Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Federal Prosecutors have launched a gigantic fraud case against Duke University, North Carolina, accusing Duke University of embezzling $200 million in federal research grants, by presenting doctored data with their grant applications.
Whistleblower sues Duke, claims doctored data helped win $200 million in grants
On a Friday in March 2013, a researcher working in the lab of a prominent pulmonary scientist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, was arrested on charges of embezzlement. The researcher, biologist Erin Potts-Kant, later pled guilty to siphoning more than $25,000 from the Duke University Health System, buying merchandise from Amazon, Walmart, and Target—even faking receipts to legitimize her purchases. A state judge ultimately levied a fine, and sentenced her to probation and community service.
Then Potts-Kant’s troubles got worse. Duke officials took a closer look at her work and didn’t like what they saw. Fifteen of her papers, mostly dealing with pulmonary biology, have now been retracted, with many notices citing “unreliable” data. Several others have been modified with either partial retractions, expressions of concern, or corrections. And last month, a U.S. district court unsealed a whistleblower lawsuit filed by a former colleague of Potts-Kant. It accuses the researcher, her former supervisor, and the university of including fraudulent data in applications and reports involving more than 60 grants worth some $200 million. If successful, the suit—brought under the federal False Claims Act (FCA)—could force Duke to return to the government up to three times the amount of any ill-gotten funds, and produce a multimillion-dollar payout to the whistleblower.
The Duke case “should scare all [academic] institutions around the country,” says attorney Joel Androphy of Berg & Androphy in Houston, Texas, who specializes in false claims litigation. It appears to be one of the largest FCA suits ever to focus on research misconduct in academia, he says, and, if successful, could “open the floodgates” to other whistleblowing cases.
…
The academic whistleblower, who presumably took a serious personal risk to expose this alleged fraudulent misuse of federal funds, stands to receive a multi-million dollar bounty if the embezzlement case is proven.
I somehow doubt this will be the last case of academic embezzlement which will be heard by the courts.
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What’s it going to be like when AGW fraud cases are brought against climatologists? Oh never mind – it’ll never happen.
The guy who exposed those climategate emails deserves a billion dollar award. an award like that would be great publicity for the idea of blowing the whistle on scumbags – badly needed when (D)irtbags are in power. I’d also like to see a special “clawback” law, allowing ALL of a government enabled scammers wealth to be confiscated
Providing the proceeds are returned to the PUBLIC from which they originated..
I think the current law and triple repayment is adequate. There should be no lynching. We have had enough of mob rule for one generation.
Do not underestimate greed.
If people see other whistle blowers getting large cash payouts for coming clean, it may be more contagious than a new dance craze in a middle school.
Wouldn’t it be fascinating if this court case triggered the collapse of the CAGW scam?
Stranger things have happened…
It takes a long time to get paid but twenty million is a good motivator, ya think?
David, we could hope that it might bring down the scam. But when we get to AGW, who owns the judges?
Interesting that the linked, Science Magazine article reported that Potts-Kant, in the words of the whistle-blower, involved in the law-suit, worked “investigating how pollutants affected the body’s airways.” The same whistle-blower, drawing on information he personally received from participants in an in-house Duke University “review” of the Potts-Kant matter, also advised that Potts-Kant “doctored nearly every experiment or project in which she participated…some times she hadn’t exposed mice to the right experimental conditions or run the experiments at all…other times…Potts-Kant…had run the experiment but altered the data, tweaking them to match the hypothesis…”
It gets better–despite what the article’s whistle-blower describes as “obvious red flags”, Duke university “witheld the scope of what it knew as it filed reports on existing grants and and applied for new ones…” Why? Well, the $82.8 million in grants that Potts-Kant won for Duke from the NIH and EPA, just might have been part of the motivation. And then there was the potentially embarrassing factoid that the research unit to which Potts-Kant belonged allegedly provided “doctored data” to other NIH grant-seekers which helped them win the same to the tune of $120.9 million, thereby providing Duke with another lucrative income-stream, we can imagine.
So, if the whistle-blower’s allegations are substantiated, we have finally obtained a good picture of just how one version of the Lysenkoist, hive-science con-job works. A single “prestigious” University, exploiting its national “brand recognition” and the vulnerability of a trusting public (what Professor Gruber famously described as “the stupidity of the American voter”), acquires the services of a “researcher” with a “genius” for comin’ up, time after time, by hook or crook (usually the latter), with just the “right answer” the grant-awarding customer is seeking–her Stakhanovite, good-comrade labors, in turn, generating a flood of snout-pleasing grant-money, from highly politicized, lefty-agenda bent organizations like the EPA, with which to fill many an ivory-tower trough. And the “science” produced by the above, little money-maker “researcher” is so darn valuable, that even other grant-seekers, from other universities and other institutions, sub-contract all that tedious data crunching business of theirs, that supports their own grant applications, to the “goose” who lays the golden data-eggs.
