Monday, December 6, 2010

Research misconduct, by the numbers

Thanks to Paul's posts, I decided to take a look at the adjudicated cases that the Office of Research Integrity has handled. Here are the results of my tabulations; please note that I am NOT a biologist, so my categorizations are probably incorrect:

Retrovirology: 1
Endocrinology: 3
Genetics: 7
Epidemiology: 1
Organic chemistry: 1
Psychology: 1
Nephrology/transplant science: 4
Immunology: 6
Sleep science: 1
Pharmacology: 2
Clinical trial misconduct: 5
Developmental biology: 2
Neuroscience: 2
Radiology: 1
Protein expression/isolation: 1

What does this say? Not much, really, except that HHS and NIH fund a lot of biology, probably a heck of a lot more than chemistry.

Another interesting tabulation was the gender of the "respondent": 25 men, 15 women and 1 unknown. Certainly, gender parity has not reached scientific misconduct yet.

Finally, in response to thoughts that Bengu Sezen has not been punished enough, there was one case in which the "ultimate punishment" was meted out: Paul Kornak falsified records and misenrolled someone into a clinical trial in which they died. Because of this, Kornak pled guilty to criminally negligent homicide and was "excluded for life from participating in any and all Federal agency transactions, both procurement and nonprocurement."

1 comment:

  1. Kindler is gone! :-) little off topic but I had to spread the joy!

    ReplyDelete

looks like Blogger doesn't work with anonymous comments from Chrome browsers at the moment - works in Microsoft Edge, or from Chrome with a Blogger account - sorry! CJ 3/21/20