Hauser Resigns After Research Fraud

Marc Hauser has resigned from Harvard, following the discovery that he falsified experimental data in at least three papers. He is going to work "on the educational needs of at-risk teenagers" (which is really laying it on with a trowel; couldn't he just "want to spend more time with his family" or something?)

Why would a lauded, even lionized researcher of such stature commit fraud? Only he knows, of course, but I suspect his towering status has more than a little to do with it. Author of multiple books, leader of his own lab in one of the most prestigious research places in the world, greeted as a celebrity wherever he goes, half his own staff and students seeing him as a hero - the pressure to perform, to keep getting results, must have been immense. No matter what, he is still only a fallible human, and asking him to be superhuman, to be perfect, is not realistic and not fair.

Very few people are born cheaters. The vast majority of researchers enter their field because they genuinely want to understand the world around them, and share their finds with the world. If money and fame is your goal then science is not the right field for you. I doubt most cheaters start by outright, large-scale fraud, and I doubt Hauser did either.

But I imagine that when failure is no longer an option - when your career, your status, your own livelihood and the future careers of people under your charge all depend on your success - people will all too often start down a slippery slope: clean up a fuzzy picture just a little, omit those obvious outliers, perhaps rerun an experiment that just failed to reach significance. The pressure doesn't let up, and once you've started it's easy to take just another small step, and another... One day you wake up and realize you've become something you used to despise.

How to stop this? We can't stop hero-worshipping, and research funding agencies understandably want to support successful research over failures. It's one thing to tell people that it's OK to fail, but the reality is that a failed project is a real handicap when funding is as cut-throat as it is today. Better oversight and a culture of transparency would help - it should always be OK to talk about odd events or suspicious data in your lab, and a whistleblower should ideally be able to count of the full support of their university. Reminding people what is and is not good research practice throughout their training is another good idea; almost all people want to do things correctly, so you want to stop them from entering that slippery slope before they even realize it.

 
As for Hauser himself? He may or may not return to academia in some years. But with this resignation - and the lingering doubt of all his earlier publications; he is unlikely to have started with full-blown fraud - I don't expect him to ever return to active, high-profile research ever again.

Mail Fraud Arrests

A brief¹ followup to my earlier posts about the large-scale mail fraud case that's been uncovered this spring: The fake disability group set up to make use of discounted mail rates needed certification from the ministry of health, labour and welfare. They got this certification from a director-general at the ministry in 2004, and said director-general has now been arrested and both the ministry offices and home searched.

As MTC points out so eloquently, you do not arrest high-ranking officials and search the ministry unless you have a fairly solid case. Or if the prosecutors really have jumped the gun the backlash couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people. The lawmaker that leaned on the ministry to certify the organization is as yet unnamed, but one of the two parties is going to have a nice little scandal to throw into the election campaign in a couple of months, depending on which party the offending diet member belongs to. Amazingly, it's actually not illegal for politicians to interfere directly in individual cases here, but the fallout should be plenty effective anyway. Wouldn't it be interesting if it turned out to be, say, a senior New Komeito member...

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#1 I'm writing up something for work right now, which makes writing for the blog less than ideal as a diversion. Don't expect long, windong posts for the next week or so.

Elsevier and Merck Fakes Medical Journal

This is pretty disturbing: Merck, big pharmaceutical company, has apparently set up a fake medical journal, the "Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine". They've used it to publish dodgy and made-up data under the guise of "science". To make the fake journal look real they paid off Elsevier, one of the major scientific publishing houses, to set up the journal under their name. This is bad. More about it here and here and here.

When you get a drug from your physician, how do you know it'll work for your specific problem? How do you know it's even safe? Well, your doctor tells you it should work and is safe, but how do they know? They look at the published data on the drug, which in turn is based on experimental medical studies of that drug, studies that are published in peer-reviewed medical journals.

Now, some studies are good, some are bad. It's really quite difficult to make a good experimental study; there's many, many pitfalls along the way. A bad study may have too few patients to give any good data, or have some methodological problem, or are mishandling the statistics, or are even not really asking the right questions at all. A good study avoids all that. In medicine you often have the question of impartiality. When a study and the people working on it are independent of the company making the drug all is well and good. But when the study is paid for by the pharmaceutical company, or the main researchers are getting a lot of money or junkets, then impartiality can and should be questioned. There's many (far too many) examples of studies that have been altered to suit the funding company, had data faked to conceal some problem, or the whole study silently dropped altogether when the results turn out to be unfavorable.

Medical journals in particular really want to be vigilant to this kind of thing. Decent journals require upfront declaration of all connections (monetary or otherwise) between the researchers and the company and editors try to determine if there's a conflict of interest that may invalidate the study. Reviewers try as best they can to figure out if the study is any good - if the statistics hold up, if there's any problem with the methodology and so on. It's common even for good, solid papers to have to be rewritten with further clarification of some point, or require additional data and analysis to cover some problem area. Bad, biased papers can (and do) slink through this net it's fairly unusual.

