From Medical News Today, word of a major failure of peer review spanning years and 11 journals.
Researcher Who Studied Benefits Of Red Wine Falsified Data Says University
An extensive misconduct investigation that took three years to complete and produced a 60,000-page report, concludes that a researcher who has come to prominence in recent years for his investigations into the beneficial properties of resveratrol, a compound found in red wine, “is guilty of 145 counts of fabrication and falsification of data”.
In a statement published on the university’s news website on Wednesday, the University of Connecticut (UConn) Health Center said the investigation has led them to inform 11 scientific journals that had published studies conducted by Dr Dipak K. Das, a professor in the unversity’s Department of Surgery and director of its Cardiovascular Research Center.
The internal investigation, which covered seven years of work in Das’s lab, was triggered by an anonyomous allegation of “research irregularities” in 2008.
…
Philip Austin, UConn’s interim vice president for health affairs, said:
“We have a responsibility to correct the scientific record and inform peer researchers across the country.”
…
According to a report from the Associated Press (AP), Dr Nir Barzilai, whose team conducts resveratrol research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, says Das is not a major player in the field.
Barzilai told AP lots of labs around the world are conducting extensive research into resveratrol, with encouraging results, and the new allegation will not make a material difference.
Full article here – h/t to WUWT reader Mark Johnson
Partially related, concerning (British) government limits on units of alcohol. This turned up on one site I read:
HeartAttackSurvivor said…
When I was being stented after my heart attack, my cardio surgeon told me “now, listen to me because I’m a heart specialist and I know these things. I want you to drink red wine every day”. He then went on at length (and I was of course a captive audience…) that he was closely associated with the working group that threw up the “21 units” figure. Apparently they had told the government that the range of units over which the mortality rate was lower than LD50 was 21 to 65 units (it’s a “J” shaped curve) and NOTWITHSTANDING other effects – cancer, liver disease, falling over into the path of a bus etc, people who drink 21 to 65 units a week live longer than people who drink nothing. The chief government health wonk was appalled and said “we can’t tell people to drink 65 units a week (about a bottle a day)!” So they fixed it at 21, any more than that and you’re a total sot with the life expetancy of Amy Winehouse. Also see http://www.wightwash.org.uk/drinks_units_myth.htm
Jeff L says:
January 12, 2012 at 10:08 pm
Bummer …. but I still did enjoy a nice Okanagan Syrah this evening after snowboarding in the Nelson BC area today. Canadian wines have come a long ways! Good job, eh !
O/T but couldn’t be missed
“Canajan eh?”
From a speaker of “Strine”
‘research into resveratrol’
I read that as Reserve a troll.
I wonder what R.Gates thinks
Who paid for the study? Maybe wine related entities? If not then, who? And what were the parameters of the study. Were the levels of RV the same as other componds levels which were chosen in amounts far less than substantiated theraputic levels. Must be a slow week if they do not go any further than what the link provides.
If he had been a pro-cAGW researcher, I doubt this would have come out, but, as the establishment is currently on a massive anti-alcohol, anti-smoking, anti-fun crusade, you can bet the investigators went in with all guns blazing!
With three reviewers for each Das journal item published there’s at least 33 peer
reviewers and 11 journal editors or associate editors who didn’t detect a problem
and failed to protect the medical research community and the public from sloppy
scientific work.
It’s nice to see the University of Connecticut has the integrity to persue the matter…
unlike Penn State or the University of Virginia who rely on whitewash and legal
obstructionism for their miscreants in another research field.
pat says:
January 12, 2012 at 10:47 pm
“12 Jan: UK Telegraph: South Africa weather forecasters threatened with jail if predictions wrong.”
Hmmm, could be more reasonable than appears at first read; – a lot of resources are mobilized, put on stand-by; however a jail threat is pretty overboard. Then again if I close my convertible, put on a rain mac, but sweat my bollocks off in winter woolies while my car suffers sun blisters, can I sue?
So, a couple of questions.
Were the research conclusions to justify a drinking problem of Prof, Das?
Were the reported fabrication problems by persons who think drink to be evil? (There are plenty in the US)
A doctor told me once that if any doctor told you to reduce your drinking change to a doctor who drinks more than you do as there are plenty of them.
i will not let this report cloud my drinking the odd bottle of red at weekends.
He should have ‘studied’ the effect of sparkling wines.
With CO2 involved every fake study survives.
Recently, the efficacy of a daily aspirin has been questioned; and the success of nicotine patches suffers from a high recidivism rate.
Philosophically, one has to question whether Man can improve on the design of Nature for the human body. I’m inherently suspicious of a daily dose of anything, but I am told to take Warfarin because I have a pacemaker because I had atrial fibrillation that was controlled by daily sodium iodide that gave me hyperthyroidism that almost killed me … if you get the drift.
BTW, my wife has been a vegetarian for over 60 years, so it is possible to modify conventional diets and intakes. However, when you are a chemist who can read and understand the number of toxins in ordinary food and their mechanisms (when known) one is driven towards a bread and water style of thinking.
Why take wine when ethyl alcohol is so harmful? I gave it up 30 years ago when I read what it does to livers.
I wonder do the cabal of climate scientists who have managed to mislead the governments of the west worry that they will one day face the wrath of the people? Or do they feel so confident in their protection that they are above the norms of ordinary men?
