This document outlines issues with bad science and proposes ways to improve science. It discusses how the current system rewards sensationalist and misleading research over reproducibility. Issues highlighted include data manipulation, lack of transparency, tolerance of misconduct, and wasted funding. The document argues that preprints, public scrutiny, and whistleblowing can help make science more reliable and honest by exposing irreproducible findings and research misconduct. Citizens are encouraged to engage in post-publication peer review and help hold researchers accountable.

1. leonid.schneider@gmail.com
Twitter: @schneiderleonid
www.ForBetterScience.com
Leonid Schneider, PhD
Independent science journalist
Bunk, fraud and waste
in neuroscience:
Making science better is in your hands

2. Outline
 Science: a game show
 Bunk, racism and misogyny
 Human Drain Project
 Rotten elites
 Broken publishing
 COVID-19 and bad science
 Fixing science

3. $$$
The money cycle
Paper-to-funding convertion
Funding used for research…

4. The Reputation Game
• Peer review was invented as an internal selection tool
• Originally in same way fiction literature is published: editors decide if they
want to publish this scientific paper in their society’s proceedings.
• Only in mid-20th century external peer reviewers were invited to advice the
editor. Traditional peer review was born.
• Journals started to compete for “hottest” stories and relied on peer review as
tool of verification
• Impact factor was invented to measure a journal’s popularity
• Scientists, media and society fell for it

5. Scientists occasionally help data to fit the story
 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)

6. Unnatural selection for bad science
 Scientists waste time, money and careers with irreproducible science made at
little cost
 Competitive environment polluted by bad science undermines productivity,
motivation and work moral: resign or resignate
 Bulling PIs demanding results foster research misconduct
 Dishonest mentors procreate by appointing dishonest mentees into faculty jobs

7. Risk vs gain
 “Cutting corners” 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

8. Anything goes
Just tell’em a story
Data is illustrations
Conclusions not affected

9. Journals and funders love
sensationalist “breakthrough” science
• Simple mechanisms for disease cures
• Hot topics and methods: Microbiome, AI, GWAS
• Stem cells! Regenerative medicine! Organs from lab!
• Translational/Commercial potential
• Or just something totally crazy (e.g., arsenic bacteria)

10. Industry of crap

11. Alysson Muotri:
conscious mini-brains in crab robots
• Biggest science news, of stuff too silly for cheap
science fiction novels
• Alysson Muotri of UCSD knows all the keywords,
and has all the best backing. Everyone is either
enthralled or afraid to make fun of his “science”

12. Male brains are smarter!
• The bad science of gender brain difference just won’t die
• For every debunked paper, dozens of new get published
• Incidentally, many proponents of male intellectual superiority are also
eugenicists and racists

13. Race and IQ
• The pseudoscience of race and IQ is disgusting. Most proponents are dead or
very old (Richard Lynn, J Philippe Rushton, Charles Murray)
• But there is a new generation like Emil Kirkegaard, who still manage to publish
racist bunk, e.g. in Elsevier or MDPI

14. IQ eugenics going strong
• In 2019, Nature Communications published a eugenics/ social Darwinism paper
• The authors led by Ian Deary and Stuart Ritchie say your financial wealth is coded in
your genes. They and others previously postulated IQ and education attainment are
genetic also (and that female intelligence is “different” from male).
• Top science communicators openly endorse eugenics of IQ and wealth genetics.

15. Angela Saini’s books
• Inferior (sexism in science)
• Superior (racism in science)

16. Human Brain Project: a €1 BILLION money grave

17. From Markram to Amunts
• HBP was set up in 2013 by EPFL professor Henry Markram (who also set up Frontiers)
• Funded by EU Commission with €500mn, + €500mn from member states
• Markram promised EU Commission to simulate human brain in super-computer,
consciousness and all. With mouse brain as extra. Everyone fell for it.
• HBP was initially ruled by Markram alone, plus 2 friends.
• Right away protests began, mostly by neuroscientists excluded from HBP
• From inside, a 2014 putsch overthrew
Markram, project control moved to
Germans. “Independent” mediator was
Wolfgang Marquardt, HBP stakeholder and
director of FZ Jülich. Katrin Amunts of FZ
Jülich became scientific director of HBP
• HBP opened to outsiders, changed focus

18. No more flagships
• Nobody can now tell what HBP’s new goal is. They still claim to be simulating human
brain in computer
• 2017 EU Commission evaluation was symbolic, HBP didn’t even need to submit reports
• HBP was ordered in 2018 by the EU Commission to become less male dominated
• Infighting apparently continued: FZ Jülich fraction against the rest, said source
• Amunts (whom I previously interviewed!) sent lawyers ordering me to delete my
reporting about her PhD in Moscow, USSR.
• In 2019, EU Commission abandoned the FET Flagship programme, calls for new projects
cancelled mid-phase, only HBP, Graphene and Quantum remain. None lives up to
expectations.
• Markram still on board via Mouse Brain project,
which he publishes in his own Frontiers

