Fake it till you make it

Mark Zuckerberg famously said it out loud, the thing that drives Silicon Valley and the tech industry: "fake it till you make it".

As it turns out, basic science is also about faking it. Andrew has been grumbling about this for years on his blog, and there is really no way to sugar coat this.

Here are the two latest examples.

The first is the revelation that a whole class of chemicals ("forever chemicals") made by 3M accumulate in human and animal bodies, and has been found to cause death in lab rats. These chemicals are used in everyday products such as Scotchgard and non-stick pans. The company executives including high-level research scientists have long known about this for decades but chose to remain silent, while continuing to flood the market with harmful chemicals. See this New Yorker story cited by Andrew.

The second is the discovery that a senior Columbia medical professor faked data in his lab's peer-reviewed research papers. It's not a one-time offence though. Here is a funny quote cited by Andrew originally written by the New York Times:

The chief of a cancer surgery division at Columbia University this week had five research articles retracted and a sixth tagged with an editor’s note . . . With the latest retractions, the Columbia lab, led by Dr. Sam Yoon, has had more than a dozen studies pulled over suspicious results . . .

In some of these retractions, the faking it is quite blatant: what were supposedly images coming from different experiments turned out to be the same images.

Here is a funny quote about his employers:

The university declined to comment on the retractions. Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where Dr. Yoon worked when much of the questionable research was done, also declined to comment, saying only that it reviews such cases.

Andrew's venting can be read in full here.