The final ingredient in the above, sneaky, little, rip-off hustle?–everyone in on the profitable deal, to include those famous peer-reviewers, we hear so much about, must ignore, it goes without saying, any “obvious red flags” that might arise with respect to the real assay-value of all those auriferous ovoids, there, all laid out and just beggin’ to be cracked open and made up into one of your basic, standard-issue, brave-new-gulag omelet-specials. And, of course, if the whole scam ever gets busted, there’s only one bag-holder to take the fall and everyone else can play dumb, and act surprised at the whole turn of events, and with looks of purest innocence, do what the hive-bozos do best–play the victim. Pretty slick, huh?
Will be curious just how much legislation and how many regulations flowed from Duke University’s hive-“science.”
Mike, it would be very helpful if you and everyone else would post here anything you find about laws and regulations that are based on Erin’s work.
I am of necessity in contact with others who are investigating the validity or otherwise of claims for health impact from various pollutants, with the WHO committees being a pliable vehicle for creating and carrying the claims. As there is consideration of such work from the WHO for providing the basis for making EPA-like claims setting permissible emission rates and modeling health impacts, this particular set of paper withdrawals is timely.
Although the comments here mostly reflect on the EPA, because of the site’s participant base, the WHO is in the same business. The group dealing with exposure limits is strongly affected by, particularly, Berkeley, specifically Berkeley Clean Air and LBNL. They publish papers very much along the same lines, meaning modeled health impact based on emission rates, with modeled dispersion, inhalation, modeled disease response and modeled ‘premature deaths’ (shortened lives). The model that affects my work is patently defective and from what I read, willfully so, scoring high on Erin’s Axis of Deceit. The metric is ‘causism’. You divide an imaginary effect A by a Cause B. The more abstract and arbitrary B is, the likelihood of B being real shrinks. A/B therefore provides a higher score on the Causist Index of Deceit.
As every sentient, literate being knows, catastrophic anthropogenic climate change value (A) divided by the tiny confidence in causist factor AG CO2 (B) yields a high value for the metric, Deceit.
So I am asking everyone to keep an eye on this space: pollution, lung and other disease response, impact of that on the global burden of disease (GBD), integrated exposure response (IER) and the shortening of the lives of population cohorts. The real metrics are Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALY) and aDALY’s.
The promise arising from that ‘work’ is that by spending large amounts of money everyone can die post-maturely. That is the same as promising everyone in the class will get above average marks, a result worth paying for, handsomely!
a website
RetractionWatch is brilliant for its exposing flawed science and faed peer reviews etc
when people say they don’t believe Bom or others like NASA etc would fudge data to suit an agenda for grants ongoing..
I ask then ..
if someone will knowingly fake/alter/data on Cancer/surgery/serious illness and drug trials FOR ongoing funding and some fame via publishing
and that info misleads other research and can and does KILL people..
why? would you not consider that the AGW climate crowd would do the same and feel no guilt at all.
Correction: ‘Berkeley Air’ not Berkeley Clean Air’.
What strikes me as crucial is that Pott-Kant’s fabricated “research” – apart from bringing in serious overhead income to her university which therefore shuts up about what it probably knew- focused on the very topics the EPA uses as an excuse to curb carbon under the guise of “pollution”.
Boiled down, we have the US government funding what turns out to be fraudulent research -surrounded by iterative red flags that everyone except the whistleblower choses to ignore, the results of which happen to fit hand in glove with policies enacted by a federal agency operating under direct executive orders.
And guess what? Even though the research has now been exposed as fraudulent, the government will still cite it as grounds for EPA anti-carbon policies..l
Can anyone tell us what else is wrong with this picture?
Crispin in Waterloo – just back from a couple of weeks riding a horse on the north rim of the Grand Canyon so this comment is a bit late.
Nevertheless – I heard this yesterday driving home to Alberta:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/09/27/climate-change-kills-400-000-a-year-new-report-reveals.html
Annual cost of 1.2 Trillion per year according to the U.N.
WHO will undoubtedly build on this.