Merck figured out they could bypass this pesky quality control by paying Elsevier, a major scientific publisher with a rather shady record for integrity, to create a fake journal. Which they happily did, even going so far as to recruit an actual physician to be on the "review board". Apparently not a single paper was ever actually peer-reviewed; they were lousy studies that would have been rejected by a real journal, or thinly disguised marketing material - fake papers, in other words, the kind of thing researchers lose their jobs and careers over. Merck then used these fakes to sell their products to physicians. Since the fake journal was published by Elsevier nobody would question the source; no reputable publishing house would actively deceive its readership - it's customers and contributors - after all? Of course that's exactly what Elsevier has done.

So here we have a problem: this only came to light by chance. There's no way of knowing how much seemingly solid data about Merck products safety and efficiency is actually fraudulent. So we - I and you and everyone else - have no way of knowing which of their product claims are real and which are made up by the company and then deceptively pushed as honest research. Here is a partial list of Merck products; do you know which are backed as safe or effective by faked research reports? Neither do I. You want to use any of their medicines? Neither do I.

As for Elsevier - they're a large company, one of the biggest scientific publishers in the world. This is a list of journals. 2325 journals, according to that link. How many other of those journals are paid-for fakes masquerading as real research journals? No idea. And if they accept payment for setting up fake journals, do they accept payment for placing bad papers in otherwise good journals too? Should it surprise us if they did? The Elsevier ethical guidelines are here; this is especially rich:

Elsevier takes its duties of guardianship over the scholarly record very seriously. Our journal programs record "the minutes of science" and we recognize our responsibilities as the keeper of those "minutes" in all our policies, including the guidelines we have adopted to support editors, reviewers and authors in performing their ethical duties.

We are committed to ensuring that advertising, reprint or other commercial revenue has no impact or influence on editorial decisions.
...

I won't be publishing in Elsevier journals in the future, and I will no longer accept reviewer invitations to one of their publications. My considered opinion, as a researcher, is that Elsevier can go fuck themselves.

Mail fraud, corruption and the DPJ

Here's a "creative" business idea: send mail advertisements disguised as newsletters from support groups for the disabled. They have heavily discounted postal rates you can take advantage of and save more than 90% on the postal fee. Since the distribution fee is a major part of any advertising campaign, the sums are not trivial; we're talking billions of yen here. There is the little detail that defrauding the post office is illegal, and taking indirect advantage of disabled people for cheap marketing is not the most socially upstanding thing you could engage in.

Now the indictments are coming (had a link to Asahi here but it disappeared), and it turns out this idea was both more widespread and carefully planned than it first seemed. The companies involved are not small fly-by-night operations but include Best Denki, a nationwaide chain of electronics shops. The group had formal agreements in place on how to divide up the savings of at least 650 million yen so far (perhaps up to 20 billion yen overall). Also, they seem to have taken advantage of other postal discounts in a similar manner before switching to disability support groups. The "support group" currently in the news, Hakusankai, may have been set up specifically to take advantage of the mail discount system. Garden-variety fraud; so far, so good.

Here's a twist: When Best Denki first tried to send off a batch of advertisements under the guise of Hakusankai in 2007, he post office refused. The return address didn't go to Hakusankai but to Best Denki, which violated rules for the discounted rate and aroused suspicion. At that point an aide to Yoshio Maki, a DPJ lawmaker, intervened; he went to a regional office with Hakusankai representatives and "asked questions about the conditions for the disability discount" (as Asahi puts it), after which the direct mail was accepted and sent. Maki himself seems to have tried to defend the operation in the Diet. Oh, and completely incidentally - no connection att all, really - Yoshikuni Morita, arrested head of the Hakusankai is a long time donor to and supporter of Yoshio Maki. If you ever wondered what political corruption looks like, search no further. So what, you may wonder; "dirty Japanese politician" is pretty much a tautology after all.

This matters. Maki is an opposition DPJ lawmaker. And as it happens, there's an election coming up very soon (no later than September). The election really is mainly beteween the incumbent LDP, a conservative party of the old political class, bereft of policy ideas or ideological coherence and torn between wildly divergent factions vying for power; and DPJ, a, well... conservative party of the old political class, bereft of of policy ideas or ideological coherence and torn between wildly divergent factions vying for power. The truth is, both parties consists of much the same people from the same old political families, positioned around same end of the political spectrum, and as far as implementing policy is concerned they're close enough not to matter. Each party has its ideologically far-flung wings making noise, but they're unlikely to actually affect policy. The rhethoric is much more divergent than the actions.

In fact, the only major perceived difference has been one of morals. The LDP is seen as an old, corrupt party, in power only for the benefit of its representatives and their donors. DPJ would be a break from this endemic corruption and sleaze and, in some unspecified manner, return to politics as serving the people. DPJ and its leadership and policies are no more liked than the LDP; the only reason people have had to hold their nose and vote DPJ is that they're at least not in it to line their own pockets.

