Science was one of the greatest intellectual discoveries in human history. The revolution in thinking unleashed in Western Europe from the 13th century enabled some of the greatest leaps forward in human development. It still does.
Sometimes.
More often, though, science as it is practiced today resembles a creepy combination of cult- and mafia-like corruption. At the same time that private enterprise is revolutionising space travel, mostly government-funded science at government-funded universities has become a monstrous, bloated, fraud machine, churning taxpayer money into fake ‘research’ and so-called ‘research misconduct’.
Or what we’d call, if it was a business, fraud and white-collar crime.
Molecular biologist David Vaux campaigns against research misconduct – people fudging data, fabricating results. He has worked at it so hard and so long that the Australian Academy of Science named an award after him, a fellowship for people who track research to keep scientists honest. This year it went to Jennifer Byrne from the University of Sydney who searches for published papers full of fake science.
Vaux wants the government to step up, however, and set up a national office to police research integrity in Australia because, he says, the research establishment won’t do it well enough.
The scale of the problem is something well known in the scientific establishment, even if the general public remain blissfully ignorant. The ‘IFL Science’ crowd, meanwhile, are almost willfully pretending not to notice.
Other than human error, there are reason for it. Fraud (universities like to call it “research misconduct” but it’s fraud) is less common than baked-in, especially in disciplines where governments spend money, and that is mainly in medicine and the STEM disciplines, science, technology engineering and maths.
Unsurprisingly, the rot started in the fringe disciplines of the humanities. Marxist and ‘grievance studies’ journals regularly publish gibberish so nonsensical that not even its reviewers can agree just what the hell it’s supposed to mean. Periodically, for decades, deliberately absurd parodies have passed peer-review at ‘prestigious’ post-modernist and other post-Marxist journals.
Recent revelations of repeated plagiarism and other fraud by the heads of even the most prestigious universities in the world show how endemic the problem is.
Plagiarism is one thing. What’s worse, though, is how far the rot has spread into STEM. Unsurprisingly, given the ethical standards of the pharmaceutical and big medical industries, medical journals and life sciences appear to be the worst offenders.
[Plagiarism] does not matter anywhere near as much as faked scientific findings that can send other researchers off on dead-end trails, pursuing world-changing, lifesaving results that cannot exist.
Fakery happens because careers depend on publishing papers that report breakthroughs. The more times other scientists cite a researcher’s work, the more they will be noticed, funded, promoted. And so corners are cut, small findings amplified into breakthroughs, results are written up that could, maybe, perhaps be true but certainly make for a great headline.
In December, Adrian Barnett (QUT) and international colleagues reported an experiment showing researchers were willing to “hold their noses” and edit their articles to appear in a prestigious publication.
Throw in literally trillions of dollars of funding, and you get a whole lot of ‘climate science’ that is anything but.
Surveys of early career researchers by Kate Christian (QUT) and colleagues found 20 per cent felt pressured to engage in “questionable research practices” and more than half knew of researchers who kept running data until they got a result that suited. They also feared they would not be believed and faced “negative consequences” for speaking up.
As then South Australian corruption commissioner Ann Vanstone warned last year, academics point to “a power dynamic whereby more senior researchers benefited from unfair practices”.
They almost always get away with it because universities indulge in the equivalent of hiring the Beagle Boys to guard the bank vault.
When it comes to inquiring into research misconduct matters, it is up to universities and medical research institutes to police themselves.
Yes, there is a national code of conduct and the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council, which also manages funding for the Medical Research Future Fund, have a watchdog – quite right, given that they will be handing out $2.5bn next financial year.
But a bloodhound the Australian Research Integrity Committee is not. Instead of investigating fraud, it oversights how universities run their own inquiries. If they stick to procedures, ARIC leaves them alone, which means people with allegations generally ignore it. The committee considered six new cases last year.
Which, considering the sheer scale that we know the problem to be, is almost laughable.
Except that it’s our tax money that’s funding this fraud.
