ACADEMIA IS BROKEN! Stanford Nobel-Prize Scandal Explained

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[CELLPERSPECTIVE]

Professor at a top university, at the forefront of medical research:

"lemme just turn my pictures 90 degrees, that'll fool them"

[mark]

Science is now doing what peer review should have been doing the last 2 decades.

[jesseparrish]

This is why I always photograph extra unpublished blots to create unique forgeries.

[smathew]

The bigger problem is that negative results don’t get published. So everyone will try to fudge their data, conclusions and say there is something significant.

[caspermadlener]

If there is ever going to be a prize for showing fraud, this should be called the Elizabeth Bik prize.

[alyssaoconnor]

I think
1. The peer reviewed system needs an overhaul because it’s completely failing at its task.
2. It’s too easy for a “supervisor” to put their name on a paper without doing the leg work and then expect blame to lie elsewhere when they fail at supervising.
3. We need some kind of reward for the person/people who find the scam artists/Lazy work in the system.

[dbmail]

The desperate need for funding has corrupted ALL the sciences 😢

[StylishHobo]

When does Elisabeth Bik get a Nobel Prize?

[giomjava]

Oh yeah, science is science and people are flawed. That's why we need people like Pete and Elizabeth Bik to identify flaws and perform corrections.

[LordMondegrene]

A med student friend of mine asked her adviser if she should go into research, or medical practice.

He asked her how important it was to her to be able to look at herself in a mirror. Abby asked him to clarify, and he said, "They won't order you to commit fraud, but they'll press you to find a way to get their products approved - whether they help patients or not. Could you still look at yourself in the mirror after doing that?"

That was 20 years ago, almost. I never found out which way she went.

[joelfenner]

When I worked in academia, I was there long enough to hear rumors about specific professors. Some of these rumors even came from their own students. Only a few profs names came up again and again, but it became predictable after a time. There were certain names you came to mistrust, even if you had no direct proof or contact, because the stories never stopped coming.
Whether it was an academic integrity problem, or a problem with interpersonal conduct, some names became associated with this stigma. But the truly discouraging part were the recurring counterpart tales about students who supposedly HAD direct involvement in these issues, and took them to the administration, and their concerns were buried or ignored. These stories ALSO came up again and again.
These problems don't exist JUST because there are bad actors in academia. They also exist because *administrators* would rather sweep the concerns under the rug, and avoid a scandal that might hurt donations or grants, rather than maintain a rigid standard of integrity. I'm convinced that a lot of the fraudsters are given cover, intentionally or not, by their departments and institutions who are desperate for the gravy train to continue at any cost.

[maudbrewster]

As a supervisor it is also your role to verify the data and ask uncomfortable question–At least that is the case in Germany... Maybe you can mess it up once or twice but not 30 times.... You do get so much money BECAUSE you have to do this tidious task, you can not just rest on your past distinctions...

[exshenanigan]

I love the fact that you took note of your audience's reaction to your first academia is broken videos and took action. Your action resulted in this channel becoming one of the most unique channels covering these subjects.

[Sturdy_Penguin]

Elisabeth Bik is the real MVP. When these institutions fire some of these fraudsters they should send the discoverer that employee's would-be bonus or 6 months salary upon termination. It would show that they actually care about integrity and encourage academic honesty rather than just acting aghast and brushing things under the rug. Encouraging honesty and sending a message that academia can have a future when trust in institutions is at an all-time low.

[jamesthompson]

"As the final author on the paper & as a scientist of his caliber" he should NOT just be there in an advisory role: he should be reviewing & confirming the data collected & the work of his co-authors. Let's face it, as a Nobel Prize winner, the paper is flying under his authority & will attract attention in the marketplace because of his name on it.

If he's just surfing fame, resting on his laurels & gaining continued fame by co-opting the work of his co-authors, he deserves to go down in flames if THEY fabricated evidence.

[MavHunterXX]

As someone who as owned quite of few dogs, I find them eating my homework more believable than it being "compression artifacts" as would happen with low resolution rendering.

[ShutterNChill]

I have run a lot of Western blots, had published a number of them, and have seen my colleagues publish quite a lot of it. Also had the experience (as a graduate student) to see my fellow grad student forced to falsify a Western blot, pressured by her supervisor. When it came to publication, the lab director thought the blot looked really dodgy (nobody dared tell him it was doctored but he thought it was not right, and explicitly told the PI that he should repeat all the experiments before thinking of publishing it. The PI did not do that, and published without the lab directors name and permission. He got his paper, but the lab director refused to give him a salary raise at his next evaluation because of low scientific standards. In return the PI volunteered to spearhead a witch-hunt against the lab director, that was started by a scumbag high in the academic ladder (with similar standards as the falsifying PI)....
Shortly, in my experience there are two very distinct men in academia, and the ONLY commonality between them is that they are extremely smart. One type is extremely smart to come up with new ideas and how to demonstrate them. The other type is the pathological evil-genius, who has no original ideas but is an expert at leeching off the colleagues, scheming to ruin others' reputations and stealing their research and especially: their funding! I have seen the craziest funding thefts, and the most incredible allegations used to ruin careers.
It is super sad though that from the outside these extremely different career paths look the same... both are in academia.... and when the pathological cases are caught and shown to the public, the public thinks that this is how every scientist is. Which is the furthest from the truth. Yet, as always, hard work does not get a fraction of the attention that outrage gets.... so the general impression is that academia and science is all about fraud and misconduct, and nobody thinks twice that all the technology around us (from cell phones to liver transplants) came through science. The truth is that the majority of scientists are extremely altruistic, sacrifice much more from their lives as people in general do, work hard hours thanklessly, are abused and discarded by the system which has a lot of unfortunate influences at the top, and stand at a big disadvantage in life compared to a carpenter or a construction worker to have a solid financial foundation for personal life.
As always, where money is, trouble follows. As funding for science is becoming more scarce every year, even honest people are forced into desperate measures just to stay floating. While there's a very big difference between totally faking a Western blot and touching up a part of the blot to make it look super clean, the latter is unfortunate as it gets placed in the same category as outright forgery.

When you have ran Western blots, you know that sometimes they come out looking not so clean: the lanes might not be perfectly parallel, there might be a small uneven gel pockets skewing the lane, it picked up some dust from the camera, and so many little hickups. The way to take care of those is to run the experiment again until you get the perfect looking one, that's neat enough to get published in PNAS or Cell. However, since 2010 or so, we barely have enough funding to run a single blot for a given experiment. Nobody has the luxury to allow for multiple repeats (which likely require purchasing an additional set of antibodies, and maybe months to run the experiments to get the protein for the blots.) As a post doc, you have a job security that does not extend to more than one year, in lucky cases 2 or 3 years when you have a major lab backing you up (mainly through nepotism, but also happens rarely by sheer luck). Most often if you do not get the blots right the first time, it's the end of your career. You can start looking for a job as an adult with no practical training in any field whatsoever (other than your specialized field, that just chewed you out), and no life savings at all. And it's getting more cut-throat every year as NIH is constantly cutting the funding on R01s and other grants, while reagents go through staggering price increases every year. The funding system is forcing the academia to break, as thriving requires either uncanny luck to have experiments and ideas work right away (they almost never do in biology) or resorting to stealing and faking.

[alfonso]

I understand why the process from research to clinical applications is so slow: there's a bunch of contradictory BS data out there.

[darbodrake]

Alternative title, Stanford professor has 35 papers scrutinized, penas retracts

[luszczi]

The passive aggression in his response. 😂