Their fall will be so satisfying.
I have a question to the knowledgable readers of WUWT: Isn’t the red wine theory a stop-gap for the theory on the harms of colestrol, in that it purports to explain away the so-called French paradox? And isn’t the stop-gap necessary because of the multi-million (billion?) health food industry that depends on the colestrol theory? And does anyone notice any similarity to the theory of AGW and the commercial need to protect it?
‘Barzilai told AP lots of labs around the world are conducting extensive research into resveratrol, with encouraging results, and the new allegation will not make a material difference.’
Now fellars, there’s a lot of funding at stake here. We’ve got to kill this one off as soon as possible otherwise our grants are at risk. Let’s take a leaf out of the AGW crowd, they know how to hide the truth when it comes to scientific research. We can’t allow this Dr Das man to muddy the waters for us, so start getting those press releases out before this story gets too much coverage. The message is simply ‘the University of Connecticut is wrong even though they have found 145 areas of misconduct by Das. This is a pittance compared to the AGW crowd, and look what support they have across the world.’ Dr Das needs our full support, otherwise we’re all doomed.
The red-wine-is-good-for-you proposition is vulnerable to the classic confounding factor problem fundamental to epidemiology. Is there a valid control group?? For instance, group A drinks more wine than group B. Group A lives longer. So wine is good for you!! Umm – no (not necessarily). It could be that some members of group B dont drink wine because their doctors told them not to since they suffer from some horrible disease. Or alternatively, the genes associated with moral self-righteousness and abstinence are linked to something link a cancer susceptibility etc. Good epidemiology is damn difficult.
(Probably the best epidemiology study of recent times was one aimed at finding out how harmful ionising radiation is. Two shipyards were compared, one servicing naval nuclear ships / submarines, the other dealing with non-nuclear ships. Both had similar work forces with similar socio-economic profile. The result was that radiation induced cancer was absent from all except the very highest dose group. This confirmed a threshold for radiation carcinogenesis. But this study was supressed vigorously for contradicting the ludicrous linear no-threshold hypothesis (LNT). That’s why you are reading about it for the first time.)
Epidemiology is the study of what makes people die. BY FAR the biggest factors are socio-economic status and social connectedness. The size of your car is also a large, independent factor. Other environmental factors like smoking, toxins, radiation etc which attract all the media interest are orders of magnitude smaller. Social interaction is primarily an exercise in killing people.
A “Diederik Stapel” all over again, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diederik_Stapel
The whole thing with him started rolling when a he, Roos Vonk and Marcel Zeelenberg published an article that meat eaters are more selfish than vegetarians, wich was suspected to be based on faked data. The research result had not yet been published in a scientific journal, only a press bulletin was released.
He has written a 130 articles and 24 bookchapters and it will take years to research wich ones are based upon faked data, not to mention that others used his data as well.
And all it took was an anonymous allegation!
Storm in wineglass.
Perhaps my comment above is too cryptic. I’ll try again: “Who on earth believes any medical research related to items of diet, for heaven’s sake?”
Experts say …
…-
“‘Scientists falsify data to get research published and whistleblowers are bullied into keeping quiet,’ claim their own colleagues”
“More than one in ten scientists and doctors claim to have witnessed colleagues deliberately fabricating data in order to get their research published, a new poll has revealed.
The survey of almost 2,800 experts in Britain also found six per cent knew of possible research misconduct at their own institution that has not been properly investigated.
The poll for the hugely-respected British Medical Journal (BMJ) is being presented at a meeting aimed at tackling research misconduct in the UK.”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2085814/Scientists-falsify-data-research-published-whistleblowers-bullied-keeping-quiet-claim-colleagues.html
I don’t think those claims were ever taken too seriously. Certainly not by me. Alcohol itself has long been known to have a “cardiac pre-conditioning” protective effect, when taken in moderation.
But it’s a useful reminder that what’s reported in the scientific literature is frequently incomplete, not new, wrong, or just plain BS. I doubt if climate science is different to any other branches of science in this respect.
Peer review, like “95% statistical confidence” levels, is not a gold standard. It’s a minimum standard.
It is just a matter of time until Penn State does a real investigation on Mann’s research. Without said investigation, Penn State will not be able to recover its reputation.
>> “Where’s the US Office of Research Integrity (ORI) on Climate Research and the IPCC?”
Good question, but the ORI is a part of the Dept of Health and Human Resources, so it appears that they’d only be interested in medical/epidemiological research and publications.
maz2,
And as we saw in the Harry-read_me file, the fabrication among climate Phil Jones’ researchers approaches 100%.
pat says:
January 12, 2012 at 10:47 pm
this is also summarised on the UK Met Office story page…OUCH!
12 Jan: UK Telegraph: South Africa weather forecasters threatened with jail if predictions wrong
By Dan Newling in Cape Town
Independent forecasters have been told they could be imprisoned for up to ten years – or fined up to £800,000 – if they issue incorrect severe weather warnings without official permission.
Is there a proceedure for obtaining official permission to issue an incorrect severe weather warning?
Just wondering.
Smokey says:
January 13, 2012 at 4:33 am
I like your ad at the end of the above article:
http://www.smokeybear.com/
So you’re in the fire prevention business?