When the only saving grace of the opposition is their supposed moral superiority, getting involved in this kind of postal scam is a disaster. Remember that the opposition leader Ichiro Ozawa is already under a cloud after his campaign office accepted illegal contributions from the construction industry. Seriously, now: one lawmaker's office is taking illegal contributions from the construction industry, and one is helping a scam that takes advantage of a system set up to help poor disabled people? What's next - rob a fund for widows and orphans? "No worse than the other guy" works fine for the LDP; they have the benefit of low expectations and everybody expects them to be corrupt already. But it is a disaster for DPJ. "No worse" means "no better", and if they're no better the whole reason to vote for them - the whole reason for them to exist - is gone.

It doesn't help, of course, that the DPJ really is no better. It's all the same people, from the same families, brought up in the very same political culture - frequently in the same party. Of course they're just as corrupt as their LDP colleagues. The value of a DPJ government was never about what the DPJ would do, but that a solid election defeat for the LDP could finally start the process of changing the Japanese political landscape. The amorphous LDP and DPJ would hopefully both gradually disappear in their current form, to be replaced with a 20th century professional political culture (yes, I know it's the 21st century already. Baby steps, baby steps). Exactly what that would entail nobody knows, of course, but whatever ends up replacing the current setup, chances are good it'd at least be better than the current LDP government.

Of course, "Better than LDP" is a low bar to clear, and still the DPJ has shown an amazing ability to fail in doing so. They're nothing if not consistent, I have to give them that. For whatever reason, the upcoming election keeps reminding me of this.

Pensions, Pensions...

I wrote recently about how some companies reduced their pension premium payments by fraudulently reporting lowered salaries for their workers. That way they'd only need to pay the minimum pension amount, not the amount the worker was actually entitled to. And nobody would find out until the worker retired and got a very nasty surprise. Oh, and it turned out the companies did that on the urging of a social insurance agency official.

Turns out this was a lot more common than initially believed - though frankly it's hard to disbelieve anything regarding the Japanese pension system by now. A quick investigation has found over a million pension records that may have been altered in this manner. In a way I'm happy the system won't ever apply to me. Since I already know my pension payments here are money lost forever, I can plan accordingly and not worry about whether the SIA will be abolished and the pension system reformed in time or not.

More Fun with Pensions

How's this for a scenario: A company is in financial trouble. It has cash-flow problems and has difficulty coming up with the money to pay expenses every month. One expense is of course the monthly pension premiums it pays for its workers, premiums based on the employee's monthly salary. The salary, and thus the premium, is of course what determines how much the employee will get in pension benefits once they retire.

The Japanese Social Insurance
Agency Open for Business

Things look grim, and as it turns out, one way to cut expenses is to lie to the social insurance agency - tell them the monthly salary of the workers are a lot lower than they really are and you can get away with paying just the minimal premium. Of course, years down the road those employees are going to get a very nasty surprise when their retirement payouts are only a fraction of what they thought they'd get. But that is then, this is now and it's a clever way to cut costs. All in all, just another example of companies in trouble resorting to fraud or other crime in an effort to save themselves.

But here's the wrinkle: Hundreds of companies in trouble were told to do this by a social security agency official. Why would he do that (it's only one official at the moment but the scandal is still very young)? If a company defaults on the pension payments, that impacts the payment rate statistics for the agency, making the pension system look like it's in trouble and makes the official look bad. If the company declares a fraudulently low income it can continue to pay, and that makes the agency statistics look much better while avoiding economic problems for the company. Everybody wins - well, everybody except for the workers cheated out of their pensions, but who cares about them anyhow, right?

Interesting Times

Interesting times at my current job. Things will get better again in due course. Meanwhile, a few things I've wanted to write about but never found the energy:

A straightforward way to cut welfare costs and improve your ministry's economics: Refuse to accept welfare applications. Applicants would be refused application forms, or officials would refuse to accept and process the forms when presented. Three confirmed dead from this policy so far; but of course the welfare statistics look good. When it comes down to the wire - support your ministry or help the downtrodden people you're supposedly hired to assist - it's good to know which side these officials will come down on.

Teachers need certifications to teach. A certification is gained by passing a written and oral examination, and is given locally, at the prefecture level. It is a very competitive exam, with only one in ten or so passing each year. In Oita prefecture, officials have routinely boosted the scores of applicants that were relatives of government officials, or whose parents gave gifts of money or goods ("bribe" is such an ugly word, isn't it) to officials in return for having their children pass. In order not to have suspiciously many applicants pass, some applicants with neither connections nor money got their score lowered instead, having them fail. The two test officials are under arrest. Naturally, the higher officials on the take solicitous of their constituents' interests - the ones that assembled lists of people who should pass; or the well-off, well-connected parents who plied them with bribes gifts will likely not have anything so vulgar happen to them.

 

Tokyo University medical researchers have faked patient consent and ethics committee approval for a medical studies on leukaemia. For anyone not involved in research, this is a serious, major offence. In most places this would be grounds to cancel the research program and withdraw the funding. It would also likely be the end of the research career for the directly responsible. But I guess since it's Tokyo University they'll probably just have to apologize instead.

This is an interesting country to live in, but honest - honest it is not.