One, because it's going to ruin our day, alright?
So, uh, if you know anything special about this paper, don't tell anybody.
What I really want you guys to do is to not use the internet.
We're going to take a close look at this paper, see what you guys think about it.
We're going to read it, I'm going to give you about 20 minutes
to read this paper and discuss it. Maybe half an hour.
Talk to your friends if you want to.
The idea is going to be to get through it as fast as you can, and let's talk about
if we like this paper or not, alright?
Cool.
(crosstalk)
>> Put them up here. >> Mia apparently doesn't staple papers
that she reads, so they're not stapled.
So it's just complete mayhem.
>> At least I got the job done. >> No, not really.
(crosstalk)
>> Did anybody not get one?
(crosstalk)
>> Alright. I'll be back.
(crosstalk)
>> Alright, so, maybe read for about five more minutes, and then maybe
discuss this for about five or ten minutes.
So read for five more minutes, then we'll discuss
for five or ten minutes, and then I'll lead the discussion on the paper.
The discussion is really going to center around what do you find convincing?
What do you like and dislike? Same kind of discussions we've had, but sort of
a short version, just to kind of see if maybe people will notice things
that other people didn't notice.
Does anyone know about this paper? Anyone know what I'm talking about here?
Has anyone read this paper before?
Alright, good, we're all on the same page.
Alright, read for a few more minutes, and then when you're ready, start discussing
with whoever your neighbors - or whoever you want to talk to about it.
Talk about this paper for ten or fifteen minutes.
See what you think about it, see if you can come up with a consensus.
(crosstalk)
>> Alright, okay, so uh, what do you guys think of this paper?
>> Cool. >> Yeah, super cool, huh?
Like really really good. Yeah, I think you guys got it.
Yeah, and what do you think?
>> We have a theory that it's all made up.
>> Ahh. (class laughing)
Anyone else think it's all made up? >> I was convinced.
>> Based purely on the fact that you told us that there was a retraction.
>> You can't find it, can you? >> You also gave us the author manuscript,
so, yeah. >> Yeah, yeah, no, no.
So, go do some Googling right now, everybody pull up your laptop or your
phone and see what you think here, because this is a really interesting
lesson in how to do this, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no. But go see what you can find about this paper.
It's a useful exercise.
A couple of minutes of your own research by phone or laptop,
and then we'll have a little more conversation.
(crosstalk)
>> All right. That's pretty amazing, huh?
Okay, so not just the paper in "Cell," but also the paper in PNAS, right?
So two different papers had to be completely retracted.
The retraction notice here in "Cell" is good reading.
Let's see - where's the retraction notice? Here's the retraction notice.
So, here we are.
Study reported the former family blah, blah, blah.
Shortly after publication, a lab with whom we had shared reagents
noticed that cell lines that were supposed to be stably expressing
GFE-4 were not, we subsequently found a western blot of the paper
had been inappropriately manipulated.
And that multiple cell lines were not as reported.
When we constructed and validated new cell lines and reagents,
our attempts to produce critical data in the paper were unsuccessful.
This led to basically office -ORI, is the Office of Research Integrity,
at the NIH, did a study, and actually found that there were
fabrications in figures two, three, five, six, seven,
and the majority of the supplement. Alright?
Now, what's even more stunning - what? Yeah, I'm getting there.
(crosstalk) >> From the NIH? This is ridiculous.
>> Yeah, well, so, okay, right.
So an interesting thing to do in these cases when you see retractions
is to read the ORI report, uh, and the ORI report goes on for
pages and pages and pages of all the things that were altered,
but the real meat of it is here.
This is for the "Cell" paper.
Results which did not originate from experimental observations,
which did not originate from experimental observation using selected regions
of the same original to represent the control and the rescue.
Lying about whether they were 2.5 or 3.5 microliter channels,
not originating from experimental.
And then, what's particularly crazy about this, is that there's a lot of
falsification data here, but almost every single figure in here has the
end numbers exaggerated.
The error bar is mislabeled, etc., etc., right?
And so this is a relevant thing to think about.
So this was a very talented scientist. I saw her talk at
a Gordon research conference and immediately asked her to apply to UT.
I said "You should apply for a faculty job at UT," completely sold on the story.
So was UT Southwestern, who actually offered her a job
as an assistant professor.
So was the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas,
which offered her a two million dollar recruitment grant.