Interesting that this report was posted in 2012 yet for some reason it was being reported on the news yesterday. I guess someone in the media decided it needed to be recycled to see it it gets traction four years later.
All the best.
Wayne Delbeke
First, you remark gas nothing to do wirh the rather vague article we both just read. By your screen name you’re a contractor for NOAA I take it — if that’s even true — parading as a NOAA employee? Most federal agencies contract out IT programming. This was an article about fraud, right? And then, you snarkily suggest climate scientists should be arrested? How about the changing chemical composition of the atmosphere and increasing ocean acidification, are those made up? What about the current mass extinction underway, also a leftist political fake? Can we arrest that? What would it take for you to look at some real data with an open mind and make an independent evaluation? No fair taking money for an opinion. Ignorance of science is hardly an excuse for any political opinion. Do a little mental work, the information is widely available. Reckless disregard in this case is dangerous.
All of us need to gave a better conversation, and frankly, conscience, than this.
You stated that ignorance of science is hardly an excuse, yet you have waded into a site heavily populated with highly educated, experienced scientists and have spouted drivel as scientific fact. Please educate yourself on ocean ‘acidification’ and mass extinctions. You might also want to read the climategate email scandal to see the foundation for claiming fraud among climate scientists.
I suspect others will weigh in on your remarks, so please enlighten us, what is your educational and professional background in science?
@ur momisugly Twilight
Yr: “better conversation”
Fair enough. Here’s my best shot at a more elevated and temperate “conversation”. And I’ll put matters in a form in which I defer to your superior view of the matter, Twilight.
So, Twilight, you appear to be convinced that CAGW-induced “ocean acidification” and “mass extinction”, and the like, are real and happening and a threat to our planet and the life that occupies it–to include babies and polar bears. Right?
And in “light” of all that, Twilight, would you then agree that those climate scientists who share your beliefs, but who, unlike you Twilight (you’re one of the carbon-free good-guys, I just know, ol’ buddy!) nevertheless jet about from one Gaia-swarm, group-think gab-fest to another spewing their “lethal” CO2 “pollution”, just for the chance to get in a little grab-ass, net-working face-time with their fellow, good-ol’-boy, frequent-flyer academics, and just for the chance, maybe, if they’re lucky, and can control their premature-ejaculation, spastic-dork tendencies, to have a sloppy-seconds “go” at some unengaged, NGO hot-babe, bored out of her gourd and a little pissed, in a vindictive, jealous-female sort of way, that she’s been classified as superfluous to the needs of her originally assigned hive-master, in attendance, whose lifestyle carbon-footprint dwarfs that of many a small island nation threatened by rising sea-levels (you forgot that bogey-man, Twilight, so I helped you out, there), and just for the chance, maybe, if they are really, really lucky, to score the “Big-Score”–a well-planted, passionate, career-enhancing smooch on that same hive-master’s strutting-rump, while catching a dream-of-a-lifetime “ride” with him in his private jet, are just a bunch of brazen-hypocrite, carbon-piggie BABY-KILLERS!!! and POLAR BEAR KILLERS!!!?
And if you then conclude, Twilight, that those climate scientists, identified above, are mass-murderers and mass-extinctioners , as you inevitably must, can you in good “conscience” then recommend anything except that they should be prosecuted without pity for their infamous crimes against humanity and polar bears, and, when they are inevitably found guilty, that they be justly sentenced to the cruelest of all possible punishments–their future, eco-confabbing to be limited, exclusively, to those tree-humper, nerd-pit, pie-hole flapper-fests held as zero-carbon video conferences where Third-World, women climate-scientist of color can attend on an equal footing with the thick-as-thieves, privileged-white-geekballs, currently runnin’ the show, as a “no-girls-allowed”, closed-shop tree-house?
But to answer the question you posed in your comment, Twilight, albeit addressed to another: Yes! I think all that scare-mongering, greenwashed agit-prop and flim-flam that the hive churns-out to advance its brave-new-gulag, dystopian designs on humanity are so much “leftist political fake”. And I’ll continue to think that until I see my betters PRACTICE WHAT THEY PREACH!!!, until I see my betters LEAD FROM THE FRONT AND BY INSPIRING PERSONAL EXAMPLE IN MATTERS OF CARBON-FOOTPRINT REDUCTION!!!
Thank you, Twilight, for your suggestion that the discussion on this thread strive for a “better conversation”–since cashin’ in on your suggestion has been some real fun, guy. Anything else you might have in mind?
