A Science News report about Dr. Eliezer Masliah (who held a highly important role at the National Institute of Aging), a 300-page dossier composed of misconducts at his lab, as well as followups… Featuring everyone’s favorite research integrity sleuths (Elizabeth Bik, Mu Yang, “Cheshire”, …) and more.
Post URL points to archive.org due to soft paywall on Science News. Here’s the original link
Reading about this is making me feel sick. It’s so sad how many people’s lives have been negatively affected because of this Masliah’s dishonesty. I think people who fake research like this belong in jail.
Sadly I think low key dishonesty is even more prevalent than what this guy did - the way we dole out money encourages researchers in every field to cherry pick data so that they can keep getting funding.
It’s definitely way more prevalent. There actually is this post from Retractionwatch just a few days ago too. This is kind-of a systematic issue induced by how scientific funding & the system works…
My current PI is actually co-mentoring a student who was studying scientific fraud, but the problem is… being a fraud researcher is apparently a really good way to alienate a lot of people, which ensures you never make it in academia (which is heavily dependent on networking/knowing people)… so I don’t know how many ppl would seriously study this.