Eliezer Masliah’s Misconduct Exposes a Crisis in Scientific Integrity

Another day, another science scandal. Recently, we learned that leading Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease researcher Eliezer Masliah is seriously suspected of research misconduct.

A Science investigation has now found that scores of Masliah’s] lab studies at UCSD and NIA are riddled with apparently falsified Western blots—images used to show the presence of proteins—and micrographs of brain tissue. Numerous images seem to have been inappropriately reused within and across papers, sometimes published years apart in different journals, describing divergent experimental conditions.

Masliah is one of the top ten researchers in the world in his subfields of neuroscience. His research is a very significant support for Prothena’s drug prasinezumab, used to treat Parkinson’s. He has headed the National Institute on Aging’s Division of Neuroscience, whose budget in the most recent fiscal year was $2.6 billion. And now, there is significant evidence that he faked his research throughout his career by using and reusing fake images. Alas, one sort of research misconduct is very frequently a red flag that other sorts of research misconduct occur. At best, a question mark must be put on Masliah’s entire corpus—and on the distressingly large portion of the entire subfields of Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease that have built upon his work.

And based on that tainted body of research, there must be a question mark on every pharmaceutical developed. And there must be a question mark on every government grant and every government policy that builds upon Masliah’s research and expertise.

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has argued its Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science and Shifting Sands reports that the American government and American science should treat such research misbehavior as either an endemic or a pandemic component of modern scientific research and not an exception. Brian Wansink, Diederik Stapel, Anil Potti—each of these science scandals strengthens that argument. The Masliahs are not freaks, alas, but an ordinary part of the scientific world.

American government must change its regulations and incentives to ensure that it neither funds science that depends on research misconduct nor enacts policies based upon research that is built upon research misconduct. It also must cease to fund or depend on research that follows the ordinary sloppy procedures and groupthink that have produced the irreproducibility crisis—the carelessness and activism that together may have tainted a good majority of modern scientific and social scientific research.

Even “gold-standard” research, such as randomized controlled trials (RCTs), needs to be inspected for research misconduct.

NAS’s Model Science Policy Code provides suggestions for federal policy reforms. Beyond what the government should do, scientists generally must change their attitudes and realize that they cannot simply take the good conduct of their colleagues on faith.

Trust but verify, alas, needs to be the new motto for science.

Portrait of neuroscientist Eliezer Masilah from NIH website on Wikimedia Commons