Congratulations.
That’s the biggest of pig ignorant, scientifically illiterate, alarmist bollocks I’ve seen in a bloody long time.
Twilight …
1. Way too many typos in your screed to be taken particularly seriously.
2. You seem to be particularly gullible and naive. You believe every Urban Myth that comes along?
3. I pose the same question to you …
4. Vague article? Dude … Duke University is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg:
http://hubpages.com/education/10-Scientists-Who-Turned-Out-to-be-Frauds
Regarding the “problem of ocean acidification”, a few days ago James
Delingpole call for ideas regarding reality of ocean acidification; I suggest
the following experiment be done:
First imagine a mad chemist manages to dissolve ALL the
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into the oceans. It takes 20 years to
accomplish this. This terminates photosynthesis on land, eliminating
agriculture, forests, etc; very serious consequences on land. But are
there also serious consequences for the oceans? Let us assume that
in those 20 years, the ocean currents mix the carbon dioxide down to
a depth of a half mile (we will use English units!).
Carbon dioxide is currently 400 ppm by volume of air, or 607
ppm by weight, as the molecular weight of carbon dioxide is 44, and
air’s mean molecular weight 29. Sea level air pressure is 14.6
pounds/square inch, so the carbon dioxide is 0.0089 pounds/square
inch. We increase this by a factor 1.45 for the atmosphere over land
areas, = 0.0129 pounds/square inch (0.21 ounce/square inch) carbon
dioxide to be dissolved in the oceans.
Each column of ocean water 1 square inch and a half mile deep is a
volume of 31,680 cubic inches. That is the volume of 137 gallons.
That is a good sized salt water aquarium.
So the proposed experiment is to set up such an aquarium in
a laboratory, with coral and some nice colored reef fish, and aquatic
plants. Measure the pH. Then a qualified physical chemist should
calculate and predict what the pH will be after 0.21 ounce of carbon
dioxide is added to the 137 gallons of salt water. The 0.21 ounce of
carbon dioxide is added, perhaps as a small chip of dry ice, and the
aquarium stirred thoroughly. Then the pH is measured again, and
compared to the initial measurement and the predicted value.
Anyone expecting some serious acidification in this aquarium?
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0005738 (via https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/07/the-numbers-on-bad-science/ )
The problem goes well beyond Duke University.
“…..but 81% were…..”
A terrible indictment of a sub-culture. There are always statistical outliers of bad actors, but this signals a pervasive problem.
Not really – the number of cases is fairly low given the 10s of thousands or researchers working around the world. Compare that to the number of incidents of fraud in the corporate world.
“Not really – the number of cases is fairly low given the 10s of thousands or researchers working around the world. Compare that to the number of incidents of fraud in the corporate world.”
Eh? what’s it got to do with fraud elsewhere? Even if your statement could be shown to be true?
Businesses exist to make money, researchers to find the “truth”. Deliberately faking results to fkae the truth is as bad as you can get.
Read this yesterday in the TIPS and Notes area….You are probably right, this is only the tip of the iceberg…
How can there be an iceberg with all this oppressive GlobalWarming™ heat floating around and the oceans boiling etc.
The ice is made of man made carbon dioxide, of course.
I wonder if another whistleblower will surface in Penn State.
With multi-million dollar payouts, it’s is probably very tempting, especially to someone with already corrupted thinking.
I would guess that the payout for the WB is related to the sum recovered. It is only that large because of the size of the alleged fraud.
Hopefully Mann will be stupid and greedy enough to dob himself in..?
Apparently only private universities need be concerned. Government funded universities can carry on with as much fraud as they like with no fear of investigation or prosecution. Mann enjoys a truly safe place.
Bravo and more like this. Universities and individual researchers have been ripping off taxpayers around the world for many years. We can and have shown that tax money flows to researchers from agenda driven politicians.Each case that can be proven and publicized increases awareness and rightful skepticism among the public.
One John Beale is worth one thousand scientific debates in the all important battle for public opinion. Most people understand the original deadly sins when they see them at work. Btw… John Beales’ s enabler at EPA now works at Duke.
Anyone who has worked for a large organization knows about people like John Beale. Somehow they don’t appear to be working as hard as anybody else but they manage to take advantage of everything. They attend meetings near ski resorts in snow season and everyone at the meeting wonders why an electrical engineer is at a meeting about wood grouse habitat.
John Beale reminds me a lot of Wally in the Dilbert comic.
