The bad science scandal: how fact-fabrication is damaging UK's global name for research !

Britain’s leading science institutions will be told on Monday that they will be stripped of many millions of pounds in research grants if they employ rogue researchers who fake the results of experiments, The Independent has learnt. The clampdown comes as retractions of scientific claims by medical journals are on course to top 500 for the first time in 2013 - having been just 20 a year in the late 1990s, when Andrew Wakefield notoriously claimed that the MMR vaccine caused autism in children.

In April, the UK’s first researcher was jailed for falsifying data over a prolonged period. The Government is concerned that Britain’s prized second place in global research behind the US will be at threatened if more fact-fabricators are exposed. It knows that hundreds of thousands of jobs could easily go to foreign rivals if British laboratories do not keep coming up with new product ideas, to be made by major multinational companies in UK factories.All of the country’s 133 universites and colleges of higher education are being forced to sign a new Concordat for Research Integrity - having been warned by major fund providers that those who do not will be refused access to more than £10 billion in research grants funded each year by British taxpayers - and as much again from the private sector.

Grant-funding charities like Wellcome take a dispassionately global view in their search for research excellence. And their fear is that their money may be spent on giving advice to ordinary doctors worldwide, who read and believe the scientific journals, which researchers know is wrong.


Their attempts to stop elaborately-faked data being published in the first place are driven by the fact that invariably take years for journals to retract bogus studies -- in a few paragraphs, that are usually missed by hard-working GPs -- during which time millions of seriously-ill people are treated in ways that make their conditions worse. 

More on this story here.

Eddie