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Reporting misconduct
When?
Who?
In our limited sample, professors reported a witnessed case of alleged misconduct more often (67% reported vs 29% not reported) than other members of academia … we found that researchers in permanent positions report incidences of suspected misconduct twice as often as those in temporary positions… here was little difference between men and women regarding the reporting of alleged research misconduct.
Why?
(morally unacceptable, see Kant [1, 2 “falsiloquium dolosum”), 3]
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No new facts today
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About the psychology of scientists
It is my impression that most of the scientific misconduct cases are not the result of intentional fraud (with some exceptions) but self deception, poor education, indifferent handling of facts and wrong rewards.
Dorothy Bishop thinks that the role of cognitive biases in sustaining bad science is underestimated.
I shall argue, however, that to improve scientific practices we need to go deeper, to understand and counteract the mechanisms that maintain bad practices – not just at the institutional level, but in individual people…
Much has been written about how we might tackle the so-called “replication crisis”. There have been two lines of attack. First, there are those who emphasise the need for better training in experimental design and statistics. Second, it is recognised that we need a radical overhaul of the incentive structure of science.
Interesting slide #26 on p-hacking and the sequence of positive/negative studies when the sequence of ‘significant’ results is YNNNYNNNYN – my empirical example would be the pseudo association of mycobacterial infection and allergy. Interesting also her slide #31 on the canonization of false facts which looks like the reverse! association of vitamin D and allergy.
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Kritische Stimmen zu dem Urteil des Bundesverfassunggerichtes
Dass der Sterbehilfe-Paragraph 217 nicht mit dem Grundgesetz vereinbar ist, mag rechtstherotisch nachvollziehbar sein, zerstört aber einen mühsam ausgehandelten gesellschaftlichen Kompromiss.
Bundesärztekammer: Wir brauchen Zeit für Zuwendung
Betont werden muss auch heute, dass die Beteiligung an Selbsttötungen nicht zu den ärztlichen Aufgaben zählt. Es ist vielmehr Aufgabe von Ärzten, das Leben zu erhalten, Leiden zu lindern und Sterbenden Beistand zu leisten. Daher sollten ärztliche Handlungen auf eine lebensorientierte Behandlung abzielen und Leiden durch eine geeignete schmerzmedizinische Versorgung lindern. Gerade die Palliativmedizin stellt eine adäquate Form der ärztlichen Sterbebegleitung dar.
Ethikrat: Der Lebensschutz wiegt nichts
(Frage) Ein 18-Jähriger mit Liebeskummer, gemobbt und ohne Lehrstelle, sagt: Ich will ernsthaft nicht mehr leben – und sucht sich einen Sterbehilfeverein. Wäre das durch das Urteil gedeckt?
(Antwort) Ja. Es sagt ausdrücklich, das Recht auf selbstbestimmtes Sterben könne nicht auf schwere Krankheitszustände und bestimmte Lebensphasen eingeschränkt werden, es bestehe “in jeder Phase menschlicher Existenz”. Das Verfassungsgericht legt dann dem Gesetzgeber nahe, Prozeduren zu entwickeln, um die Ernsthaftigkeit eines solchen Wunsches zu prüfen und die Seriosität einer Sterbehilfeorganisation. Aber grundsätzlich gilt: Das Verwirklichungsrecht des jungen Mannes auf assistierten Suizid darf nicht beeinträchtigt werden. Wollen wir, dass unsere Rechtsordnung so schrankenlos ist?
Kirchen: Mit großer Sorge
Mit großer Sorge haben wir zur Kenntnis genommen, dass das Bundesverfassungsgericht am heutigen Tag (26. Februar 2020) das Verbot der geschäftsmäßigen Förderung der Selbsttötung (§ 217 StGB) aufgehoben hat. Dieses Urteil stellt einen Einschnitt in unsere auf Bejahung und Förderung des Lebens ausgerichtete Kultur dar. Wir befürchten, dass die Zulassung organisierter Angebote der Selbsttötung alte oder kranke Menschen auf subtile Weise unter Druck setzen kann, von derartigen Angeboten Gebrauch zu machen.
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inherently dishonest people
Gemma Conroy about a new study by Satalkar and Shaw
More training and clear guidelines are favoured as fixes for bad research practices, but a new study suggests that these efforts are wasted if researchers are inherently dishonest.
The study published in BMC Medical Ethics revealed that childhood education and personality traits have a greater influence on how researchers conduct their work than formal training in research integrity.
Research integrity is an ever expanding field
The few empirical articles that examined determinants of misconduct found that problems from the research system (e.g., pressure, competition) were most likely to cause inadequate research practices. Paradoxically, the majority of empirical articles proposing approaches to foster integrity focused on techniques to build researchers’ awareness and compliance rather than techniques to change the research system.
Discussing science fraud, techniques in seminars may even have adverse effect as summarized by Resnik.
