funded is a huge part of the institutions surrounding science, to the point that they’ve become plesionyms.
Unfortunately, many people can’t tell the difference
To the vast majority of the population, those two things are the same. Science is what’s published and what the lawmakers and journalists see. If most of that is flawed, Science is flawed. if Science is flawed, then the next best thing is “common sense”.
Yes. But no.
Sounds more like education is flawed.
Well, education would give us a better sense of what “common sense” needs to mean.
I meant earlier in the comment, if people are misunderstanding what science is.
Best I can offer is a token fine that will be reduced on appeal.
This problem could be solved if funding was also awarded to projects that can verify important results like this. Effectively allow scientists to verify the results thoroughly. This means to redo the entire study! Peer review is there to catch blatant lapses in logic and basic science. But in order to see if those results are as they say you have to redo it.
There is a lot of trust between scientists that they will act morally and truthfully but these days when funding is scarce and pressure is high some will resort to all sorts of shortcuts. The most used is over inflated goals to get the funding. That is benign enough. Others will tweak the results to get ahead and claim their place in front of the others and hope to fix the problem down the line.
Funding doesn’t allow repeat studies, studies with ideas too close to what has been done before etc. Also the time allotted is too short. 3 years is not enough to go from zero to finished idea ready for the market, yet that’s the aim most of the time. How on earth do people think anyone will have the time and brain space to verify what others have done and force them to retract it?
I can see how people can start to be skeptical of science but the truth of the matter is that science should be funded without the expectation of profitability in the short term. People should demand better funding for schools and research. And then ask that all science of held to the highest standard at all times! Having cheap fast science to the highest standard doesn’t work! If you don’t believe me have a look at the titan submersible to get an idea. We wouldn’t be here posting messages on this platform if science was funded the same 80 years ago.
Science shouldn’t be means tested. Neoliberalism will kill us all.
Wtf does that mean
Sorry! I misunderstood your reply
It’s OK. :) My brain jumped around, it can be hard to follow. I was not clear.
Thank you for the book recommendation! I just bought it. Light reading for the holidays
What is save or not in the chem and pharma industry in the capitalism depends of the profit it brings, nothing else.