All of which was of course rescinded when this was discovered.
Turns out she had fabricated all the data in a second paper in PNAS as well.
And so I think it's worth considering these things and sort of paying attention
to what happens here, right?
So Claire Waterman, the senior author on these papers is a very famous
cell biologist, who's been in the business for 25 years,
at least as long as I have.
And is very well regarded, very respected by all of her colleagues,
Obviously this puts her in quite a bind, right?
And it's worth thinking about.
We've had faculty in this department where this has happened, right?
This appears to be a case where a very intelligent young scientist
somehow felt something about the pressure of the job, needed to
make up all the data in two entire papers.
Then so one of the questions you ask is,
that you get asked a lot from non-scientists is
"Well, why doesn't peer review find it?"
Right? How does this get through peer review?
Did anyone see anything wrong with this paper? If I had just given
you this paper, you'd have read it and you'd have loved it, right?
Because if you're a smart person, and you're a dedicated fraud,
it's very hard to get caught, right?
If you just make up numbers and put them on a graph, and it looks good,
very hard to see that in peer review. Right?
If you pick the part of the image that shows what you want to show...
it's very easy to get away with this actually.
>> The only thing I was suspicious about in the whole paper was that
it all came together so perfectly, and that's just like not how it should
ever happen with cancer cells.
>> Yeah, but it does sometimes, right?
Yeah, right, it does, and when you sit there and you watch the data,
and it's from a good lab-- right?
It's very hard to say, "Ah, it's too perfect."
You know, you wouldn't have said "Oh, clearly you've made all of this up."
Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right?
>> I don't - I was only suspicious because I had thought already
that that's what happened with this paper.
>> Yeah, yeah, yeah. No.
It's hard to do the exercise any other way.
August had a question and then Jifa.
>> No, just because we were quite -
you know, they made a little bit far-fetched of a claim, but
at the same time we can see that, yeah, the phenotype's right.
So I think... >> Yeah, Jifa?
>> So, were the other scientists here in on it, or was this like -
did she orchestrate it?
>> No, the Office of Research Integrity puts it all on the one person.
Basically just a dedicated fraud all the way through.
And again, it wouldn't be that hard to do, right?
So probably the other authors involved are the authors who
generated other reagents, also possible that many of them
just generated reagents and gave them to this person, to do work on,
and then she did experiments on them and made up the results.
But actually in the entire investigation, only one person
was found to be the root of all of this.
And so...
>> (inaudible).
>> Huh?
>> I said, it sucks for the other authors of the paper.
>> Oh, it sucks for everybody, absolutely.
>> I'm sorry, I just want to know, how about the (inaudible)
>> I think we don't know. I think someone will have to go back
and redo all those experiments, right?
So these are the findings of what people said, but even those findings
in the first few figures, clearly the numbers are inflated, right?
And so I think someone will have to go back and start over.
>> I didn't read the summary at the beginning because (inaudible),
so I just read the introduction, but I feel like the titles are very attractive,
and then I read-- briefly go the the introduction and read each figure.
I think they're basically true then you gave us a little time so I went back
to read the summary. >> Yup.
>> And I felt like some of the summaries they were giving for the whole picture
of this paper, I felt like how could it be so perfect, you know in
animal models, and the (inaudible)
>> Yeah, but every once in a while you get lucky, right?
And so that's the thing with fraud, right?
If it's really consistent and you stick to your guns, it's really hard
to catch. Now, the funny thing is
that surely she must have thought someone would try to repeat -
I mean it's a cell paper. She was on the job market, she gave
talks all over the country. She must have known that
somebody was going to do these experiments.
And so I just don't know. August?
>> I'm pretty sure that Skau's reputation is completely shattered,
but how is the reputation of Clare Waterman?
>> I mean that's always a danger, right? And time will tell, right?
It's the only time she's ever been associated with it.
The independent investigation found that it was all this one person.
So, time will tell.
But right now I would say it's still very good.
>> Oh, okay. >>Right? Yeah.
>> This makes me wonder like, what is so terribly wrong with the system
that somebody (inaudible)
>> Sure. Right? I mean I think that's one of the big questions,
and what's kind of related to that that I think is a really
subtle point - I'll get to your questions in a minute,
but I do want to make this point, because it comes straight to this.
Right?
It's very easy to start believing your own bullshit. Right?