I don’t think most people will be shocked at a story about a shirker. On the other hand, stories about people who fake their scientific data will have the bad effect of making people distrustful of all science.
You should be distrustful of science. That’s how science works. There’s always more to the story, except when it comes to climate change. Because as we all know, ‘the science is settled’.
Well, in recent 20-odd years many things changed in science, as a social circle. It became increasingly hostile for people outside the institutions. I’m about to pocket a PhD degree shortly, as an outsider working for a non-academic company, and boy! was it a struggle. I think I’m qualified to say science, as a social circle, has lost its touch with real people. I expect it to fall from grace, and it is only a question of which branch of science will trigger the downfall. There are other contenders, but CAGW quacks are championing in that run.
There is a chance to fix the science as a whole if the scientific community separates itself from this quackery.
Hlaford September 3, 2016 at 2:19 pm ” . . . science, as a social circle, has lost its touch with real people.” I could care less about their out of touchness with real people. It would be helpful if they were in touch with actual data.
Replication is the key to confirmation, not peer review. Though a researcher ought (in the spirit of humility) publish along with their results and the details of the experiment, the raw data, and the full details of any code used in the analysis.
I was shocked by the attitude evidenced by one climate researcher, who justified not disclosing his data and methods with “why should I reveal them to you, just so you can find fault“. Failed his Philosophy of Science, or Scientific Method 101 course, with that.
Hopefully we’ll get some inside juice from RGB@Duke.
I haven´t seen anything from RGB@Duke lately, I miss his presence. Is there anybody out there who can enlighten us?
Ask him yourself.
http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/contact.php
Good idea – I just threw him a mail.
Why am I not surprised?
I wonder if Lewandowsky has any disgruntled research assistants who know all about how he has gone about doing his research? One whistle-blower out of that group could knock out 97% of the “97% Consensus.”
It happened to D. Stapel, but his case was especially egregious – making stuff up out of whole cloth, which went on for years. I suspect there are too many AGW narrative-pushers and other SJW-types hovering around Stephan L. for anything less than that to be called out.
Making stuff up was the only way they could get grant funding. At some point, there is going to be a humongous train wreck that will damage the image of science for a generation, minimum.
The saddest part of this for me pyeatte is I believe this is evidence the damage has already been done. Along with poll results that show AGW to be at the bottom of the list of concerns in the vast majority of people’s minds, it shows the sciences are attracting scam artists in record numbers. I’d say it’s safe to assume the majority of folks actively participating in this forum have well thought out ethical concerns about climate science; it appears from this report there are other branches effected by it, in this example cardiology.
People in general are aware of the corruption of science and there’s been no more public display in my lifetime than what’s been exposed by the climate folks. Young people are influenced by what they see as “social norms” and this is what happens when corruption becomes normal.
Surprise, surprise
Sunspots reduce the maxima of photons.
Wow! I will wait for further details though, as my trust in academia and the courts to hold them accountable has been sullied. It will be another whitewash affair I am afraid. Another “I don’t recall” moment.
Presumably someone is going through Michael Mann’s papers…?
It would be a stunning act of justice if McIntyre got a multi-million payout for the many years of work he’s done on this…
The case ismuch more nuanced and complicated than the headline implies. Read the whole Science article and follow-on to Retraction Watch.
It does show what happens when false/erroroneos findings lead to additional follow-up studies which then have no possibility of being correct as they are based on incorrect assumtions from the previous bad study. An Error Cascade (in this case the error comes from scientific misconduct).
Rather than being automagicly self-correcting, Science is prone to these episodes of lemmings folowing false trails. Sarewitz used the phrase – “Lemmings Study Mice” referring to cancer researchers studying mice as models for men, even knowing that they don’t serve that function well.
…assumptions…
Kip, maybe your first spelling was more nearly correct – you just missed out the hyphen between the second s and the u.
yes, it’s not supposed to work like that but a lot of scientists don’t seem to bother checking papers which they cite as a source of information.
In effect you are endorsing a paper if you cite it as a source. ( That is why citations are taken as the main measure of worth in academia ). However, it seems that most scientists just take it as proven result if is published and charge ahead.
This obviously adds a positive feedback to spurious results, rather the claimed self correction.
“erroroneos” !
This may not be the way the word is (correctly) spelled – but, by God!, it’s the way it SHOULD be spelled!
er·ro·ne·ous == something with a lot of errons.
Gotta love English — I am more often betrayed by my lying eyes and happy fingers (which type the whatever they feel like sometimes) now that I am a bit older (compared to 30 years ago, when I was just plain stump dumb.)
