Biology and cheating

[Anonymous No.6189084]

Why is there so much cheating going on in biology? All the big cheating scandals in science have involved biological research (cloning, DNA sequencing, etc).

Why are biologists cheating so much? Is it because their research cannot be easily reproduced?

Here's the latest scandal: http://www.nature.com/news/research-ethics-3-ways-to-blow-the-whistle-1.14226

[Anonymous No.6189096]

Because biology is a woman dominated science, and they tend to be far more deceitful (in general).

[Anonymous No.6189100]

>>6189084
>Is it because their research cannot be easily reproduced?

Maybe, but then I don't see how you'd use that to stroke your own ego

[Anonymous No.6189113]

>>6189084
>Why is there so much cheating going on in biology?
What is you basis of that? This article? There's cheating in every field, even non-science related. Why would biology be any different?

[Anonymous No.6189142]

>Is it because their research cannot be easily reproduced?
Pretty much. Though part of that is the disproportionate amount of money thrown into biological research, especially disease-state.

[Anonymous No.6189154]

>>6189113
>What is you basis of that? This article? There's cheating in every field, even non-science related. Why would biology be any different?

No you dumbass. Basis is the history of academic cheating.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_misconduct

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/27128/title/UCLA-prof-falsified-cancer-data/

http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090203/full/news.2009.74.html

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/240222.php

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/99298.php

[Anonymous No.6189169]

>>6189154
Are you sure there's an actual difference in the amount of cheating in biology and medicine and that there isn't a bias in the reporting of cheating in these fields than in a field like geology?

[Anonymous No.6189244]

>>6189169
yes since it's much harder to cheat in other fields.

how the fuck would you cheat in math or CS? you can either follow the proof or you won't and same goes for CS with an added bonus of actually running the algorithm.

it's fucking simple to cheat in bio.

[Anonymous No.6190211]

Obvious reasons:
Cheating is easy enough
Cheating allows researchers to apply for better private contracts and subventions.
Science is a competitive endeavor, so people feel compelled to cheat in order to improve their status.

[Anonymous No.6190261]

>>6189169
Never mind biology, medicine research is shit.

MDs are seriously like mongoloids next to hard science PhDs.

[Anonymous No.6190267]

>>6190261
>Never mind biology, medicine research is shit.

word. i read somewhere that majority of oncology research is flawed.

just one example:


>Deeply flawed research apparently demonstrating the anti-cancer properties of a wonder drug extracted from lichen has been accepted for publication by a majority of “open access” science journals despite the study’s obvious errors, an investigation has revealed.

>Most of the 300 online journals that claimed to check each study’s credibility before publication have agreed to publish the flawed research even though the errors should have been obvious to any expert asked to review the work, it is claimed.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/deeply-flawed-research-into-cancer-wonder-drug-accepted-by-science-journals-despite-obvious-errors-8856905.html

[Anonymous No.6190295]

First of all it's complicated as fuck, and hard to verify compared to other sciences.

Also, the entire medical and pharmaceutical industries are based on it, which are world renowned as some of the most corrupt greedy evil sonsabitches anywhere. The fact is that unlike other sciences there is a shitload of money and lives on the line with biology. Perhaps that's why people fudge the numbers, because they feel they need to to be successful, or they want to cover up their mistakes, which are common in such a young field (biotechnology).

I believe the main problem comes from the public not knowing shit about what's actually going on. Seriously in hundreds of years they will look back on this time period and say this is when everything changed but your average joe doesn't even know what a chromosome is.

[Anonymous No.6190305]

Because "cheating" in biological science, particularly medical science, has more corporate applications, i.e. a new medicine found to not actually be as useful as it's been told wouldn't go over to well for the pharmaceutical companies that stock it.

Would companies really care if it was discovered that physicists lied about just how far away we are from the sun or if there was a mathematical hoax that hid a shortcut on how to integrate?

[Anonymous No.6190429]

I think there is a bit of a fad for "reproducibility" in biology lately.

People like to make a half assed attempt to reproduce studies while hardly even following the protocol consistently (and the published protocol usually glosses over many subtle nuances) and then when it doesn't work, they scream fraud.

It's commonplace in biology to fail to reproduce even classical experiments. It's just an inexact science with many unknowns sometimes. It may take years for a student to get the expertise needed to even reproduce a very difficult, but well-accepted experiment. After that, they make their own, novel experiment.

If you've ever worked in a biology lab you'll know that the simplest experiment has many quirks that you must watch out for, and even if you do it perfectly, sometimes it may fail anyway and it's possible that no one knows why.

