A journalism professor at New York University and his class combed through Food and Drug Administration (FDA) records and uncovered mountains of evidence of research misconduct. The concealed misbehavior ranged from the relatively mundane (faked lab tests) to the shocking (like secretly amputated limbs).
Writing at Slate, Professor Charles Seife explains:
When the FDA finds scientific fraud or misconduct, the agency doesn't notify the public, the medical establishment, or even the scientific community that the results of a medical experiment are not to be trusted. On the contrary. For more than a decade, the FDA has shown a pattern of burying the details of misconduct....The silence is unbroken even when the FDA itself seems shocked at the degree of fraud and misconduct in a clinical trial. [Slate]
Making matters worse, when professional journals published research the agency has flagged as faulty, they often omit the warning. As a result doctors and other researchers are doubly unlikely to know if the research they're using was obtained via fraudulent or otherwise untrustworthy processes. Ready the story in full at Slate.
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