Webinar for Lynn Kamerlin group at University of Uppsala, Sweden. Presentation and cartoons CC-BY-NC-ND

1. leonid.schneider@gmail.com
Twitter: @schneiderleonid
www.ForBetterScience.com
Leonid Schneider, PhD
Independent science journalist
Bad science kills

2. Outline
 The danger and origins of science fraud
 Blowing the whistle in a rotten system
 The Macchiarini affair
 COVID-19 and hydroxychloroquine
 For better science

3. Sure, fraudulent clinical research can be deadly,
but basic science?
 Biomedicine: much of preclinical basic research ends up in clinic, fraud
directly dangerous to humans
 Plant, invertebrate, fungi research often aims at pest control: fraud results in
dangerous pesticides, toxic GMOs
 Chemistry: fraud will lead to environment/food pollution
 Physics, engineering, material sciences: malfunctions and material toxicity
 Climate research: take a guess
 etc

4. Is bad science
individual or systemic failure?
Hint: it’s both!

5. Why do scientists manipulate data?
 To prove a pre-conceived
theory against lack of
experimental evidence
 To scoop a competitor lab on
an unpublished discovery
they made
 When caught: careless
visionary genius, someone
else did it, findings still
reproducible, conclusions
always unaffected

6. Junior scientists are often pressured or bullied by their advisors:
- If you can deliver this result, you will publish a nice paper
and have a job
- If you don’t deliver this result, you will not publish any
paper and have no job (or get deported!)
Dangerous confirmation bias:
- repeating experiment to be sure of its result’s reproducibility
is not the same as
- repeating it until the result finally fits the “expected” one
How it starts

7. Scientists occasionally help data to fit their
theoretical model for a publication
 Selective data acquisition, omission of critical
controls (very common)
 “Adjustments” or manipulation of data
(more widespread than you think!)
 Data falsification / fraud
(rare, often by „recycling“ old data)

8. Paper mills
 China took over in scientic research output
 Much of this research is unreliable or outright fraudulent*
 A lot is fabricated outright by third-party contractors: papermills
 We only know of China, but what about India, Iran, The West??
* This is what happens
when state imposes goals
and direction of research

9. Unnatural selection for research misconduct
 Scientists waste time, money and their careers trying to reproduce bad science
others made at little cost.
 Highly competitive environment polluted by bad science undermines
productivity, motivation and work moral: people leave or cheat
 Bully PIs demanding results foster research misconduct in their labs
 Dishonest mentors procreate by appointing dishonest mentees into faculty jobs

10. Risk vs gain
 Manipulating data or working “sloppily” is a risk
 Benefits are huge: science rarely sanctions misconduct
 Risk to your career diminishes with your status increase:
 Junior researchers get sacked while professors get reprimanded
 Senior researchers enjoy supportive and forgiving peer
networks
 Avoid getting caught until tenure!
 Blame student/postdoc/technician/third party

11. Journals and funding agencies prefer
simplistic, but sensationalist “breakthrough” science
• Simple mechanisms for disease cures
• Hot topics: Microbiome, AI
• Stem cells! Regenerative medicine! Organs from lab!
• Translational/Commercial potential
• Or just something totally crazy (e.g., arsenic bacteria)

12. What happens if a published paper is found to
contain manipulated data?
1. Correction (rare)
2. Retraction (even rarer)
3. Nothing* (most common)
*unless it enters public debate

13. Every paper on its own merit
• Academia loves to give second chances to fraudsters. It shows tolerance and openness.
But not to whistleblowers who report fraud.
• Same with journals: a convicted fraudster is rarely blacklisted. Trust is restored if no
visible data manipulation is detected.

14. Do not rely on authorities to solve things quietly
• Sometimes, it’s the authorities themselves who engage in misconduct
(university rectors, institute directors, journal editors etc)
• Letters to editor almost never work
• Make things public: Publicly available valid criticisms are much more
difficult to ignore
• Whistle-blowers should consider anonymity
when reporting data integrity concerns
• Once it’s on internet or even in media,
the snowballs starts rolling

15. • Scientists prefer to share
constructive criticisms by
private communications
• PubPeer users mostly wish
to report data irregularities
• PubPeer was founded as
“online journal club” and
became a platform for
flagging data manipulations
• Read PubPeer comments
and form your own opinion!
Use PubPeer, to inform yourself and others!

