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
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Smokey
Now its gone. I grabbed the URL, maybe it will cycle back.
60,000 pages? That’s almost 55 pages a day (over three years).
“Self-investigations” are rarely if ever aimed at finding the truth or protecting integrity. Their goal is either (1) provide a pretext for retaining an employee or project, or (2) provide a pretext for firing an employee or stopping a project.
My guess would be that Das has offended or insulted the management, and this is the only way to break his tenure.
It’s conceivable that he may have actually violated the norms of integrity, but that would be an uncorrelated and unrelated fact, which wouldn’t affect an “investigation” in either direction.
Is there ANY field of study, research, and scholarship where intentional exaggeration, misrepresentation, and biased slanting of the information is not common?
I like drinking red wine and I am still alive. All the proof I need!
British medial journal poll reports more than 10% of scientists and doctors falsifiying their data in order to get it published.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2085814/Scientists-falsify-data-research-published-whistleblowers-bullied-keeping-quiet-claim-colleagues.html
phlogiston says:
January 13, 2012 at 3:14 am
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.
Very close! I know of one theory that was disproven a few years ago. What happened in this instance was a report that continuing to drink into old age would extend your life as studies show that those who give up the booze actually lived shorter than those who did not. What the studies actually did was pick ‘healthy’ candidates from the drinking side and then follow those who gave up due to severe medical conditions. When you bend the conditions that much it is easy to end up with a result to the ‘sponsors’ liking.
One of the best ways to track actual results is information from hospitals themselves, this was also done in studies on health and wellbeing of homosexual couples with far from sterling results for the supporters of that type of lifestyle. While heavily damaging to the information that the media likes to report they just ignore the information altogether as we know that the media likes to operate that way (i.e. Climategate I & II).
You see these fairly often in the medical field. Have you EVER seen an intensive investigation associated with AGW where such conduct is rampant? I suppose the current DOJ inquiry into the “drowning polar bears” report comes close to a real investigation. The reason for the difference, I believe, are the legal and regulatory ramifications of medical malpractice that are completely absent in AGW. AGW is all about public acclaim, research funding and little else, even though the collective economic and social ramifications are enormous.
The only formal AGW investigations I can think of were the University of Virginia’s “investigation” into charges Dr. Michael Mann’s famous “hockey stick” temperature graph was a phony and a similar “investigation” into Climategate’s Dr. Phil Jones in the U.K. In both cases the exercise was a cursory whitewash that didn’t even involve a review of the material or how it had been used. So far as I can tell, the “investigative committee” didn’t even interview the scientists who’d made charges against the accused.
CH
I feel like I have been hit in the gut. I was counting on global warming to introduce warm climate and I could plant vineyards in the Northwest Territories of Canada. I discover the warming won’t be enough and the demand for wine is also threatened. Seems like science has a political agenda creeping in.
Very nice. Thank you.
In vino veritas?
“12 Jan: UK Telegraph: South Africa weather forecasters threatened with jail if predictions wrong.”
Shouldn’t this apply, a fortiori, to the climate alarmists?!!
Layne Blanchard says:
January 12, 2012 at 9:52 pm
Something tells me I’ll still be drinking wine….
============================================
Agreed !!
As if I drink for any health benefit !!!
This is not the first time that the UConn Health Center has had to deal with questionable activities by a faculty member. Back in the mid-1980s, the Chair of the Clinical Microbiology Department was ousted due to misappropriating funds. He had obtained a grant to research pathogenic bacteria that infected shell fish in Long Island Sound — arguably a worthy research project. As one would expect, he needed a boat to get his samples as well as technicians to retrieve and analyze them. On paper, there did not appear to be anything untoward about his expenses. Then an expose was published on the front page of The Hartford Courant: his research “vessel” was a 40 ft sailboat and his research “technicians” were his children. In a matter of weeks, the powers that be forced him to resign. Schadenfreude is a good description of the prevailing mood of the basic research faculty. He was the chair of the Rank & Tenure Committee and had torpedoed the careers of several excellent researchers, mostly on the grounds that the basic science faculty “did not publish enough”, at least with respect to the number of publications. After the story broke, one faculty member decided to take a look at his publications. It turned out that he would take a few tables of data and publish them over and over again in different journals — a big no-no in the basic science community. While not scientific fraud per se, one has to wonder given his other actions.
