Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by RealClear Science on November 4, 2024. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.
The latest research fraud scandal concerns one Eliezer Masliah. He’s one of the world’s leading researchers into Alzheimer’s and it looks as if he fabricated a good deal of his data. A large part of the last generation of research into Alzheimer’s may have discovered nothing at all—and the last generation of Alzheimer’s drugs may be useless.
A large part of modern science and social science already is tainted by the irreproducibility crisis of modern science—the combination of politicized groupthink, academic publish-or-perish culture, and statistical carelessness that means more than one half of modern scientific and social scientific research may be wrong. The same incentives that produce sloppy research, and which prevent any checks to see if research has been done badly, also provide space for actual research fraud. If you don’t provide open access to your data, if you don’t preregister your work, if you shove negative results into the file drawer—you allow the deadwood to get tenure, but you also allow the actual cheats to prosper.
Modern science tolerates fools, and that means it has no way to tell who are knaves.
Some critics simply despair of the academic research system. Ben Landau-Taylor writes in Palladium that,
I have little hope that academic science can be reformed from the inside. Frankly, it seems too far gone. If they want to prove me wrong, it will take a massive purge of the fraudsters and bullshitters, and probably a sharp reduction in the institutions’ total staff. … More likely, reform will come through circumvention from outside the academic system.
Scientific research will have to be conducted outside the university, building upon the “the internet commentariat’s intellectual elite.”
Landau-Taylor’s estimate of the scale of the problem, alas, is accurate. I am less sure of his solution. Scientific research, after all, consists of a massive infrastructure of personnel, laboratories, equipment, and industry. It isn’t just the lab that fabricated Alzheimer’s research results but the factories producing Alzheimer’s drugs, and doing their best (with the data they were given) to make sure the drugs are pure and effective. Scientific research is the 74 million hectares of genetically modified crops in America, and $144 billion in annual spending on research and development by the Defense Department, and another $100 billion in annual spending on research and development by the American pharmaceutical industry, and a vast amount of capital and annual investment throughout the American economy.
The “internet commentariat’s intellectual elite” cannot do this work. More to the point, it is doubtful that we can simply replace the system we have by slash-and-burn reform. We have an immensely rotted system of scientific research—but if we burn out every part of that system touched with rot, we will have no system of scientific research at all.
Our scientific research system is badly infected by woke zealotry and incompetence, where it is not tainted by fraud, so it is tempting to say we would be better off without it. But we do have those hectares of genetically modified crops. We also have scientists working to keep ahead of our enemies in the great power competitions of artificial intelligence and drones and missile defense. We have pharmaceuticals and public health that work well enough that the proportion of the American population greater than 65 years of age increases every year. Throwing out the entire system seems imprudent.
The National Association of Scholars (NAS) is working for reform within the system. We have published our Model Science Policy Code as a way to improve the system, but not tear it down. What we most want to improve is the role of federal government in America’s system of scientific research.
The federal government is the largest single funder of scientific research in the world, and federal funds not only distort American regulatory policy but also subsidize the wholesale production of irreproducible research – some outright fraudulent – in American universities. Federal regulations, in turn, can have real effect in changing the practice of scientists in America—and, indeed, worldwide. If scientists won’t get federal research funds unless they act honestly, then they will (with bad grace) act honestly.
Our Model Science Policy Code includes seven bills devoted to ameliorating the irreproducibility crisis, by requiring preregistration, transparent data, funding of replication studies, and more. It also includes the Research Integrity Act, which takes positive steps to stop fraud. Three further bills reform the three other crises of federal science policy: our laws and regulations allow universities to overcharge the federal government in its grants; federal grant money imposes discriminatory and illiberal “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) policies on universities; and our laws permit universities to be culpably complaisant about scientific espionage conducted by China and other foreign powers. These three crises are each important, but each can be addressed by relatively simple legislation.
Of course the Model Science Policy Code cannot work by itself. Reformers must also re-staff the federal scientific research bureaucracies, to ensure that these laws actually are implemented. Policymakers must engage in extensive oversight. A sizeable number of scientists within the existing system must commit themselves to reformed scientific practice.
The Landau-Taylors who doubt that the system can reform itself will say that this reform never will happen. But we must try to reform the system as it currently exists. Americans are a prudent people, and they are unlikely to discard entirely their existing scientific research infrastructure. Certainly they will not until we have made every effort possible to reform the existing system.
Science’s status quo is unacceptable. Revolution is impracticable. The Model Science Policy Code should give Americans hope that reform of our science establishment is possible.
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