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Published online 23 January 2008 | Nature 451, 386 (2008) | doi:10.1038/451386a
News in Brief
NIH in the dark over conflicts of interest
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Please note this is News in Brief, and so will be a short article.
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While this is true, at this point, by far the greatest conflict is pressure to provide "good results" in order to get the next grant. George Soros said it well. Without real economic alternatives, there is no freedom. For those of us in academia, with tenure disappearing, it is no longer publish or perish. Today, it is "publish grant support or perish." I am aware of at least 4 situations personally where NIH grantees have lied, or are about to lie (including one submitting to Nature by the way) about their results. The lies range from lies of commission (falsifying data) to lies of ommission (falsifying interpretations). This has become so rampant that I have concluded that the enterprise of science is threatened. There is only one cure, which is to do the following: 1. Eliminate the statute of limitations on scientific misconduct investigations. Make it open ended with no time limit. 2. Hire new personnel as investigators who have a prosecutor's bent rather than an insider's "good old boy/good old girl" attitude. Require investigations to be pursued based on reports. 3. Institute a statistically valid full audit of each study section each year. Think of this the way the IRS does it. Randomized selection. 4. Institute, as part of the audit system, placement of personnel and graduate students as undercover operatives to aid the investigation of grantees. 5. Institute a parallel randomized process for auditing of graduate student doctoral theses. 6. Institute recognition that negative results are as meaningful as positive, particularly in complex areas. If a lab publishes such, that they be given transition funds to move to another area. Eliminating the honor system in science will take care of all of it. It will take care of the problems with scientists being motivated to lie because they could reap stock benefits. But far more importantly, it will control (fraud is never eliminated) the far more common motive which is simple survival - the next grant. (I will note that my personal experience is that never have I seen any scientist falsify work for commercial profit.) No area of human endeavor can be honest without mechanisms for keeping it honest. Who would trust a bank that had no audit system? Who would trust the stock market without the SEC? Science is long past the point it was 100 years ago. Things are so expensive, so specialized, so complex that we simply have to do this. PS - I leave it up to Nature's editors to find the knowingly falsified results submission. I have already experienced enough retaliation.