I missed that on first reading.
that was fun – thanks
@Kip: Are errons the same thing as bogons?
Too bad this didn’t involve a ‘climate researcher’.
Well, this one didn’t, but this is only the beginning.
What? They’d simply make a poll on that and find 97% consensus of their innocence.
…and her science was cited how many times
I hope they bust them good…and put them under
From Sciencemag, by Alison McCook, Retraction WatchSep. 1, 2016 , 2:00 PM
“Thomas, who says he participated in the review, claims that other reviewers and pulmonary division staff (at Duke) told him that Potts-Kant doctored nearly every experiment or project in which she participated. Sometimes, the suit alleges, she hadn’t exposed mice to the right experimental conditions or run the experiments at all. Other times, Thomas alleges, Potts-Kant had run the experiments but altered the data, tweaking them to match the hypothesis or boost their statistical significance.”
and,
“Relatively few of these cases have targeted research universities (see box, below); many allege fraud in health care or military programs. But that’s changing. The FCA “is increasingly being used to target alleged fraud in a diverse array of industries, including research and academia,” says attorney Suzanne Jaffe Bloom of Winston & Strawn LLP in New York City. Although recent court rulings suggest public universities may have some protection from qui tam suits because they are government entities, private institutions do not.”
Very interesting, and unfortunate that according to a recent ruling by the US Supreme Court, public universities are exempt from the False Claims Act (FCA). WUWT is a great forum, and maybe could start to dig into EPA publications about the alleged connection between pulmonary health and relatively low levels of pollutants measured in American cities.
so they are private when it comes to FOIA…
..and government when they get sued
So we see why other fields have been so quiet about criticising rigged papers in climatology. They are scared it would attract a spotlight on their own field.
If you get public money, you should be subject to public scrutiny.
stop cheering. This is not a good development. Science is done by people who make mistakes and make errors in judgment. By definition, a good scientist always operates in a state of confusion. Withholding of further funding should be enough. The idea that “you have nothing to be afraid of if you have done nothing wrong” is, needless to say, a very shaky foundation for a healthy society. Perhaps I do not want to submit a grant at all if I am afraid that some disgruntled former colleague of mine will accuse me of fraud and I will have to explain myself to the police and face financial ruin. Science cannot operate this way.
Of course people make mistakes. But this was not a mistake. The scientist in question knowingly fabricated results in order to get funding.
Yes, Peter, but she’d probably seen Peter Gleick getting off without so much as a police interview after having effectively admitted wire fraud.
Why should scientists not be allowed to lie, cheat and commit fraud? How do you expect them to work ?! Science cannot operate this way.
Do these critics know how difficult it is to produce results that agree with the predictions of one’s hypothesis?
What the heck are they supposed to do, just admit they were wrong and go back to the drawing board?
It is very difficult to look smarter than you really are if and when you keep being wrong.
Thomas Edison made 10,000 mistakes before he came up with the Tungsten light filament. But when he got it wrong he said so and moved on to the next option.
Menicholas – You left off the /sarc … I hope! LOL
John Teisen September 3, 2016 at 1:51 pm
Thomas Edison made 10,000 mistakes before he came up with the Tungsten light filament. But when he got it wrong he said so and moved on to the next option.
It was William Coolidge who came up with the Tungsten filament not Edison!
Mr. McGoo,
I always try to make my sarcastic remarks obvious enough that they need no tags.
🙂
And I seem to recall Edison finally got his lightbulb to work by using cotton thread coated with lampblack.
Hey, wait a second…lampblack sounds like…CARBON!
Oh nos!
fraudulent data in applications and reports involving more than 60 grants
John T, Edison did not invent the tungsten filament. Edison first used carbonized thread and later paper, then a certain type of bamboo from Japan. A couple of dudes from Austria created sintered tungsten filaments from 1904 to 1911. They were too brittle. William D. Coolidge was the first to come up with a method to draw tungsten in 1908 into a wire and henceforth make tungsten filaments. My wife’s family lives in Benxi China. I became friends with the chief of police one day and he took me to his brother’s shop. They make filaments one at a time. Heat wire, turn with a simple machine, clip, then on to next step to make uniform and clean up, This country would call it a sweat shop. Not American working conditions, but all I could see was smiles. I believe that I estimated that they use about a ton to a ton and a half of wire each month depending on their sales schedule.
