Parkinson’s Study Data Was Fabricated
July 6th, 2012
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If there is one thing that can send chills up my spine it’s learning that research in a peer-reviewed study was fabricated outright. I’m not talking about data that was flawed due to a systematic error or poor control or even data that was “cherry-picked.” I hesitate to call such events examples of bad science, because they’re really not. Bad science is when data is interpreted incorrectly, studies flawed in design or when outcomes are reported wrongly in the media. Fabricated data is not simply bad science, it’s fraud.
One of the most dangerous things about fabrication of scientific data is that it’s very difficult to detect or screen for when studies are published. The peer-review process is by no means an audit of the study data and it does not confirm findings of the study. Rather, peer review simply attempts to determine if the methodology and analysis of the study meets basic standards for scientific rigor. Implicit to this is the presumption that the researchers were honest, and usually they are.
Unfortunately, while out and out fraud may be uncommon (or at least, wr *think* it is) in scientific research, it does happen. Andrew Wakefield is one notorious example of a researcher who presented data that he had completely forged. Now, another example has come to light.
Parkinson’s Researcher Fabricated Data
Neuroscientist Mona Thiruchelvam agrees to retract two studies linking neurodegeneration to pesticides.
A former assistant professor at the University of Medicine and Dentistry, New Jersey (UMDNJ) committed research misconduct by fabricating data, according to an investigation by the university and the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Research Integrity (ORI). The ORI, which announced its findings on Thursday (June 28), determined that Mona Thiruchelvam falsified cell count data published in two papers in 2005 in Environmental Health Perspectives and Journal of Biological Chemistry, both of which she has agreed to retract.Thiruchelvam fabricated stereological cell count data in two studies on how pesticides influence neuronal mechanisms involved in Parkinson’s disease (PD). The studies reported the results of 13 new experiments that supposedly counted nigrostriatal neurons in the brains of mice and rats, but an investigation spearheaded by the UMDNJ determined those counts were never taken. The nigrostriatal pathway is a major dopamine circuit in the brain, and loss of neurons in this area is one of the main features of Parkinson’s disease.
The papers slated for retraction investigate the neurological response to the combined pesticides paraquat and maneb, and suggest the pesticide atrazine also has a role in disrupting dopamine pathways. The false data were used to create several summary bar graphs, which Thiruchelvam modified to support the hypothesis that proteasomal dysfunction is higher in males than females with PD, and that exposure to paraquat and maneb enhances this effect.
Gary Miller, who cited the Environmental Health Perspectives paper (which has been cited 36 times, according to ISI), said his lab has always been skeptical about the association between certain herbicides and Parkinson’s. “There is strong evidence of an association between pesticides and PD, but figuring out exactly which compounds are driving this has been difficult,” he told The Scientist by email. “I suspect some laboratories have pursued studies based on these findings, which is unfortunate. The retraction of these papers doesn’t help the field.”
The article goes on to state that the forged data was only detected after computer files containing the study data were examined by forensic computing experts and determined to be modified copies of the same data file. The files were requested after another faculty member raised concerns that Thiruchelvam had been publishing data on cell density, but had not been using the laboratory that had the equipment necessary to measure cell density. In her defense, Thiruchelvam produced a witness, who then turned out to be false.
What is chilling is that she could have gotten away with this very easily had things been slightly different. If nobody had noticed her absence from the laboratory before publishing the data or if the facility had multiple laboratories of this type, thus making it hard to notice she was not present, nobody would have had a clue that something wasn’t right. If she had thought to visit the laboratory and go through the motions of using the microscope system, again, nobody would have been the wiser.
The significance of these kind of studies and the results of the fabricated data shouldn’t be underestimated. They can drive government policy, result in huge sums of money being spent on further study, encourage frivolous lawsuits and bogus treatments. It can undermine confidence in scientific research and destroy the reputations of institutions and co-authors of studies who may have not been aware of the dishonesty.
I have no doubt that this study will be cited by those with a vested interest in promoting the idea that Parkinson’s is caused by certain pesticides or “toxins.” Once the cat is out of the bag, it’s impossible to negate all the damage done by such studies. Andrew Wakefield, for example, continues to be cited as a source of data on the alleged autism-vaccine connection, despite having been proven a liar.
As for Mona Thiruchelvam, hopefully she has lost her job by now. No university or reputable research institution should ever even consider hiring her, regardless of any apologies. All studies she has worked on in the past will now likely need to be audited and re-examined. She should be liable for the cost of that and the money lost due to the study she corrupted. She must be stripped of any kind of scientific fellowships, accreditation or tenure she has received. This woman has no right to ever act in any professional scientific capacity ever again.