And there's a big difference between really making up entire papers
and not being honest with yourself, but they all are part of the
same spectrum, and something you have to guard against is
"Am I really doing this the right way?"
"Am I really seeing what I think I'm seeing?"
"Am I really being completely honest?"
Because especially once you get halfway into a paper, halfway into your PhD,
it gets, you know, there's a lot of pressure.
And it's something you have to fight against, right?
Especially when a project's going south, right?
You've invested a lot in it, and everything's starting to
fall apart, and so you've got to be vigilant.
And again, I'm not saying that you're likely to decide to just
make up all the data in the last three figures of your paper.
But the system is stressful.
It's a very competitive system.
It's a very competitive world.
Is fraud any worse now than it used to be,
or can we just detect it better, right?
I don't actually know. My guess is that we can detect it a lot better, right?
There's a lot better tools for it.
But there's also a lot more money in science than there ever was before
at all levels, even in academia, which puts a big incentive in
for people to be unethical.
But I mean these are serious concerns, I think there's things that as
graduate students, you guys should be thinking about and considering.
There were some hands up. I can't remember who they all were.
Will?
>> I was just going to say that it's crazy that it seems like the
way that she started to get caught was that she sent
stably-transfected cell line, and it wasn't actually stably-transfected.
>> Yup. >> It seems so basic.
>> Yeah, I mean but once you're there, right, they ask for the line,
what are you going to do?
>> That's also easy to hand away, to be like "Oh, it might have..."
You know, you build these lines and they fall apart, so I mean...
and if you're this confident in falsifying data that ends up
in the "Cell" paper, you're probably willing to think that you can
argue your way out of something like that, right?
Do you see what I'm saying, like the mental-- yeah, yeah.
>> Well but also at this level, you know it's slid over into pathology, right?
I mean literally every single thing in this paper has something
fraudulent about it.
Right, which is really evidence to me that someone has gone
way past "Oh crap, I've got to just save this one paper" into
"I'm invincible".
Right? >> Yeah.
>> Yeah yeah yeah, I mean I don't know, but yeah.
>> Yeah, so apart from the reputation and embarrassment, what is the
punishment for such (inaudible)?
>> Right, so the punishment for her is-- I mean, the punishment
is her entire scientific career is completely ruined.
She'll never work in the field again, right?
>> What about the taxpayer's money? >> Right, right, right.
Taxpayer's money, there's nothing-- I mean, nothing done.
They have these voluntary settlements here that you can read about it.
And these things are really built around the assumption of
small amounts of fraud, you know?
You made a mistake, you're a savable person as a scientist, then they
put a supervisory plan in place where someone's really
looking a lot more carefully at your work, and then for three years,
you're not allowed to work for the NIH and these kinds of things.
But at this level, her reputation is just destroyed, so there's--
we won't see her anywhere in academic science again.
In terms of monetary, these kinds of things, I don't know of any,
and there's much more-- there was a big "New York Times" piece
about a cancer biologist at Penn State who's apparently
been under investigation for fraud like every other year for ten years,
and he still has millions of dollars of research money and it just sort of
never comes home to roost, so.
You guys should educate yourself about the fraud situation,
and what's there.
Did someone else have a hand up?
>> Can I same something quick? >> Yeah.
>> I saw in the news, UT Southwestern removed a million dollar grant from her.
>> Yeah yeah, that's the grant. Yeah-- oh yeah, she--
the job was rescinded, the grant was rescinded, so she's not
getting the grant, she didn't get the job, she will absolutely
have to leave science.
As I understand it, she's like a program officer at a foundation now
or something. Yeah.
>> But not just the monetary loss, what about killing so many mice
and falsifying data? (inaudible). (laughter)
>> If you go down the road that killing life is a problem,
then you're going to have a real problem.
>> If you're doing science, doing something productive,
it makes sense but if you're falsifying data.
>> Yeah.
>> I was-- >> Hang on, you had a hand up.
>> How often-- obviously this one seems like it was very intentional,
and so that's really-- but how often do people get
caught up in this just because they weren't careful enough
and they didn't force themselves to be very thorough?
>> I mean mistakes get made in papers all the time, right, and some papers
get retracted because we went back and resequenced the mouse allele,
and it wasn't what we thought it was, right?
But generally what happens is there's a correction. Generally when that happens,
it's not like the entire paper's ruined, "Oh, surprise, we mutated
totally the wrong gene".
