Rathnam Chaguturu
iDDPartners, Princeton Junction, NJ 08550, USA
Discovering safe and effective medicines, one of the greatest gifts to humanity, relies intensely upon the availability of detailed, unassailably accurate biomedical scientific knowledge. Unfortunately, such critical technical endeavors are being jeopardized by an epidemic of false-science unfolding around us. There has been an alarming increase in the number of scholarly articles retracted, and almost two thirds of the retractions have been traced to scientific misconduct and fraud, not error. Although science, like Wall Street, is self-correcting to a certain extent, the outcome of the recent housing bubble reminds us vividly how much pain and destruction can be incurred by passively awaiting organic self-correction. The talk centers on research malfeasance in the biomedical arena, characterizes some of the key forms of deliberate misconduct, including falsification of results, peer-review rigging, data over-interpretation and improper or willfully selective sampling practices. The discussion also explores problematic grey areas such as choice of inappropriate analytical protocols, the failure to retract erroneous findings and the use of textual plagiarism for manuscript assembly. The investigator, the publisher, the institution, the funding agencies, and the national policy-makers have the imperative, the ability and the resources to identify research improprieties and prevent such misconduct from inflicting negative consequences on their research priorities. It is good to be reminded of the quotes from Mark Twain, which was true then, certainly now, and surely also for eternity:
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”