The staggering death toll of scientific lies
www.vox.com
From Don Poldersmans and Francesca Gino to faked Alzheimer’s data, the scientific field needs a better handle on allegations and consequences of fraudulent research.

Archived version

You probably haven’t heard of cardiologist Don Poldermans, but experts who study scientific misconduct believe that thousands of people may be dead because of him.

Poldermans was a prolific medical researcher at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, where he analyzed the standards of care for cardiac events after surgery, publishing a series of definitive studies from 1999 until the early 2010s.

One crucial question he studied: Should you give patients a beta blocker, which lowers blood pressure, before certain surgeries? Poldermans’s research said yes. European medical guidelines (and to a lesser extent US guidelines) recommended it accordingly.

The problem? Poldermans’s data was reportedly fake. A 2012 inquiry by Erasmus Medical School, his employer, into allegations of misconduct found that he “used patient data without written permission, used fictitious data and… submitted to conferences [reports] which included knowingly unreliable data.” Poldermans admitted the allegations and apologized, while stressing that the use of fictitious data was accidental.

  •  tardigrada   ( @tardigrada@beehaw.org ) OP
    6•9 days ago

    The Theranos case is not a scientific fraud in that sense if I understand the article correctly. Holmes had raised hundreds of millions of USD over several years before the first scientist even joined the Theranos board. They apoarently never had a technical (and assumably no financial) due diligence for their ‘blood test’, let alone a research paper. I’d call that a financial fraud, not a scientific fraud.