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Scientific fraud kills people. Should it be illegal? (www.vox.com)

submitted 2 months ago by tardigrada to c/science

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You probably haven’t heard of cardiologist Don Poldermans, but experts who study scientific misconduct believe that thousands of people may be dead because of him.

Poldermans was a prolific medical researcher at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, where he analyzed the standards of care for cardiac events after surgery, publishing a series of definitive studies from 1999 until the early 2010s.

One crucial question he studied: Should you give patients a beta blocker, which lowers blood pressure, before certain surgeries? Poldermans’s research said yes. European medical guidelines (and to a lesser extent US guidelines) recommended it accordingly.

The problem? Poldermans’s data was reportedly fake. A 2012 inquiry by Erasmus Medical School, his employer, into allegations of misconduct found that he “used patient data without written permission, used fictitious data and… submitted to conferences [reports] which included knowingly unreliable data.” Poldermans admitted the allegations and apologized, while stressing that the use of fictitious data was accidental.

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[–] FlashMobOfOne 16 points 2 months ago (2 children)

What's the argument against it being illegal? This seems like a no-brainer.

I spent part of the last two weeks reading 'Bad Blood', a book about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, and how they mishandled and faked test results, creating problems for many of their customers. It just seems obvious to me that this kind of deception and fraud is particularly immoral.

[–] Neuromancer49@midwest.social 11 points 2 months ago

Agreed, seems like a no-brainer. Typically this stuff is handled at an institutional level, with bad professors losing/ failing to achieve tenure. But some results have much bigger implications than just "Uh oh, I cited that paper and it was a bad one." Often, entire clinical pipelines are developed off of bad research, which wastes millions of dollars.

See also, the recent scandals in Alzheimer's research. https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease

[–] tardigrada 6 points 2 months ago

The Theranos case is not a scientific fraud in that sense if I understand the article correctly. Holmes had raised hundreds of millions of USD over several years before the first scientist even joined the Theranos board. They apoarently never had a technical (and assumably no financial) due diligence for their 'blood test', let alone a research paper. I'd call that a financial fraud, not a scientific fraud.