A good scientist never, never operates in a state of confusion, that’s pop science B.S. A good scientist operates in a state of uncertainty, with that uncertaiinty moderated by replicates of results and congruence with the logical conditions that govern the systems and domains within which they work, (e.g., laws of thermodynamics).
I am cheering, an academic fraud of this magnitude should spend 3 to 5 years in the custody of the Federal prison system, and the while I generally have respect for Duke University, but they are utimately responsible and need to be held accountable for the work product of their employees.
I disagree. This was not a simple mistake by Potts-Kant. It was cold, calculated, systemic fraud over a long time period. This can’t be allowed in science, especially in the Health and Medical fields. People’s lives could be put at risk.
When the taxpayer is being tapped by the power of the IRS, and those funds forcibly taken from the taxpayer are used to fund supposedly scientific research in the form of “grants” I’m afraid mf that we the tax payer expect a much higher standard of ethics than simply “people make mistakes .”
Mr. Mac. of MacDonald Aircraft used to say: “We seldom fire a person who makes a mistake. We ALWAYS fire a person who tries to cover up a mistake. ”
And good scientists do NOT operate in a state of confusion.
It says something about the “academic environment” if persons in it can’t choose between being honest and being funded.
At least in industry, the success of one’s work efforts has a direct bearing on the ability of one’s employer to keep paying his(er) salary.
If YOU don’t have skin in the game, what motivation is there to keep your nose clean.
There is no satisfaction quite like watching a fellow citizen freely take money out of his own wallet, and place it down on the counter in exchange for some product that YOU personally helped develop into a money making success story for your employer/
G
Not on my nickel you don’t
Very well said; I’m with George on this one.
The tendency to make mistakes is about like ignorance. We are all born with it; and it is not a disease.
Yes we learn from mistakes. Hopefully we seek to correct the consequences of a mistake as soon as we recognize it.
There is NO responsibility of the general public to fund the life style of people who feel they want to spend their lives doing “research” as if there is merit in that. Such life choices often come with a retirement pension that many in the private sector can never afford themselves.
But by choice, we often collectively (via government systems) DO fund such activities, in the belief (sometimes quite misguided) that something that contributes to the common good can come from such things.
In pioneer America, farmer Jones’ daughter was engaged to round up the community kids, in the local Church building, and try to teach them something useful and to keep them out from under the plow horses.
Well it’s gotten (there’s that word) a whole lot more complex today, but the motivation is not greatly different.
So I don’t freak out over ALL taxpayer funded research. I also don’t need or want to be in the decision chain as to what should be researched by such means. So I tolerate a lot of latitude as to that.
But the columns of WUWT do present us with a constant stream of stuff being “researched” that just defies rational explanation.
But we ought to at least be able to demand honesty in those pursuits.
As for other folks buying your wares or the results of that; in the instance of one of my efforts, I stopped watching the numbers after the first two billion of “my” gizmos had been shipped world wide. I assume at least one billion persons use one, although I don’t claim they each bought their own.
And the knockoffs swelled the numbers beyond those I directly contributed to.
I think it is six years since that 2E9 number was shipped, so who knows where it is now. There also are plenty of them now that I had nothing to do with.
My effort was of course only one part of the puzzle; but worthy enough to be preserved in the peer reviewed literature of the US (and foreign) Patent Office.
Now there is plenty of academic research output that leaves my puny efforts in the dust.
That’s great, and is why I pay attention to such things. We all gain from results that benefit things we may not even know about. It is not too much for us to at least get a run for our money.
G
Making an honest mistake and committing deliberate fraud are two entirely different things. Altering the data, or not doing the experiments at all and just making up the data to get money, is deliberate fraud. If it is allowed to continue in the name of giving scientists the leeway to “make mistakes,” it will destroy science. Think also of all the lives that could be lost due to fake research in health-related fields. For all we know, this researcher is already a mass murderer due to conclusions drawn from her fake pulmonary research.
Think also of misrepresenting computer models as ‘evidence’.
mf September 3, 2016 at 9:44 am
I have agree with mf
This researcher was stealing medical research grant monies and spending those funds “buying merchandise from Amazon, Walmart, and Target”. WALMART? you steal thousands and then bargain shop at Walmart?
That is one cornfused “researcher”.
Was there not a higher end establishment that this individual could have frequented?
michael
Oh yeah Erin Potts-Kant, knew exactly what she was doing. She is a thief.
Why pay too much for the same thing? But I’m just being an efficient German again.. 🙂
“By definition, a good scientist always operates in a state of confusion.”