While most people would endorse this as a worth-while goal, research has produced little evidence that RCR education actually helps to achieve it … Moreover, some studies have shown that RCR education may be associated with certain of unethical attitudes or misbehaviors.
According to Anderson training in research ethics was positively associated with problematic behavior. Inherently dishonest people remain dishonest.
So if we believe Satalkar, Bonn, Resnik and Anderson – the system has to change with a high entry gate for dishonest people.
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“what a shit-show life-sciences have (at least partially) become”
quoting another blog from my current reading list
an application specialist … gave a day of training on qPCR applications in general and these instruments specifically. The scientist got to a point in her presentation where she was describing frequent errors and pitfalls in qPCR methods for quantitating gene expression, and she gave about 10 different examples that started out “I visited this one lab, and upon discussing their workflow with them it turned out they were making huge error such-and-such.” At this point, I raised my hand and asked for her honest estimation of how much confidence she places in qPCR or RT-PCR data that appear in standard journals. She paused for a few seconds and then tentatively admitted “maybe 25%.”
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Car and Bike Studies
Is mode of transport to work associated with mortality in the working-age population? You will live longer as a cyclist (New Zealand).
Physical activity and weight following car ownership in Beijing, China: quasi-experimental cross sectional study. You will be overweight after buying a car (Beijing).
The health risks and benefits of cycling in urban environments compared with car use: health impact assessment study. Avoid premature death abd reduce CO2 emissions (Barcelona).
Dutch Cycling: Quantifying the Health and Related Economic Benefits. Get 6 gratis months of life and save 3% gross domestic product. (Amsterdam).
The relationship between bicycle commuting and perceived stress: a cross-sectional study. Less stress (Barcelona).
Physical Activity, Air Pollution, and the Risk of Asthma and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. No problem with asthma (Denmark)
Bicycling to Work and Primordial Prevention of Cardiovascular Risk: A Cohort Study Among Swedish Men and Women. Prevents hypertension (Denmark)
Associations between Recreational and Commuter Cycling, Changes in Cycling, and Type 2 Diabetes Risk: A Cohort Study of Danish Men and Women. Decreases diabetes risk (Denmark)
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Fake pictures and paper mills
There is an increasing awareness of faked scientific papers, not just in predatory journals but also renowned publishing companies like Wiley, Karger, Elsevier. Even German Spiegel reported now on that based on an excellent article by@schneiderleonid that is itself based on work of Indigofera Tanganyikensis, @MicrobiomDigest, @SmutClyde, and many others.
In China, clinicians are expected to publish a certain number of research papers in international journals if they want to be promoted. The easiest way is to pay a paper mill, which seem to provide a full service: an English-speaking research paper containing Photoshop-generated fake research data, in a respectable peer-reviewed journal, with your name on it.
The big problem is the move now from isolated ghostwriters to big paper mills:
We have also witnessed the submission of identical template‐style manuscripts to multiple journals at the same time, presumably to increase the likelihood that the manuscript will be accepted. This practice could greatly amplify the burden of paper mill manuscripts on journals and peer reviewers. A high‐throughput approach to manuscript generation in the absence of experimentation could also result in paper mill manuscripts and publications presenting with features that are rarely found in genuine manuscripts.
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How it is going, how it started – asthma genome wide scans
Here are the most recent GWAS data for asthma. Peaks are not identical peaks but quite similar.
How it is going in 2021 …
And here is how it started 1986
third linkage scan (my PhD thesis)
So, more than 2 decades ago we found hits on chromosome 2, 6, 9, 12 (missing chr17q21 where our marker coverage wasn’t probably good enough). It seems that this was the first identification of the IL33 region although IL33 was described only 7 years later. Remarkably, this result was possible with just 415 individuals instead of 500,000 individuals nowadays (see also the asthma genetics timeline).
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Ärzteblatt Literaturübersicht
Burney P, Amaral AFS. Air pollution and chronic airway disease: is the evidence always clear? The Lancet 2019; 394: 2198-2200
Atkinson RW, Butland BK, Anderson HR, Maynard RL. Long-term concentrations of nitrogen dioxide and mortality: A meta-analysis of cohort studies. Epidemiology 2018; 29:460-472
Peter Morfeld, Thomas Erren. Attributable Fraktionen und vorzeitige Todesfälle: Wichtige Klärung von Missverständnissen. Gesundheitswesen 2019; 81(05): 448-452
Tollefson J. Air pollution science under siege at US environment agency. Nature 2019; 568:15-16
Ioannidis JPA. Evidence-based medicine has been hijacked: a report to David Sackett. J Clin Epid 2016;73:82
Taubes G. The Soft Science of Dietary Fat. Science 2001:291:2536-2545
sowie die folgenden Blog Einträge.
