ACADEMIA IS BROKEN! Stanford Nobel-Prize Scandal Explained

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Professor at a top university, at the forefront of medical research: "lemme just turn my pictures 90 degrees, that'll fool them"

Science is now doing what peer review should have been doing the last 2 decades.

If people faked data by random sampling from a gaussian with the desired mean/variance, it would be much more difficult to prove anything. It is scary to think about how many experiments can be manipulated that we can never notice

I have run a lot of Western blots, had published a number of them, and have seen my colleagues publish quite a lot of it. Also had the experience (as a graduate student) to see my fellow grad student forced to falsify a Western blot, pressured by her supervisor. When it came to publication, the lab director thought the blot looked really dodgy (nobody dared tell him it was doctored but he thought it was not right, and explicitly told the PI that he should repeat all the experiments before thinking of publishing it. The PI did not do that, and published without the lab directors name and permission. He got his paper, but the lab director refused to give him a salary raise at his next evaluation because of low scientific standards. In return the PI volunteered to spearhead a witch-hunt against the lab director, that was started by a scumbag high in the academic ladder (with similar standards as the falsifying PI).... Shortly, in my experience there are two very distinct men in academia, and the ONLY commonality between them is that they are extremely smart. One type is extremely smart to come up with new ideas and how to demonstrate them. The other type is the pathological evil-genius, who has no original ideas but is an expert at leeching off the colleagues, scheming to ruin others' reputations and stealing their research and especially: their funding! I have seen the craziest funding thefts, and the most incredible allegations used to ruin careers. It is super sad though that from the outside these extremely different career paths look the same... both are in academia.... and when the pathological cases are caught and shown to the public, the public thinks that this is how every scientist is. Which is the furthest from the truth. Yet, as always, hard work does not get a fraction of the attention that outrage gets.... so the general impression is that academia and science is all about fraud and misconduct, and nobody thinks twice that all the technology around us (from cell phones to liver transplants) came through science. The truth is that the majority of scientists are extremely altruistic, sacrifice much more from their lives as people in general do, work hard hours thanklessly, are abused and discarded by the system which has a lot of unfortunate influences at the top, and stand at a big disadvantage in life compared to a carpenter or a construction worker to have a solid financial foundation for personal life. As always, where money is, trouble follows. As funding for science is becoming more scarce every year, even honest people are forced into desperate measures just to stay floating. While there's a very big difference between totally faking a Western blot and touching up a part of the blot to make it look super clean, the latter is unfortunate as it gets placed in the same category as outright forgery. When you have ran Western blots, you know that sometimes they come out looking not so clean: the lanes might not be perfectly parallel, there might be a small uneven gel pockets skewing the lane, it picked up some dust from the camera, and so many little hickups. The way to take care of those is to run the experiment again until you get the perfect looking one, that's neat enough to get published in PNAS or Cell. However, since 2010 or so, we barely have enough funding to run a single blot for a given experiment. Nobody has the luxury to allow for multiple repeats (which likely require purchasing an additional set of antibodies, and maybe months to run the experiments to get the protein for the blots.) As a post doc, you have a job security that does not extend to more than one year, in lucky cases 2 or 3 years when you have a major lab backing you up (mainly through nepotism, but also happens rarely by sheer luck). Most often if you do not get the blots right the first time, it's the end of your career. You can start looking for a job as an adult with no practical training in any field whatsoever (other than your specialized field, that just chewed you out), and no life savings at all. And it's getting more cut-throat every year as NIH is constantly cutting the funding on R01s and other grants, while reagents go through staggering price increases every year. The funding system is forcing the academia to break, as thriving requires either uncanny luck to have experiments and ideas work right away (they almost never do in biology) or resorting to stealing and faking.

another month another fraud

If there is ever going to be a prize for showing fraud, this should be called the Elizabeth Bik prize.

“Trust the science” has forever become a meme.

Could not happen to a better University.

This is why I always photograph extra unpublished blots to create unique forgeries.

When does Elisabeth Bik get a Nobel Prize?

This is happening ALL OVER ACADEMIA. Thank god it’s finally getting some attention. The social sciences are the absolute worst with this.

What's shocking to me about this is how crude the manipulations are. I am a researcher myself, and if I ever had the intention to make fake data for a paper, I can think of so many ways of doing it in a much more sophisticated manner so that it would be much harder to find indications for the manipulation than looking for duplicates. And there are MANY people with the technical skills to pull this off -- therefore it stands to reason that people probably are cheating in more sophisticated ways while evading detection.

The bigger problem is that negative results don’t get published. So everyone will try to fudge their data, conclusions and say there is something significant.

I think 1. The peer reviewed system needs an overhaul because it’s completely failing at its task. 2. It’s too easy for a “supervisor” to put their name on a paper without doing the leg work and then expect blame to lie elsewhere when they fail at supervising. 3. We need some kind of reward for the person/people who find the scam artists/Lazy work in the system.

"Also, I found these regions by eye." What an epic line!!!

I remember when “the Harvard of the West Coast” was meant to be a compliment.

Oh yeah, science is science and people are flawed. That's why we need people like Pete and Elizabeth Bik to identify flaws and perform corrections.

I love the fact that you took note of your audience's reaction to your first academia is broken videos and took action. Your action resulted in this channel becoming one of the most unique channels covering these subjects.

@PeteJudo1, the cloned rectangles shown round 5:30 in the video can actually be artifacts of an image upscale. Actually if you try to upscale an image that has any one-colored area will result in repeated upscale artifacts because the algorithm will make the same "decisions" on what to do there and given it will be seeded with the only non blank area will repeat the same output until it fills the blank area. I am just a software developer and have no idea of the subject of the photos and it's composition, but I have enough experience to say that "well.. I have seen this before" ;)