Scientific Fraud

This month fraud was exposed, in numerous papers by Yoshihiro Sato, regarding clinical studies of supplements showing outstanding results in preventing skeletal fractures and/or other problems in elderly patients.  The dedicated work of Alison Avenell and Mark Bollard  was a major contribution toward exposing the fraud and subsequent retraction of many of the flawed studies.

Kai Kupferschmidt (2018, Tide of Lies.  Science, 361:636-641) doe a good job of reporting the results of their efforts and the difficulty of getting scientific and/or medical journals to address the issue.  The delays helped proliferate grants, studies, and publications that would never have been undertaken without the fraud.  The principle author committed suicide; co-authors often had no knowledge of the fraud and very small, if any, role in the research.

Their problems of dealing with publishers of fraudulent papers made me change my mind about trying to get retractions of two papers giving invalid support to Ecdysozoa and Lophotrochozoa as legitimate animal groups.  The authors did good work and were not fraudulent.  They were just mistaken in relying on other papers to support some poor scientific choices.

evolutioninsights.blogspot.com/2013/05/science-screw-up-no-1.html

The above address is for my sixth blog post on May 31 of 2013.  The errors in the criticized papers have probably been a major reason my views on the pogonophorans have gotten so little, if any, attention.  I just checked and the sixth post noted has had 15 page views.  The most popular post on this blog, about the body cavity, has had over 3930 page views since it was written in early 2015.

I was recently, in the process of trying to minimize the debris my heirs will have to deal with after I am gone, going through some accumulations packed before this blog was started.  I found numerous science journal articles supporting points I was trying to make in blogs I have written.  I have been writing mostly from memory and manuscripts I have written and research literature from reference files on my computer.  I should blog about some of those items before I get back to the clean-up tasks.

To the kind person who commented on my October 2015 "insect speciation" post (51 page views), thank you, you made my day.

Joseph G. Engemann    Emeritus Professor of Biology, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan       August 30, 2018.