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I feel like any paper that’s published that cited a paper which got retracted, should automatically be reviewed and assessed to determine if they should also be retracted.
Might be a dumb question/remark but while this story is super bad, I don’t believe our regulations are based on this one study, right? AFAIK, EFSA and IARC (which only found limited evidence of carcinogenic effect on humans) used more data (with better quality) than just this article: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00204-017-1962-5
While this article and its conclusions are bad and did a lot of damage in terms of trust, do we know that this retraction means that the conclusions is that it is toxic? I’d be surprised that this is the one study we base all our regulatory decisions on, because I tend to trust EFSA’s conclusion, their work is usually good and up to date.
It takes AGES for malfeasance to get consequences. The Wakefield MMR study (responsible for energizing the modern anti vaccination movement), published in 1998, wasn’t retracted until 2010. (He was also stripped of his license to practice medicine and has consistently doubled down since which has paid off dearly, marrying supermodels and being a literal millionaire).
The amyloid plaque hypothesis for Alzheimer’s that was based on falsified data from 2006 wasn’t retracted until 2024. This had thousands of citations, possibly tens of thousands, and the first author continues to defend the data manipulation as overblown. Essentially something like that the underlying experiments were sound, we just edited the images for clarity, there was no intent, all (8!) of my coauthors agreed to the retraction because they’re laaaaame, basically every drug made based on this hypothesis doesn’t work because of some other reason, trust me bro.
It’s very difficult to counter this. It takes serious effort to generate data contrary to the evidence presented. However, funding would help. But additionally this is something where criminal charges would be merited. Wakefield has created a world in which we moved backward for his own financial enrichment. One could argue that the children dead from measles outbreaks are in part his fault. He lost his license, sure, but this is meaningless. He is an antivax icon, he married Elle McPherson, he does podcasts and documentaries, speaking engagements, etc. he is paid far more than many doctors with none of the stress and liability. And it’s fairly clear his original intent was to discourage people from the MMR vaccine to push them towards a product he had a vested financial interest in. The antivax stuff was not his goal but it worked out because he is a sociopathic grifter.
Lesne is different. He is a scientist that is probably pushed to publish at all costs and did so. Perhaps he is honest and his manipulation was simply to improve clarity. If it was not and he was pushing to get an influential paper out then he is guilty of wasting billions in funding and tens of thousands of hours of researcher time as well as countless lives wasted doing clinical trials for treatments that were never worth exploring.
What’s a viable consequence for these people? Life in prison? This is such a huge crime against society. Similarly the Monsanto and Coca Cola ghost writing research, everything involved in tobacco, Purdue and OxyContin addiction, etc. the last one was treated as a civil matter but are these not criminal? Countless lives were destroyed
Sometimes I feel sad I am incapable of chicanery like this, it sounds like the only path to an affluent life.
I sometimes reflect on how an evil version of me would be so successful. I’m actually rather good at a lot of the capitalism type skills, and especially in recent years, I’ve reflected on how those skills combined with my genuine expertise in machine learning would make me exceptionally good at making bank off of the dumbasses who have wholeheartedly drank the koolaid. I went to a university with a lot of effective altruists, and man, they’re easy to scam, and I could be so much more comfortable if I just sacrificed everything I value in life.
It turns out that I’m not actually sad that I have a moral compass, but rather that people with strong values are so often forced to consider compromising on those values because they’re desperate to not live in precarity. It’s grim.
Something significant that has just occurred to me is that the compulsory banking internship I had to do after my first year of university as part of a scholarship might’ve been more useful than I had previously realised. It was a soul killing experience and I reached some extremely low periods that Summer because of it, but I’m realising that it was a useful learning experience. Prior to that, I would’ve been far more likely to consider selling my soul for a comfortable life, but if nothing else, that internship taught me I physically couldn’t live a life like that. Good thing I learned that on a low stakes internship, rather than something more committed.
chicanery
deception through trickery
Well but what about all the other researchers that didn’t recreate this study?
Basically a big problem in especially medical science is that studies are not redone and retested like in a lot of other stem fields. It’s not only some bad actors it’s a kind of broken system.
Replication as you describe isn’t done in most fields, that’s part of the “serious effort and funding” I mentioned. If I am applying for a grant to do research what do you think gets funded? Novel proposition or rudimentary replication? Funders want to be a part of glory just as much as institutions which is part of the systemic issue here.
There are researchers that aim to replicate but the numbers of them have shrunk across all fields because funders and universities are pushing for novel research.
Aside from this though one does not need to fully replicate a study to disprove it. In both the studies I pointed out people were sounding alarms for years about discrepancies in the data that in wakefields case should not have passed peer review. The lesne paper is more subtle and one could argue it still should’ve been caught in peer review. But in both cases it took ages of people saying “hey hey hey this shit is fucked” and that is the problem. In the case of Wakefield it was more decisive, in the case of lesne it was more insidious (kind of a sunk cost fallacy because the field bought into the hypothesis without verifying so hard)
I’m a Biologist, years ago our lab got federal funding to research glyphosates potential as a neurotoxin and its capabilities to be used as a weapon. The DoD was concerned enough about this chemical that they poured the most funding I’ve ever seen at my university into a project.
The problem here is not science but capitalism, we should really get rid of this ideology
Honestly, while I agree retractions take too long in almost any case, having something retracted doesn’t stop people from using it to underline their course of action.
I mean, do I have to mention the Wakefield vaccine paper even? Everyone knows its a load of crap. Its already retracted for years, and? Did people stop believing this?
Does anyone know what the ethical objections acrually were here?
I would have thought they would have specifically called out data falsification if that were the problem that resulted in the paper being pulled - otherwise it leaves the door open to misinterpretation
It’s part of a larger issue of science and research being funded and backed by big companies that benefit from it not saying their product as bad. There are defunct research articles that state smoking is healthy for you from long ago. A lot of those researchers and doctors were later found to have gotten kick backs from companies that benefited from the positive research. This is just a modern example of money meddling in research for their benefit despite knowing the opposite.