19. Money waste
• HBP billion could have been invested better elsewhere
• Blue Sky Research does not mean wasting money on idiocies
• EU bureaucrats are gullible and scientists believe in trickle-down economy
• This applies to brain simulations. Or cold fusion

20. Fake Neuroscience

21. Domenico Pratico
• Pratico is professor at Temple University and popular with media
• He discovered that olive oil prevents brains diseases while canola oil causes them
• He also found leukotriene-inhibitor cures for Alzheimer’s
• All apparently based on manipulated data, the university ignored whistleblowers’
notifications

22. Chang Owyang and Ying Li
• Chang Owyang is head of gastroenterology at University of Michigan
• His mentee Ying Li is professor in Hong Kong
• Rats were subjected to extremely painful experiments
• Published data is grossly falsified (20 papers): with fake neuron readings!
• No retractions
Correction declares:
“the authors inadvertently included incorrect data “

23. Elisabetta Ciani
• Ciani received lots of money from charities to find cures for CDKL5 syndrome
• She was reported by a lab member for data manipulation
• University investigation found errors, but decided to blame the mice instead
• Rector misinformed funders, told them no data manipulations were found
• 2 retractions for data falsification

24. Claudio Hetz
• Hetz is the biggest biomedical researcher in Chile
• In 2012, some data manipulations were reported by Paul Brookes
• Hetz was investigated, and absolved. He even posted an explanation to disprove
suspicions
• New evidence emerged, including in recent papers. University of Chile announced
an independent and transparent investigation
From 2018, paper with Chilean Minister for Research
Paper already corrected for data manipulation!

25. Academic authorities as perpetrators
• Ferrara University rector Giorgio Zauli published massive research fraud
• He reacted by legal threats and lawsuits against critics
• Deployed terror against his own colleagues, forced them to sign support
letter and destroy investigative report
• Joined forces with fascist politicians,
attacked free press

26. Never have heroes
 Even Nobel Prize winners publish fraud
 Louis Ignarro (Nobel for Medicine 1998) coauthored a long string of falsified
papers, says it was innocent mistakes
 Gregg Semenza (Nobel for Medicine 2019) published many papers with
falsified data, often as last author
 Martin Evans (Nobel for Medicine 2009) published rigged and unethical clinical
studies to advance his stem cell business Celixir

27. 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.

28. Retractions are a read-out how many friends a fraudster
has lost
• Most publishers will avoid the hassle (also because some fraudsters threaten to
sue, and some do sue)
• Most journals wait for retraction
requests from authors or universities
• Some journals refuse retractions
requests from universities (Cell Press)
• Elite journals like Cell, PNAS, Nature,
Science sit on piles of fake papers and
do nothing

29. Chinese success story
 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
* This is what happens
when state imposes goals
and direction of research

30. Paper mills
 Work by „Smut Clyde“, „Tiger BB8“, Elisabeth Bik et al exposed
several Chinese paper mills
 Utterly fake published in peer-reviewed journals by Elsevier,
Taylor & Francis, Wiley, Springer Nature…
 Some made utterly out of thin air for
hospital doctors without a lab, because
promotion requires publications
 Some custom-made for university professors
with labs and grad students and
governmental research grants
 We only know of China, but what about
India, Iran, The West??

31. Coronavirus and bad science

32. Coronavirus and bad science
 COVID-19 brought bad science and our tolerance for it into the
spotlight
 Phony COVID-19 cures are pushed by real scientists: re-purposed
drugs, various supplements, stem cells, nanoparticles, female
hormones, internal UV-light, gamma irradiation, even cheese

33. 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.
 Promoted as COVID-19 contribution
by Human Brain Project!

34. Vitamin D: racism disguised as science
 Vitamin D is heavily promoted as COVID-19 preventive and therapy
 Studies supporting it are scientifically poor and/or done by VitD salespeople
 Argument goes: majority of COVID-19 deaths in USA is among Black (and LatinX).
They must be low in Vitamin D due to skin colour!
 Italy and Spain: they hide in the shadows, while Nordic races enjoy the sun and eat
fatty fish!

35. 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

36. 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 predator
 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)

38. 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).

39. Now:
 Ivermectin
 Colchicine

40. Fixing science

41. What’s the point of science?
• Is a paper only valid after some peer reviewers rubberstamped it, so we don’t have to
read it when it’s published?
• Are we writing papers for peer reviewers only then? What kind of science is this?
• Why do we outsource research ethics to commercial publishers?

42. Preprints are a better way!
• 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 journals accept preprints and
some even allow direct preprint
submission
• Preprints can be rejected for
plagiarism and non-research

43. Preprints: safer than peer reviewed garbage
 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!

44. • 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!

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

46. Some role models
Prof Patricia Murray, Univ of Liverpool. Exposed patient abuse and research
fraud by several trachea transplant surgeons and by a stem cell business of a
Nobel Prize laureate.
Dr Elisabeth Bik. Microbiologist, now consultant on research
integrity. Human super detector of image duplications and other
forms of data manipulation.
Whistleblowers and data integrity sleuths.
Some publicly named, most anonymous.
It can be you!

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