Many experiments work, but nobody knows why they work, and nobody has really tried to find out - biology in general tends to have a "don't care how it works, so long as it works" attitude similar to engineering. Partly because everyone wants to save lives and better life instead of pontificating over philosophical questions, and partly because it's so damn difficult to conclusively explain anything in biology. It's just complicated.

These "reproducibility" people like to say "don't believe every paper you read" - but this also applies to their own paper. I'm skeptical that there is as much fraud and bad science as some people claim.

[Anonymous No.6190433]

>>6190267
This "study" was made by a journalist employed by Science, a print journal, and tried to "prove" that open access journals (that compete with Science) are worse than print journals, like Science.

He tried to weasel out of the conflict of interest by claiming that he didn't have the resources to test print journals as well.

Supposedly, his "bad paper" was bad because it lacked controls, but ironically his own study also lacks controls.

He further biased it by including hundreds of scam Chinese and Indian journals that nobody reads or gives a fuck about. PLoS, the main open access journal, easily passed his test. When's the last time you paid attention to papers in a print journal that's not in the top 20?

[Anonymous No.6190530]

Life science has the most money. We constantly churn through million dollar grants to do our experiments. No money, no experiments, which means no publications and no money. It's a vicious circle. The boss gets angry when there are no results because it means no money and there is a real danger of the lab dissolving.

Nervous graduate students and postdocs are under tremendous pressure to present good data and some pick and choose what to show and what not to show. Honestly, this happens at all levels of academia.

Biology is a business now. It's not like other fields where you work with the same machine or cheap chemicals your entire career. Cell cultures need media, westerns need antibodies, pcr's need enzymes, these things are expensive. The longer something doesn't work, the more money you waste.

[Anonymous No.6190536]

>>6189244
>how the fuck would you cheat in math or CS?

Well, neither of those fields are discovering shit like biology is.

[Anonymous No.6190538]

>>6189084

[Anonymous No.6190547]

>>6190433
You're doing it wrong if you only pay attention to papers with very high impact factors. There is a lot of bullshit published in, say, Nature.

That said, a lot of open access journals are actually scams and do not peer review. That's not to say that open access is bad - It should be the future of scientific research. That said, with print journals you in general have a bit more of a guarantee of quality.

[BioMed !!1JEgcrDzIzk No.6190605]

>>6190538

gr8b8m8

[Anonymous No.6190610]

>>6190538

What a terrible thing to say.

What are you, an undergrad?

[Anonymous No.6190612]

[Anonymous No.6190613]

>>6190538
>chemistry
>mathematically rigorous
yeah...no

[Anonymous No.6190633]

>>6190613
Chemistry is all about learning shit tonnes of arbitrary rules for letters and lines on a page and trying to work out if what you proposed could possibly do anything else in practice, because it will.

[Anonymous No.6190635]

Biology and medicine are less hard sciences than lets say, physics or chemistry, and so are more conductive towards cheating. The situation is even order of magnitude worse in soft sciences.

[Anonymous No.6190713]

>>6189084
>so much cheating
>big cheating scandals
don't worry about it, faget

[Anonymous No.6190721]

>>6190547
I don't see how this relates to what I said.

[Anonymous No.6190747]

>>6190536
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHA.

[Anonymous No.6190753]

>>6190610
Yeah, definitely. When I was an undergrad I used to think that.

[Anonymous No.6190995]

>>6190538
stupid b8

[Anonymous No.6191010]

ITT kids and retarded adults
Welcome to /sci/show

[Anonymous No.6191073]

>>6189084
Because biology is not a serious science, its all hand waving and stamp collecting.
>hurr durr muh vestigials
>muh fossils
>muh drawings
>muh educated guesses

[Anonymous No.6191079]

>>6191073
>muh approximations
>muh axioms

[Anonymous No.6191090]

>>6189084
probably because of the sheer amount of activity, research, and people in that field compared to others bro
theres a revolution going on in biology and everyone wants to be a part of it bro
in crowd of 100 there will be more immoral people than a group of 10 bro

[Anonymous No.6191461]

>>6190633
That's o-chem

>>6190613
Hi, you must never have taken a decent inorganic or physical chemistry course.

[Anonymous No.6191532]

>>6190261

I'm an MD doing my PhD. I must say that the organic chemist and the microbiologist PhDs I have so far collaborated with seemed less intelligent than your usual academic MD. But then maybe those are not god tier physics "hard" sciences according to this board's standards.

My experience is that the guys who actually do scientific work while leading a clinical department and treating patients are pretty smart. My sample consists mostly of internists and neurologists here.
Your typical surgeon is not the intellectual type.