Fifteen or twenty years ago it began dawning on young PhD.'s and other researchers that if they added some reference to global warming in their grant proposals the odds of getting funded increased by two or three times. As this knowledge spread across academia, every discipline, every "-ology" became infused with the refs. To the point things got a bit ridiculous.
Ridiculous but not funny. Because it was a corruption of the funding process and a perversion of actual science. And that was just one corner of the corruption-industrial complex in academia.*
From Palladium Magazine, August 2:
In 2006, Sylvain Lesné and seven coauthors published a paper on Alzheimer’s disease, “A specific amyloid-beta protein assembly in the brain impairs memory,” in Nature, the world’s most prestigious scientific journal. This was a major paper in the development of the “amyloid hypothesis,” a proposed mechanism for how Alzheimer’s disease afflicts its victims. About 50 million people suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, more than the entire population of California, making it the world’s most common cause of dementia. This population will grow as the world’s average population gets older. There is no effective treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, and its pathology is poorly understood. Any progress in understanding this disease represents a massive humanitarian victory. Encouraged by this paper and other promising studies, funding and talent poured into investigating the amyloid hypothesis. By 2022, such research had received over $1 billion in government funds.
That year, neuroscientist Matthew Schrag discovered doctored images in this and many of Lesné’s other papers, including others purporting to provide evidence for the amyloid hypothesis. These images had been manually edited and cropped together to falsely show support for the papers’ hypotheses. Notably, these frauds all made it through the formalized “peer review” processes of Nature and six other academic journals undetected, before eventually being uncovered by unrelated channels.
Schrag’s investigation that uncovered the fraudulent papers began as a tangent from his work uncovering doctored images used in studies supporting simufilam, an experimental drug for Alzheimer’s disease. The suspicion would prove vindicated when in June 2024 Hoau-Yan Wang, a paid adviser to simufilam’s developer, was indicted by a federal grand jury for fabricating data and images in simufilam studies for which he obtained $16 million in National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants, following a 2021 petition to the Food and Drug Administration, a method of reporting research fraud which is highly unusual if not unique.
Follow-up to evidence of Lesné’s fraud was slow. Schrag’s discovery kicked off two years of wrangling, eventually leading all of Lesné’s coauthors—but not Lesné himself—to agree to retract the 2006 Nature paper. As Science reported in 2022, “The Nature paper has been cited in about 2300 scholarly articles—more than all but four other Alzheimer’s basic research reports published since 2006, according to the Web of Science database. Since then, annual NIH support for studies labeled ‘amyloid, oligomer, and Alzheimer’s’ has risen from near zero to $287 million in 2021. Lesné and [his coauthor] Ashe helped spark that explosion, experts say.”
Scientists must now untangle the strands of fraud woven through decades of arguments stretching across a billion dollars worth of research. The paper’s contribution to the allocation of this billion dollars might also be a reason why such a widely-cited paper, presumably read by thousands of experts where some must have spotted the fraud, wasn’t reported earlier. Whether the amyloid hypothesis survives or not, this fraud has likely delayed the arrival of life-saving medication for tens of millions of people, perhaps by many years. If so, it is a humanitarian disaster larger than most wars.
No Consequences for Fraud
All the coauthors of the Nature study who have spoken publicly deny any knowledge or involvement in the fraud, but acknowledge that the images were clearly tampered with. So far, the perpetrator has been left safely in the passive voice. Who actually manipulated the images? Was it Lesné himself? Was it a coauthor acting with his knowledge? Was it a harried underling, acting alone and in secret to fulfill their supervisor’s harsh expectations? Circumstantial evidence suggests it was probably Lesné, but there is no hard proof yet.In any case, Lesné’s employer, the University of Minnesota, is not interested in these questions. Lesné apparently remains a professor and continues to receive National Institutes of Health funding. The university has been investigating his work since June 2022. A spokesperson says the university recently told Nature it had reviewed two images in question, and “has closed this review with no findings of research misconduct pertaining to these figures.” There is no ongoing effort from the university to find the culprit.
Lesné’s apparent fraud is not an isolated incident. In 2023, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, then the President of Stanford University, was forced to resign after the revelation of falsified data in his earlier research at drug developer Genentech, including a now-retracted paper on the amyloid hypothesis which has been cited over 1,000 times. In a case of successful dynastic skill transfer, public reporting was spearheaded by Theo Baker, scion of an influential family of journalists, during his freshman year as a Stanford student. In 2024, Tessier-Lavigne bounced back, becoming the CEO of the newly-founded drug discovery company Xaira Therapeutics, with over $1 billion committed by its venture capitalist backers.
Once again, Stanford’s official statements do not finger the culprit, but blame Tessier-Lavigne’s “management and oversight of his scientific laboratories,” where “Multiple members of Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s labs over the years appear to have manipulated research data,” according to the Stanford Board of Trustees’s official report. The report contains incredible positions like “the process through which the science of the paper was developed in Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s lab, culminating in its publication in February 2009, lacked the rigor expected for a paper of such potential consequence, although the Panel did not find, based on the evidence available to it, that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne was aware of this lack of rigor.” The panel maintains that “it would not be reasonable to expect Dr. Tessier-Lavigne to have identified these instances of research data manipulation prior to or at the time of the respective papers’ publications,” even though many of the fabrications were later identified by visual inspection of the manipulated images. Stanford’s public position is that its researchers cannot reasonably be expected to know what happens in their own labs and gets published in their own names.....
Most folks know his warning on the military-industrial complex:
But they don't remember what followed immediately after:...In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together...
...Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present--and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite....
Something to think about.
We'll see if my meme-spotting is prescient.
I'm pretty sure Eisenhower was.