Really, I’d like to see people like this face jail time, because the level of fraud committed and the damages this can produce easily rise to the level where the criminal justice system should be involved. However, since that generally does not happen, I suppose I’ll be happy when I see Thiruchelvam in a job capacity more suited to her, for example working at the drive thru at McDonalds.
If you want to know what she looks like, there are pictures on this page. I just didn’t republish them because they may be copyrighted.
This entry was posted on Friday, July 6th, 2012 at 1:23 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Quackery, media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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July 6th, 2012 at 2:02 pm
To some extent this proves the system works in that the fraud was detected. The real issue is just how hard the powers that be come down on the perpetrator(s). This needs a response that serve as a deterrent to anyone else contemplating such activities
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July 6th, 2012 at 3:18 pm
DV82XL said:
But how many others haven’t been?
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July 6th, 2012 at 11:46 pm
Science is designed to expose fraud and bad work. Most other ways of looking at the universe embrace them. The purpose of science is to challenge other people’s conclusions and validate them.
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July 7th, 2012 at 4:19 am
My mother, and a cousin on my father’s side of the family, both grew up on sheep farms and both developed Parkinson’s; whether the link is some kind of sheep dip or something more obscure is hard to tease out but statistically there is one. I suppose researchers are under increasing pressure to get results, and there have to be stronger incentives for them not to fake it. I’d still trust a scientist over most other trades
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July 7th, 2012 at 3:57 pm
DV82XL said:
The only thing reassuring is that the university actually put in the effort to do a very in depth investigation.
But I find it disturbing how close she came to getting away with it.
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July 7th, 2012 at 5:54 pm
New record for faking data set by Japanese researcher – Anesthesiologists published 212 papers; only 3 clearly fraud-free.
“The Retraction Watch blog has been following the case of one Dr. Yo****aka Fujii from Toho University’s medical school, who has published extensively in the field of anesthesia. Unfortunately, however, it seems that Dr. Fujii has not bothered to perform extensive research to create those publications. Toho University has now published the results of an investigation into Fujii’s work, and found that the vast majority of the underlying “data” was simply made up.
Of 212 papers credited to the researcher, the investigation only found clear indications of supportive data for three. At least 172 of the rest are clearly based on fabricated data.”
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July 7th, 2012 at 11:53 pm
Unfortunately this sort of thing only gets caught when someone has access to the data to check and is skeptical enough to check. Fortunately it does happen but the institutional desire is to avoid embarrassment and to not question things like this. ::sigh::
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July 8th, 2012 at 10:54 pm
TomT said:
I don’t think it is so much institutional desire to avoid embarrassment as it is the lack of resources to double-check work that was peer-reviewed, which is the process that is supposed to catch this sort of thing before it gets published. It is this system that is breaking down more than anything else and is taking science down with it.
The problem is deeper that just the outright fraud that turns up, but also in the lax standards that are applied to research papers across the board. Over the past twenty years, and certainly over the last decade, material is being published of such low quality it would not have passed as a term paper when I was in high school. This includes publications in refereed journals, thesis and dissertation papers submitted for advance degrees, and commercial reports. This is a disturbing trend.
It is not that the work is fraudulent per se in these cases as much as it is largely pointless, poorly executed and uses very small data sets squeezed almost to death with questionable statistical manipulation that in the end old shows trends below the experiments noise-floor. This is to say no real results at all. Nevertheless this garbage floods the system and it is no wonder the review system is under strain.
What really needs to be done is outright rejection of most of this rubbish before it is even submitted to the reviewers.
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July 9th, 2012 at 1:52 pm
The worrying thing is that the sCAMsters jump on this sort of fraud to denigrate Double Blind Peer Reviewed studies as being useless and, even as I type this, will be providing it as proof that, A. DBPR’s are fundamentally flawed, and B. Because they are fundamentally flawed there’s no point in submitting whatever Woo they’re selling to such tests.
A sort of Quad Erat Demonstrandum in reverse.
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July 17th, 2012 at 6:06 pm
Having been a servant of science and involvement in numerous studies, this sort of thing does not surprise me one bit, as disgusting as it is. Scientists need results to do their job. And they have to be positive results – negative ones, while just as valuable to science, don’t get you money. The greatest advancements in science occurred when people were studying it out of innate curiosity and funding wasn’t tightly controlled. Now, we have a world of science which centres around the quest for funding and every new study is based on previous studies whose validity is questionable. It’s working, for now, but only because the world economy is so strong and not because it’s a good system.