I never found out who leaked the story to the press, and most of my colleagues didn’t care: we were just glad that he was gone. This was about the same time that the Baltimore/Imanishi-Kari case was in the news, with John Dingell doggedly pursuing David Baltimore (Nobel prizes don’t protect you from the wrath of a congressman). Chins wagged, committees were formed up, and life in the research community went on.
As with all bureaucracies, the scope and number of the watchdog committees have grown. Have they increased the integrity of scientific investigations? Probably not. It is ultimately up to members of the research community to police themselves. But, it gets complicated with jobs, careers, grants and reputations at stake: being a whistle blower brings its own hazards. At a minimum, publicly funded research needs to be as open as possible with free (or low cost) access to published manuscripts, methods and data. While the maintenance of scientific integrity is an important motivating factor for openness, the real benefit comes from the free flow of information to curious, inventive and motivated individuals who can move knowledge forward. Who knows what key scientific insight is lurking behind a $35 paywall just waiting for the right person to come along?
Michael Mann and Jones could add an additional zero to that count… easily. Penn state and the UEA (CRU) should be proud. House cleaning is no longer enough. These infested houses need to be razed and the ground sterilized. GK
I think the bad research is not the real news. The real news is that extensive investigations of bad research do indeed take place sometimes.
I’m keeping this article away from my wife and have also concluded that comments denegrating the positive health effects of red wine are proof someone is seriously deranged and should be ignored. The comment I’m most taking to heart (no pun intended) is the one about 65 units a day being good for you.
I dunno, we’ll have to check his/her blog – No, wait …
.
I’m with Neal (though I do like a good port or sherry along with red wines).
I’ve heard and read about the benefits of red wine (or grape juice if so inclined) for over twenty years. So catching a relatively recent gravy train rider who falsified data and got caught is not really surprising.
I find that in this case, I have trouble blaming the reviewers and publishers. If one is good at fudging results and the fudged work resembles/mirrors other researchers results, fraud can be difficult to spot. reading the first pass review comments for some of those peer reviews might be illuminating though.
60,000 pages says two things to me, Bureaucracy funded and written by a contractor team.
Good one kbray!
Oh good gawd it’s the IPCC of brown bagging. A 60,000 page report to prove that he’s not a major player?? They sacrifice of grove of trees in order to further marginalize a Second rate player? Sounds oddly familiar.
“…the new allegation will not make a material difference.” So, this is of no consequence, and was all a waste of time and money from the start, incredible.
Think we’ll ever see this?:
Michael E. Mann, director of Pennsylvania State University’s interdepartmental Earth System Science Center, said: “We have a responsibility to correct the scientific record and inform peer researchers around the world.”
I’m not holding my breath.
He didn’t lie. He just did a little data infilling.
@Anat T : Resveratrol is real. It’s a sirtuin 1 (Sirt1) inhibitor. Knowing that has pointed out the importance of histone deacetylases to longevity and disease progression. Resveratrol is protective in many animal models of injury. So, it’s real. The big question is whether it will do us humans any good. Because it’s so safe, clinical trials of the compound for various conditions abound. Here is a small group clinical trial for acne: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21348544. Here is a promising preliminary study for hepatic cancer: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21680702. I’ve noticed that big-name drugs like this actually get their negative results published. There is so much interest in drugs like this that a negative result is just as important as a positive. These studies show that resveratrol can have a positive effect in humans. As always, resveratrol is good for stroke in rodents: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20655115.
But your real question is whether the health food industry is pushing resveratrol. Here’s the thing: it doesn’t have to. If resveratrol as a neutraceutical weren’t hot, something else would be. Look at the history of natural food cure claims. Just as there is a certain population that are willing fools for AGW, there is a certain population that believes in natural foods for health. They can’t be completely wrong, but, they may not be completely right about anything either. I think that manipulating the sirtuin family of histone deacetylases will be productive in the future, once we know what these things do in disease or injury states in humans.
Your conclusion does not follow from the facts presented here. Recall that the purpose of peer review is primarily to confirm that the methodology is correct and that there are no egregious errors. It is not the purpose of peer review to determine if the investigators “got it right”. Otherwise, what’s the point of publishing for comment and general review? In addition, no reviewer could possibly be expected to detect faked data.