The latest scientific scandal isn’t even remotely surprising. Most science – yes, MOST science – is fraudulent. And we’re not talking about obviously fake science like vaccines, psychiatry, and evolutionary biology, we’re talking about gold-standard, peer-reviewed studies published in well-respected science journals that are landmark studies that serve as the basis for the present scientific consensus in the relevant field:
Science magazine said Thursday that it uncovered evidence that images in the much-cited study, published 16 years ago in the journal Nature, may have been doctored.
The findings have thrown skepticism on the work of Sylvain Lesné, a neuroscientist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, and his research, which fueled interest in a specific assembly of proteins as a promising target for treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. Lesné didn’t respond to NBC News’ requests for comment, nor did he provide comment to Science magazine.
Science said it found more than 20 “suspect” papers by Lesné and identified more than 70 instances of possible image tampering in his studies. A whistleblower, Dr. Matthew Schrag, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University, raised concerns last year about the possible manipulation of images in multiple papers.
Karl Herrup, a professor of neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh Brain Institute who wasn’t involved in the investigation, said the findings are “really bad for science.”
“It’s never shameful to be wrong in science,” said Herrup, who also works at the school’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. “A lot of the best science was done by people being wrong and proving first if they were wrong and then why they were wrong. What is completely toxic to science is to be fraudulent.”
The science is usually the very last thing you can trust; you’re literally better off trusting a coin toss. On average, scientists are more corrupt and less reliable than used car salesmen. And if the scientists and politicians are in agreement, you can be 100-percent certain that whatever it is that they’re trying to push on you is false.
Technological advancement does not depend upon science, that is an inversion of the actual relationship. In most cases, the technology precedes the scientific understanding that results from applying the technology to various hypotheses. For example, my hypothesis that atheism is actually the loss of a connection to the spiritual plane which is the result of brain damage that can either be congenital or caused by vaccines cannot be tested until a technology is invented that is capable of identifying and quantifying that connection. Until then, we’re limited to the sort of social science that only supports the hypothesis that there is an observable link between atheism and autism, though not necessarily a causal one.
We have a word for science that is reliable. And that word is engineering. You will note that scientists do not, for the most part, engineer anything.