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July 17th, 2012 at 10:02 pm
Kudos to Mr. Packard for posting this. But the usual suspects here are genuflecting at the altar of science and saying “this proves that science works because this was caught.” This is actually more analogous to seeing a ****roach on the kitchen floor. You can be darn sure that there are many more hiding behind the walls.
As with any human enterprise, science is as honest as it has to be. Sunshine is the best disinfectant but most scientific journal disclosure policies are still back in the pre-internet days. Look at the difficulty that Steve McIntyre at ClimateAudit.org has had in getting so-called climate “scientists” to post their data and algorithms. Most flat-out refuse and the journals and scientific societies back them up in their refusal. Indeed some like Michael Mann and Lonnie Thompson are lionized for their intransigence.
The only good out if this is that it reminds us to always be skeptical, dare I say be a “denier”
, of anything you read including in the vaunted peer-reviewed journals.
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July 17th, 2012 at 10:06 pm
That’s amusing. The spam filter seems to have taken out the first four letters of the common name for Periplaneta americana Linnaeus.
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July 19th, 2012 at 8:14 am
Thanks Bob,
I was waiting for the first climate denier to show up and inanely claim that this is proof that that climate scientists are frauds.
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July 20th, 2012 at 8:22 am
Speedy said:
But Bob didn’t do that. He complained (rightly or wrongly) about the lack of access that the public/media has to research data and methodology, and he encouraged skepticism toward peer-reviewed journals. Granted, I think it’s hard not to infer that he is a climate change incredulist (I’m trying that term out for size, as I find the use of the term “denier” to be a despicable variant of Godwin’s Law.) One can further infer that he suspects intransigence in refusing to release data is evidence of fraud in climate science, but he claimed no proof.
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July 20th, 2012 at 9:05 pm
If the climate change deniers have a problem with being compared with holocaust deniers then I personally don’t care (it is only what they are denying which is different).
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July 21st, 2012 at 11:57 am
Anon said:
I can’t help noticing that you haven’t dealt with the substance of his complaint; that published scientists fought tooth and nail prevent anyone else from seeing their data and methodology, which undermines the whole idea of replicability as the foundation of scientific progress.
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July 21st, 2012 at 5:44 pm
Well since you ask whether I am a denier of climate change, I can state unequivocally that I am not. Change is what climate does. How can one deny change with the credible evidence that 10-15,000 years ago the Great Lakes region was under a mile of ice?
And do I deny that an increase in atmospheric CO2 in absence of other effects increases the temperature? Of course not. That is elementary physics. But the rub is that the earth’s atmosphere is an incredibly complex chaotic system with multiple feedback effects. I remember seeing a time lapse video of the earth as seen from a satellite. You could see gigantic thunderstorms well up in the tropics region then blossom into huge systems that then drifted off towards the temperate regions. This brings to mind a lecture by Richard Feynman reflecting on the chaotic processes in a glass of wine and stating that if we could understand those we could understand the universe.
Now multiply that to a system the size of the earth’s atmosphere and anyone who is not skeptical that we can predict its behavior over a time scale of centuries has a lot of chutzpah and/or a political agenda. And if you doubt a political agenda, just look up the multiple times that leading “climate scientist” James Hansen of NASA Goddard has had himself arrested in political demonstrations. Or read in the climategate emails the machinations of the cabal of “climate scientists” trying to keep opposing views out of the journals they control.
I do think that there may be some common ground between “deniers” like me and some of the believers. I am a strong supporter of nuclear power. That is the reason I became interested in this site. Unfortunately most AGW believers are anti-nuclear power luddites.
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July 21st, 2012 at 9:49 pm
Bob Wilson said:
I would ask all of those that identify themselves legitimate (that is no hidden agenda) AGW critics to consider the following:
Even if we grant that the evidence for AWG fails to prove this phenomenon is real to the extent that some would wish, it is also true that any honest evaluation of the same does not support rejecting the possibility out of hand.
Furthermore the suggested mechanisms by which GHG could influence climate, given the current state of knowledge of climatology and atmospheric physics, if not proven are at the very least highly plausible.
Given the above – can it be asserted with any degree of confidence that humans can continue to inject GHG into the atmosphere at an increasing rate indefinitely before some manifestation of anthropogenic climate forcing occurs; can we take that chance; and if so what guarantee is there that this change be benign ?
