Without their halos

Bad Science Muckrakers Question the Big Science Status Quo

Among the American public, trust in professional scientists and scientific journals is declining. Yet an overwhelming majority still believes that science “remains a source for good in the world.” Could the public be on to something? Medical-doctor-turned-journalistIvan Oransky thinks so. And it’s a growing problem.

As editor and publisher of Retraction Watch, a closely followed industry blog that tracks peer-reviewed journal articles withdrawn from publication, Oransky is raising awareness of the impact that competition for grants and career advancement is having on the quality of the science being produced. Far from being above the fray and immune to corrupting influences, “Scientists are just as human as anyone else,” says Oransky. And increasingly, “People are starting to see scientists the way they really are.”One of the deeper problems is the publish-or-perish fight for resources, tenure, and prestige among the elite scientists whose living depends on maintaining the trust of the taxpayers who foot their bills. “Publication is the coin of the realm in academia,” says Oransky. “If you want to get tenure, if you want to get grants, if you want get promoted, if you want to get exposed to companies that might license your products, you have to publish in top journals.”

The academic pecking order is based on the number of papers a scientist gets published in high impact factor journals, that is, journals whose papers are heavily cited by other scientists. And yet, “The vast majority of scientific publications are never cited. There are something like 30,000 [published papers] a week.” How many of those can be first rate? How much second- and third-rate science is being funded? And how can we know?

The surge of publications is a direct result of the tsunami of money that washed over the industry between 1998 and 2003 with the doubling of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget. “It was a gold rush,” says Oransky. “What scientists did was grow their labs so they can produce more papers so they can get more grants.”

But, like a real gold rush, the bonanza couldn’t go on forever. So, asks Oransky, “What happens to all those folks when the doubling stops?” NIH funding has currently leveled out at between $30 billon and $40 billion a year, depending on how you count it. In an era of stagnant budgets, competition for limited funding has become cutthroat. That has led some scientists to take shortcuts. And that, in turn, has caused retractions to soar.

That’s a serious problem. As Oransky explains, “A retraction means there is something deeply wrong” with a given academic paper. “About two thirds of the time, that’s actually something that’s considered misconduct – the official federal definition of which is falsification, fabrication, or plagiarism.”

Another major problem is that many study results cannot be reliable reproduced. Oransky cites a famous paper by Dr. John Iaonnidis, “Why most published research findings are false,” that shows the inherent biases and the flawed statistical analyses built into most “hypothesis driven” research, resulting in publications that largely represent “accurate measures of the prevailing bias.”

To make matters worse, private research dollars are being choked off by ill-conceived regulations, making researchers even more dependent on government grants, as Dr. Thomas Stossel at Harvard Medical School points out.

Stossel calls overly restrictive conflict of interest regulations “a damaging solution in search of a problem.” A self-described “typical academic socialist, totally living on grants for the first third of my career,” Stossel says his eyes were opened in 1987, when he was asked to serve on the scientific advisory board of Biogen (now Biogen IDEC), a fledgling biotech startup that went on to become a tremendous success. “I realized how fundamentally honest business people are compared to my academic colleagues, who’d run their grandmothers over for recognition.”

While working with Biogen, Stossel learned how difficult it was to translate academic research into products that actually help people. “It was during that time that conflict of interest mania emerged.” In 1988 Harvard Medical School instituted the first conflict of interest rules, largely as a result of an incident at the Mass Eye and Ear infirmary that was sensationalized by The Boston Globe.

Stossel characterizes this rationale as, “If I am paid by a corporation to do research, I am going to lie, cheat and steal.” Based on his experience at Biogen, he calls this a “total inversion of reality.” He notes that, “95 percent of the scientific papers retracted for falsification, fabrication, or plagiarism have no commercial connection.” And yet, conflict of interest rules continue to proliferate, choking off what could be a critical alternative to taxpayer funding.

In his farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower warned of a day when, “because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity,” and “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

Thanks to the work they are doing, Dr. Ivan Oransky and Dr. Thomas Stossel may help us heed Ike’s warning. They are my guests this week on RealClear Radio Hour. You can hear them describe the problem in their own words here.