I am thrilled to share the launch of the Scientific Integrity Fund. In the past year, a number of high profile scientific integrity scandals were brought to light. The Stanford president resigned after fallout from falsified data in his research. The Dana Farber Cancer Institute announced in January it will retract six studies and correct 31 more as part of an ongoing investigation into claims of data manipulation. Four of the papers under review were authored by Dana-Farber CEO Laurie Glimcher, a professor at Harvard Medical School. Gregg Semenza, a Nobel Laureate in Physiology, retracted five papers as a result of image manipulation. The list goes on but you get my point.
Like most people, I am deeply troubled by the fact that a non-trivial number of top scientists are involved in data and image manipulation. These are Harvard, Stanford and John Hopkins researchers publishing in top journals!! Their *discoveries* based on doctored data and images didn’t get retracted until someone spoke up. But there’s very little incentive for whistleblowers to speak up as criticizing other scientists’ work doesn’t advance one’s career. In fact, there is a strong incentive for scientists to cheat as they face enormous pressure to publish and many types of research are hard to replicate so it will take a long time for other scientists to find out. When they do get caught, they often brush it off as honest mistakes or administrative oversight and face no consequences. What ended up happening is researchers with compromised integrity published fraudulent discoveries in top journals, went on to receive large amounts of grants (often funded by taxpayers) and gained powerful positions in prestigious institutions. This made speaking up even harder as whistleblowers will have to endure legal threats, personal harassment, alienation, etc to speak the truth after spending countless personal hours validating their findings. The frauds could go on for years and years before eventually blowing up. I believe we are currently witnessing the aftermaths of some of the most egregious cases of scientific fraud. But things could get worse if we do nothing about it.
About six months ago, I stumbled upon this GoFundMe campaign to support Data Colada's Legal Defense:
In June 2023, Data Colada published a series of blog posts raising concerns about the integrity of the data in four papers co-authored by Harvard Business School (HBS) Professor Francesca Gino. They waited to publish these blog posts until after the HBS’s investigation concluded, with HBS placing Professor Gino on leave and requesting retractions for the four papers. In early August 2023, Professor Gino filed a lawsuit for defamation against Harvard University, and against Leif, Joe, and Uri personally, claiming 25 million dollars in damages. Defending oneself in court is time-consuming and expensive regardless of the merits of the lawsuit – as First Amendment lawyer Ken White put it to Vox , “The process is the punishment.” Targets of scientific criticism can thus use the legal system to silence their critics.
The Data Colada case is an example of what whistleblowers had to go through to bring the truth to light. Basically zero personal gains but tons of mental distress and potential financial loss. Despite the personal costs, people like the Data Colada guys chose to speak up because they have respect for science and they want to do the right thing. Through the GoFundMe campaign, I connected with Dr. Simine Vazire, the organizer for the Data Colada GoFundMe campaign as mentioned above and Dr. Elisabeth Bik, a top scientific integrity researcher who raised alarms about former Stanford president’s research and many other high profile cases. We realized there didn't exist a legal defense fund for whistleblowers of research frauds. We decided to set one up so we can operationalize the legal support for scientific whistleblowers in partnership with University Impact, a 501(c)3 organization heavily involved by university students. By offering legal aid, we hope to make speaking up about scientific misconduct less intimidating and deter scientists from suing their critics.
We also acknowledged the role student journalism plays in scientific integrity as demonstrated in the Stanford president case. College students deeply care about the integrity of their faculty members’ research. As a part of the scientific integrity fund, we are extending grants to student journalists to build awareness of scientific frauds on their campus and we hope their work can help deter research misconduct.
The current state of scientific research is concerning but there is a movement going on to make integrity an uncompromisable quality of scientific research. The scientific integrity fund is thrilled to play a small part in this movement and we hope for a world where truth and evidence prevail, frauds get exposed, only truthful discoveries get rewarded, and fraudsters are held accountable.