The above question is rhetorical. The point being that the risk of rejecting AWG and being wrong, outweighs the converse by a considerable margin given that the adoption of nuclear energy (which we all apparently agree is a Good Thing) makes the question moot. In other words, if we are all of the same opinion about nuclear, why debate AGW at all.
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July 21st, 2012 at 11:46 pm
Matthew said:
Never mind that much of the data and methodology the FOIA requests were about was already public knowledge.
Those requests look more like a harassment campaign than a real attempt at ensuring scientific progress.
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July 22nd, 2012 at 9:53 am
Anon said:
That’s not what a recently issued report by the Royal Society Science Policy Centre concluded. See page 38 of the PDF (emphasis mine):
Preventing access to data and failing to respond to repeated requests are not what I usually associate with scientific progress.
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July 23rd, 2012 at 9:09 am
DV82XL said:
And there’s Pascal’s Wager again. Just as a moral and ethical life is worth living in the absense of God, reducing our use of fossil fuels is worthwhile in the absense of AGW.
The question is not moot, because many blind followers of AGW do not agree that nuclear power is a Good Thing. The debate is worth having, because AGW is used to justify onerous and sometimes draconian proposals to reduce energy consumption in the name of reduced emissions and because many of the people being debated (perhaps the type willing to compare AGW doubters to Holocaust deniers) will entertain almost any solution rather than nuclear. If you argue that nuclear is better than coal because nuclear is nearly carbon neutral, then you allow proposals such as coal-plus-sequestering to be elevated to nuclear’s level.
The argument for nuclear energy can and should be made on its primary benefits, including energy stability/security, reduced pollution, and reduced mining footprint. The possible/probable relief from AGW should be seen as a secondary benefit along with possible improvements to geopolitical stability. If there is significant doubt as to the threat of AGW, then the fate of nuclear energy should not be pinned to it.
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July 23rd, 2012 at 9:43 am
I was not invoking Pascal’s Wager; that is a desperate misreading of what I wrote. I am saying that the evidence, while not conclusive in the mater of climate forcing due to GHG emissions, is certainly not so bad as to reject the idea outright.
While I hate the analogy because inevitably someone will try and push it too far, the relationship between cancer and tobacco use was well established empirically by the mid 1800s, far earlier than any scientific proof based on the underling mechanisms. The correct response to these early observations would be to not smoke, not contend that the phenomenon was possibly a statistical aberration.
In this case however the bottom line is by not addressing GHG as a possible cause of climate change one asserts that the atmosphere stands as an unlimited sink for these gases and that is simply an unsupportable hypothesis. Far more unsupportable than the worst of the AGW models being discussed.
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July 23rd, 2012 at 11:06 am
DV82XL said:
I’ve read enough of you to know that that’s not precisely what you meant, and obviously there is more empirical evidence of the existence of AGW than of God, but, on its own, your post does read like Pascal’s Wager. I don’t take serious issue with that, as equivalent and true statements can be made regarding the smoking-cancer link (as you pointed out) or the doughnut-diabetes link. But I do take issue with the conclusion of your post, because you postulate a consensus on nuclear power being the solution to AGW as good-enough reason to end the debate on AGW. No such consensus exists in the broader public debate.
A better-safe-than-sorry policy is fine if the price of warding off AGW is justifiable by the quality of the evidence. Since the price proposed by many AGW supporters is exceptionally high, the quality of the evidence and integrity of the field of study must bear up under exceptional scrutiny.
The subject may be made moot if a proposed solution is justifiable on other merits. Nuclear power is justifiable for multiple reasons beyond carbon neutrality, so promoting construction of new plants does not hinge on faith in climate science alone. But when solutions such as carbon sequestration are on the table, we had better have good faith in climate science, as we cannot justify sequestration except by appealing to that science.
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July 23rd, 2012 at 3:41 pm
Shafe said:
Granted, however when I wrote “we” I was referring to present company, not the public in general. The point here being that nuclear supporters should not fight one another on the subject of AGW because our preferred solution has it covered.
Shafe said:
Again granted, but nor should we ignore AGW as a tool in the debate, True, we would be fools to put all our eggs in that basket, but at the same time we need to recognize that it helps rather than hinders our case.
At any rate sequestration, like wind and solar is an unworkable solution that like those others is more of a smoke-screen than a viable option and like them will never be made to work.
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