That is complete nonsense.
There is a vast, vast difference between honest error and deliberate fraud, and this case involves the latter.
You are wrong.
Corruption should never be either rewarded or let go unpunished.
Healthy societies demand justice for those wronged and punishment for those doing wrong.
Every time corruption or incompetence is discovered and rooted out, it improves science.
Firstly, it removes bad data that could potentially prove lethal. (Want to swallow a drug someone like this had a hand in developing? )
Second, it reminds those like her that ,if they do the same thing, they too will face the consequences.
This reduces the number of bad actors and so increases the confidence people have in science.
It also reduces the time and energy wasted redoing the work correctly.
Not being able to trust the work of others wastes huge amounts of time and resources that should be better spent elsewhere.
@ur momisugly mf September 3, 2016 at 9:44 am
Please read what you just wrote. You may want to retract your comment or rewrite it. I hope you can/will see the problem.
These grants were probably tainted with “Big Oil” tax money anyway
“This is not a good development. Science is done by people who make mistakes and make errors in judgment.”
But perhaps the error in judgment was the belief that she could get away with it or that her mentors would be watching her back.
“By definition, a good scientist always operates in a state of confusion.”
Not if the science is settled and the outcome pre-decided, then there is no confusion at all. You are arguing for a lack of accountability, the scourge of our “enlightened” age.
How misogynistic! /sarc
Would anybody at George Mason University be just a little nervous about this?
Peer review has been corrupted in all fields of climate change. Someone should research the number of times authors cite themselves or get good buddies to do the same for them. Worst of all are the reviewers for large grants – why isn`t their group of `friends` ever investigated? When reviewers are asked how they are connected to applicants, huge lies and misinformation are used frequently. The entire system needs tightening up, especially when tax-payers money is involved. Everybody I know has such information about individuals who have received large research grants for trivial `research` that would not stand up to professional/legal/public scrutiny or proper peer review. We all know them!
@Dave, peer review doesn’t guarantee the results are valid because it doesn’t replicate testing. Peer review should assure the reasonableness of methods and results. I’m sure peer review catches a lot of mistakes.
Eric,
What is the green movement within academia about?
Getting money, advancing socialism, publish or perish, picking up “chicks”.
The CAGW scam has been a wonderfully tempting environment for big dollars, rapid acceptance of papers, wealth redistribution apparatus creation, and appealing to the impressionable youthful “chicks” for … you know…
Regardless of the case noted above, the UN-CAGW scam is chock full of abuse….. you know it. So ..how do you ravel/unravel the machine?
Sue them in federal court for fraud. Take their money, discredit their publications, shame their politics and watch the “chicks” deride them.
Now, how do I get in on this? (the finder’s fee bit I mean)
When I was doing a doctoral thesis, two of my supervisors -almost in unison- looked at me one day. laughed, and then said. ”Hypothesis?” You finish your thesis, read it over to the end come up with a hypothesis based on what you have done then place it at the beginning. I also laughed thinking they were just having fun! (I never followed their ”advice” yet still had my thesis pass external peer-review).
She didn’t mean to do wrong, doesn’t remember, doesn’t recall, misunderstood, thought it was alphabetical… what difference, at this point, does it make?
… and you ask what’s the fuss about the missing blackberries? Haven’t I proven with indisputable, geometric logic that the blackberries were stolen? There must have been an assistant who had access to them. After all, anybody can make a spare key to a yoga room, or a bedroom, or the sauna… (rolling ball bearings)
She is wise in her own eyes and clever in her own sight.
They need to move 20 miles down the road where the good folks at UNC Chapel Hill make these guys at Duke look like the amateurs that they are. The amount of corruption in that school is totally beyond belief from top to bottom.
Where’s the post about California regulating cow farts?
…Re: Regulating cow farts…..
“The bill also calls for efforts to significantly increase composting to eliminate the amount of food waste in landfills, which releases methane when it breaks down.”
What do they think happens when you compost ? D’oh !
Think? You expect too much.
“What do they think happens when you compost ?”
That’ll be the same administration that came within a gnat’s whisker of banning dihydrogen monoxide, presumably?
Thanks for bringing that up Roger Bournival. California is afraid of EVERYTHING, not just cow farts; you know that fishing poles can cause cancer and birth defects don’t you? California is the mother ship for the bogus idea money tree with outposts in Boulder, CO. They are making it hard to claim one has received an “education”.
What does that tell you about the quality of the media.
I am flabbergasted.