16. In biomedicine, bad basic research
quickly catches up with patients
Trachea transplant scandals around surgeon
Paolo Macchiarini
and his past collaborators in UK, Germany,
Sweden and Russia:
•No previous lab tests or animal experiments
•Misinformed patient becomes research subject

17. The trachea transplant scandal of Paolo Macchiarini
•Paolo Macchiarini, thorax
surgeon, stem cell pioneer,
former Karolinska professor
•Transplanted patients with
cadaveric and plastic
tracheas seeded with bone
marrow cells, mostly in
Spain, Italy, Sweden & Russia
•Almost all trachea recipients
died, few lucky survivors
Photo credit: Staffan Larsson

18. A crook in a crooked system
 Macchiarini took advantage of hype and greed in biomedical research
 He changed institutions when things got too hot, charmed new university with
fresh promises of fame and money
 Scandal was only exposed because of Swedish journalists
 Every single university and hospital still covering up the Macchiarini affair

19. Macchiarini scandal had it all
 Stem cell /regenerative medicine hype
 Top journal seal of scientific veracity: The Lancet
 Huge funding, political support (especially with Governor of Tuscany)
 Extremely simplistic, evidence-unsupported science and wishful thinking
 Gross misrepresentation of results, clinical outcomes, data manipulation
 Ethics breach at every step
 Institutional threatening of whistleblowers
 Suppression of investigations
 Legal attacks on journalism (myself)
Source: Corriere Fiorentino

20. The Compassionate Use trick of testing therapies
•Large animal experiments require ethics
approvals, scientific rationale, and are very costly
•Need proper controls (untreated or standard
therapies), survival rates and side effects must be
reported to the peer community
•You cannot report only one barely surviving pig
as success and hide a dozen dead ones
•Media is barely interested in successful animal
experiments
•Your animal experiments can be easily disproven
by others trying to reproduce them
Pig vs Patient
•Ethics and regulatory approvals can be skipped under
hospital exemption / compassionate use, when life of
patient is allegedly in grave danger
•No controls needed. No comparisons with existing
therapies.
•Dead or mutilated patients don’t have to be ever reported.
They cease to have existed
•Only alleged successes (=survivors) are announced to peer
community and media
•No one can challenge your claims, only you have access to
patient and medical history

21. Coronavirus and bad science

22. Coronavirus and bad science
 COVID-19 brought bad science and our tolerance for it into the
spotlight
 mRNA vaccines are being pushed without proper testing or even
scientific basis
 Phony COVID-19 cures are pushed by real scientists: stem cells,
nanoparticles, anti-ageing supplements, female hormones,
internal UV-light, gamma irradiation, vitamins D or K, even
cheese

23. Cigarettes against COVID-19!
 Bad, stupid, dangerous science was always there. But during COVID-19, it takes
center stage.
 French clinical researcher Zahir Amoura and Jean-Pierre Changeux, star of Institut
Pasteur, suggest tobacco products as preventive therapy against COVID-19. Based
on their opinion piece published as preprint.
 Made international news

24. Swedish herd immunity
 Sweden listened to SOME scientists like Anders Tegnell to try the „herd
immunity“ approach
 Most other scientists (especially abroad) disagreed
 As result, Sweden has proportionally the highest mortality in Northern Europe

25. Didier Raoult and Hydroxychloroquine
There is no sane reason why HCQ was picked as COVID-19 panacea. But Didier Raoult
from IHU Marseille is expert in tropical infectious diseases, born in Africa, and an eager
user of malaria drug chloroquine

26. If academia only acted on Raoult‘s misconduct and
bullying…
 Raoult is a known abusive bully who
specifically targets women
 He is a vengeful narcissist with a need for
personality cult who does not allow any
opposition, by people or by scientific results
 He protected a vile racist sexual harasser,
ridiculed victims and even re-installed the
sacked abuser
 French authorities and the scientific
community knew everything, but let Raoult
keep his power
 Raoult was found guilty of research misconduct and banned by American Society
for Microbiology (ASM)
 He then turned to publish in journals he controls (like now, with HCQ)

28. Utter meltdown of a rotten system
 Surgeon Sapan Desai is a fraudster and liar, but he always played the system by
making powerful friends
 He created Surgisphere, a database of thousands of hospitals, out of his bum
 In team with some high-ranking researchers, Desai published 2 fraudulent COVID-
19 papers in NEJM and The Lancet. Latter claimed HCQ was killing people.
 If only Desai did not fake about HCQ, or faked HCQ effect in opposite direction,
these papers would not be retracted, but cited thousand-fold (while murdering
thousands).

29. What’s the point of science?
• Is a paper validated by some peer reviewers, so others don’t have
to read it after it’s published?
• Are we writing papers for peer reviewers only then? What kind of
science is this?
@schneiderleonid

30. Preprints as a better way
 Sure, much bad science on COVID-19 appeared as preprint. But it
was swiftly debunked, ridiculed and rarely made it into peer
reviewed journals
 The most dangerous COVID-19 studies appeared in peer reviewed
journals (cf Raoult, Desai), or as data-free press releases only!

31. Preprints work!
• Your own manuscript can be published
online, gratis, with DOI before or
during submission to a journal
• Negative/contradictory results
welcome
• Preprints are not peer-reviewed
• Most biology & chemistry journals
accept preprints and some even allow
direct preprint submission
• Preprints can be rejected for
plagiarism and non-research

32. You have the power to make science better!
• Preprint your research
• Never compromise your own research integrity
• Do not work with bad scientists
• Engage in post-publication peer review
• Expose irreproducible and bad science
• Report suspected research misconduct
• They are more afraid of you
than you of them!

33. Thank you!
Website: forbetterscience.com
Slides: slideshare.net/LeonidSchneider
Email: leonid.schneider@gmail.com
Twitter: @schneiderleonid