Usually it's like "Oh we thought it was exon 3, but in a frameshift,
but in fact it was something else." Right?
>> Right.
>> And so you get a lot of corrections in papers, and some retractions,
but generally, you know, you've got to-- the whole paper
really has to be systematically wrong to retract the entire paper.
>> So it's the dishonesty that gets prosecuted.
>> Yeah, or I mean, it-- yeah, so the dishonestly immediately you want to
retract the paper, because that's also what the PI is going to
want to do. >> Right.
>> Right? But if you just get it wrong, you know, you get it wrong,
we're human, right?
If there was no-- and there have been investigations where they find
"Oh, no, they weren't unethical, they were just dumb."
(laughter)
No, seriously, right? And that can happen, right?
And that's not a crime.
So, yeah.
>> Who does these investigations? Is there like a secret service
for scientists, like-- >> Yeah.
The Office of Research Integrity at the NIH, right?
>> At the NIH?
>> Yup, and then all universities will have an office for research integrity,
so I'm sure that-- so if it happens at UT, there's a UT office that will investigate,
but the NIH will also investigate if it's NIH-funded research.
Yeah, so several differnet bodies.
And there's a...
Yeah.
>> Has anyone here read the book "Bad Blood?"
>> "Bad Blood" what is that?
>> It's about the Theranos controversy and (inaudible).
>> Oh, wow. No, is it good? >> It's amazing.
>> Really? "Bad Blood." >> Everyone should read it.
>> Okay. >> It's really good.
>> The documentary on HBO's pretty good.
>> Same title? Okay.
>> I think so. >> Okay.
>> So lots of these kinds of things existing.
>> Yeah (laughs).
>> Just like the...
I don't know how to say that vitamin C is
for everything, and so now, the (inaudible) for everything
and the (inaudible) can do everything,
and they just make money from that.
(laughter)
>> As long as they don't kill anyone,
they just sell the ideas to the (inaudible).
>> Yeah, I mean that's the entire supplement industry, right?
All right. Any other questions?
Thoughts, comments?
>> When is the next assignment due?
>> Next assignment is due a week from Wednesday.
No, so nine days from now.
>> Nine days?
>> Nine days.
Whatever the date is here, actually I have a calendar
in front of me. >> It is the 6th so the 15th.
>> The 15th. >> Ooh, I'm good at simple math.
>> It is as my calendar says, 'cause I have an 11 year old
girl at home, and "Riverdale" season three starts.
(laughter)
But also your assignment is due, so get it done before River--
>> "Riverdale" season three already happened.
>> What? (laughter)
Oh, no, no, it comes out free on Netflix. Yeah.
(laughter)
>> Judge me all you want.
>> I have a shared-- >> I know all of you
watch "Game of Thrones," and I don't, so.
>> No, no I don't either.
(crosstalk)
>> Jifa?
>> What's going on Wednesday?
>> Haven't decided yet. It's going to be so much fun, though.
(laughter)
All right, cool. We're done.
(crosstalk)
>> I mean I sent in my paper just last Friday afternoon.
>> Okay. >> Was that too late, 'cause I--
>> It was too late, 'cause we told you again and again and again--
>> Oh my-- >> All right, so anyway
>> Sorry about that. >> Did you get your paper in today?
>> Yes. Yes, yes. >> Okay. Great.
We will survive it. >> Thank you, thank you.
>> All right.
(crosstalk continues)
>> Oh sorry, I wasn't (inaudible).
And on Wednesday-- I mean, this is not about the class,
it's slightly about the class, because (inaudible)--
invitation, having lunch-- >> With Roy Parker?
Yeah, you leave early and go to that.
>> No no, not for that, but on Wednesday afternoon,
I'm flying to (inaudible) to walk in the commencement.
>> Oh okay. So you'll miss this talk?
>> Yeah, I'll miss this talk likely, and I'll be away for two weeks
because my parents are coming. >> No problem.
So send your paper in before that. >> So I was going to submit it
on Wednesday. >> Great, no problem.
Okay, cool, good, it works. >> Thank you.
>> You bet.
>> Mina? >> Yeah?
>> So are you going to be in your office right now, or?
>> Yeah yeah, I'll be here all day doing experiments,
so if I'm not there, just leave it on my desk.
>> Okay.
(crosstalk)