For someone who has made the national news for probing some dubious aspects of medical research and for publicizing instances of scientific misconduct, Arturo Casadevall, MD, PhD, does not look particularly fearsome in person. But he is certainly passionate and animated when it comes to articulating his concerns.
Casadevall –- professor, editor, and, in the last few years, agitator -– spoke recently at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia before an attentive audience of postdocs, residents, researchers, professors, and Penn medical students. His topic was “Shaking Up Science,” so it was not a surprise that the event was standing room only. He was introduced as someone who has taken on “a gargantuan topic. . . . To say that he created a firestorm would be an understatement.”
The author of more than 450 scientific papers, Casadevall holds the Leo and Julia Forchheimer Chair in Microbiology & Immunology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University. In addition to being a researcher himself, he is editor in chief of mBio, the first open-access general journal of the American Society of Microbiology, and he serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Clinical Investigation and the Journal of Experimental Medicine. So he has credibility when speaking about science, good or bad. And, given that he was one of the authors of “Is the Nobel Prize Good for Science?” (The FASEB Journal, September 5, 2013), which dared to suggest some of the “negative consequences of competition between individual scientists,” it’s also clear that he is not afraid to examine sacred cows.
One of Casadevall’s interlinking themes was the phenomenon of retractions in scientific literature. Such retractions, as depicted by Casadevall, are ambiguous in effect. Rising dramatically in recent years (ten-fold since 1975), retractions represent losses of effort, resources, and prestige -– and, what is especially worrisome in an era when funding is harder to find, damage to the public perception of science. At the same time, “we have a mechanism” for correction and conflict resolution, which, as Casadevall pointed out, is a distinguishing difference between science and religion. In essence, retractions demonstrate self-correction.
The standard view of retractions has been that the great majority were due to error. But that’s not what Casadevall, Ferric Fang, MD, a microbiologist at the University of Washington and editor of Infection and Immunity, and R. Grant Steen, a medical writer, found in their widely publicized article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (October 2012). A full two-thirds of the 2,047 biomedical and life-science research retractions they examined “were attributable to misconduct, including fraud (43.4 %), duplicate publication (14.2 %), and plagiarism (9.8 %).” The authors reclassified 15.9 % of the retractions they studied, by using other sources of information.
As the authors also point out, in many cases “the retraction notice is insufficient to ascertain the true cause of a retraction,” which is one reason that instances of fraud or other misconduct have been widely underreported. In their article, the authors observe that “Policies regarding retraction announcements vary widely among journals, and some, such as the Journal of Biological Chemistry, routinely decline to provide any explanation for retraction.” At CHOP, Casadevall was more blunt: some of the retraction notices are themselves “dishonest.” In a lighter vein, I found that the editors of Retraction Watch recently posted a blog at Labtimes highlighting “the lengths editors have gone to in order to avoid using the word plagiarism in retraction notices.” These include “unattributed overlap,” “significant originality issue,” and “administrative error.”
Of equal concern, as Casadevall made clear during his campus presentation, not all articles suspected of fraud have been retracted – and some retracted articles continue to be cited in later research. Among those he cited were papers by Mark Spector, lead author, and Ephraim Racker, senior author, then at Cornell University. As I discovered, one such article, published in the above-mentioned Journal of Biological Chemistry in September 1980, remains available on the Internet. Neither PubMed nor Research Gate mentions the retraction, and the four-page article appears as originally published. Similarly, a second paper by Spector and Racker, in Cell in July 1981, appears in its original form on the Internet; nothing indicates a retraction. (Although Spector denied wrongdoing, he was expelled from Cornell.)
Casadevall mentioned in passing that Andrew Stern, a fourth-year Penn Med student, has been working to estimate the costs of scientific fraud. One figure Casadevall cited: $55 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health.
Casadevall is a staunch champion of science -– which is one of the reasons he began investigating where and how it goes wrong. During his presentation, Casadevall emphasized the great advances science has made in improving the lives of humans. In fact, he compared the lives we lead today to that of Queen Victoria, one of the richest persons of the 19th century. During her lifetime, 1 million people starved in Ireland, her husband died at 42, two children died in their thirties, her palace was full of smoke, and her toilet was a chamber pot. “Your lives are so much richer than hers,” asserted Casadevall. The reason: scientific advances.
But there are problems. Casadevall cited individuals, among them Eric Poehlman, a scientist in the field of human obesity and aging at the University of Vermont. In 2006 he became the first academic scientist in the United States to be jailed for falsifying data in a grant application. While receiving millions of dollars in grants, he had published fraudulent research. Casadevall quoted him: “I had placed myself . . . in an academic position which the amount of grants that you held basically determined one’s self-worth. Everything flowed from that.”
For Casadevall, the current system does indeed share the blame. It fosters a “winner take all” mentality, pits scientists against each other in unhealthy competition, exalts “novelty” and appearances in “high-impact” journals, offers “disproportionate” awards, and discourages collaboration –- which, he affirmed, is actually a cornerstone of scientific progress.
What solutions are there? Casadevall offered some suggestions, including “putting the Ph back in PhD.” By that, he meant training young scientists differently and more broadly, having them learn epistemology, logic, ethics, and metaphysics, encouraging them to explore how they know what they know. PhD, he reminded us, stands for doctor of philosophy. On a more earthly level, Casadevall added more training elements: probability and statistics and the proper design of studies.