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Unbelehrbar? (6000 Tote exhumiert XXXV)
Too perfect. #PostModernDarkAge pic.twitter.com/CdHwVWpy2d
— Timothy Caulfield (@CaulfieldTim) February 6, 2020
Einen mehrseitigen Kommentar, den ich im letzten Sommer an Environmental Epidemiology geschickt habe, wurde von Bert Brunekreef mit einer Email abgelehnt “das Thema sei nur von lokalem Interesse in Deutschland”. Wie ich aber erst jetzt erfahren habe, sollte das nur die Kritik mundtot machen, denn gleichzeitig wurde mit derselben Story international Politik gemacht, als im Lancet alle deutschen Kritiker pauschal diffamiert werden und ihre Stellungnahme als “fake news and denial” bezeichnet werden (Lancet vom 7.8.2019). Wer die dubiosen NO2 Studien nicht nachvollziehen kann, wird in die Nähe von Zigarettenindustrie und Klimaleugnern gesetzt.
the debate had all of the features that Farrell and colleagues discuss in relation to the misinformation campaigns on climate change or the well known strategies used decades ago by the tobacco industry.
Auch in dem Lancet Artikel wird die NO2 Mortalität noch einmal wiederholt
The scientific evidence that links ambient air pollution—in particular, fine particles (PM2.5 …) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2)—to disease and mortality was questioned by a small group of lung physicians and engineers.
Eine “kleine” Gruppe wären ein Dutzend und nicht 140 Pulmologen gewesen, dazu kommen diverse Epidemiologen und Toxikologen, die den verstiegenen Aussagen nicht gefolgt sind. Letztendlich hat auch die Leopoldina widersprochen [1, 2, 3];
Die drei aus der Arbeitsgruppe Luftschadstoffe entsandten Professoren, Martin Lohse, Wissenschaftlicher Vorstand des Max-Delbrück-Centrums für Molekulare Medizin, Manfred Hennecke, ehemaliger Präsident der Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung, und Jos Lelieveld, Direktor am Max-Planck-Institut für Chemie, zumindest sagten recht wenig und eher Versöhnliches zur Person Köhler. Sein Vorstoß sei in mancherlei Hinsicht sicher sogar “sinnvoll” gewesen, weil er zu einer Debatte geführt habe, hieß es. Bei Teilen seiner Kritik aber habe Köhler sich “vergaloppiert”.
Das ist eine echte Nummer, da mit dem Lancet Letter auch die Leopoldina angegriffen wird als “misinformation campaign”.
Der Bundestag hat – kontraproduktiv, aber das war zu erwarten – dann leider auch noch höhere Grenzwerte und Ausnahmeregelungen beschlossen.
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A basic measurement in epidemiology is wrong
Eric Topol highlighted a WSJ feature on BMI (or body mass index). The article basically says
The idea behind BMI was proposed in 1832 by the statistician Adolphe Quetelet, who wasn’t trying to define a healthy weight but to model a bell curve or normal distribution of human body sizes. He studied heights and weights and observed that weight tended to increase not according to the cube of height but with its square. The Quetelet index was renamed the body-mass index in 1972 by physiologist Ancel Keys, but it still wasn’t meant to measure the health of individuals, only to show trends among populations.
BMI calculation is wrong as an area increases according to length squared, but volumes according to length cubed.
Maybe it would be a nice bachelor etc thesis just ask 500 passengers during one busy morning at Munich airport and correlate their BMI with the body mass measured by a millimeter wave full body scanner?
Or using a laser scanner as a colleague recommended recently to me?
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Fastest ever data transfer: 126 Petabyte per second
1 x ejaculation expells 250,000,000 sperm at a speed of 500 cm/s. Each sperm contains 3,088,000,000 base pairs = bits ~ 368 megabyte of genomic DNA
Each base pair takes 2 bits (you can use 00, 01, 10, and 11 for T, G, C and A). … And remember, you have to go from bits to bytes to get to an answer in megabytes. A bit is just a single unit of digital information, but a byte is a sequence of bits (usually 8). And because computers work in binary math, 1 kilobyte = 1024 (i.e. 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 1024). 1 gigabyte = 1024 megabytes = 1048576 kilobytes = 1073741824 bytes. So you take the 3,088,000,000 bits and divide it by 8 to get 750,000,000 bytes. Divide that by 1024 and you get 376,953 kilobytes. Divide it by 1024 once more and you’re left with 368 megabytes.
Add 30,000 CpG islands x 8 bytes ~ 0,2 Megabyte
Also add 75 mitochondria x 16,569,000 base pairs ~ 148 Megabyte
So in total 516,2 Megabyte per sperm
250,000,000 x 51,2 Megabyte / 1024 = 126,000,000 Gigabyte = 126,000 Terabyte = 126 Petabyte
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The Dr Fox Experiment
The Dr Fox Experiment, my all time favorite
The results are published in J Med Educ 1973; 48(7): 630-635.
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