Iowa State, home of one of the great Vet Schools in the country, now is home of a fraudulent research project that bilked the taxpayers through the NIH.
Dr. Han claimed an AIDS antibody from wabbits. Elmer Fudd says it’s a joke that cost the taxpayers 17 million.
Thanks to Instapundit and Thomas Lifson for this item.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/12/more_science_fraud.html
Two important considerations on this new example of research fraud–there is a law, called the Data Quality Act,
http://www.foreffectivegov.org/node/3479
and another law called the Lincoln Law that criminalizes fraud on the government, also called The False Claims Act
http://www.ask.com/wiki/False_Claims_Act?o=2800&qsrc=999
My position has always been that EPA funded and sponsored research on air pollution, many toxicology claims and certainly climate, that is fraud on the taxpayer and could not pass muster in a Daubert Hearing, which is a hearing on admissibility of expert testimony or expert spnosored evidence, before a reliable and unconflicted judge or Hearing officer.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/daubert_standard
Our problem is that Federal Judges are very hesitant to buck Federal Agencies, Federal administrative hearing officers are just as bad, and lawyers for business industry are afraid of the white coat army that the agencies have paid to be available.
At the appellate level, the judges won’t even consider challenges to scientific testimony on a strained interpretation of the deference to agency discretion that is misinterpreted by federal judges as a free pass for agency science misconduct.
That nonsense jurisprudence got started with Chevron v Natural Resources Defense Council on an air pollution regulation challenge and the majority opinion of Justice Stevens, a good solid lefty.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/467/837
But the problem is that even Antonin Scalia, who should know better, allows a broad interpretation of the Chevron Standard for assessing Agency actions, as exemplified by his empty headed decision in
Whitman V American Trucking Association.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/99-1257.ZS.html
Shame on Nino, his affection for judicial restraint allowed tyranny of the EPA apparatchiks and their paid charlatan science army. Agency discretion should not allow junk science in agency research and policy making. Judges should be, as Daubert said, the gatekeepers who assure reliable evidence, the final word at the trial court level on admissibility of evidence.
Research fraud should be subject to fines and penalties and restitution.
It’s the kind of thing, like research fraud in climate, that should make researchers liable for their lies and deceit along with their complicit Universities.
Trouble is there’s no sheriff in town.
There is an interesting element to the False Claims Act–the qui tam provision
http://www.ask.com/wiki/Qui_tam?o=2800&qsrc=999
that allows a citizen to start litigation against a fraudulent use of taxpayer money, and if the government is successful, the individual who brings the inforamtion of fraud to the attention of the government, can be awarded a percentage of the recovery.
Imagine how many University research programs would be in jeopardy if the False Claims Act litigation could begin to take down the edifice of junk science now a part of the financial assets of University research programs in climate and public health research.
Most universities rely on their administrative cut on research grants of 10 percent or more. They would be subject to civil penalties and disgorgement of the research funding received.
Unfortunately, the Age of lies, lies, lies began in 1946 – the same year George Orwell started writing his warning to the public about a new tyrannical government that would be apparent to all by Nineteen Eighty-four “1984” !
Mankind caused himself enormous damage and unnecessary conflict between science and RELIGION by promoting misinformation as science.
Yes.
Mankind caused himself enormous damage and unnecessary conflict between science and rigion by promoting misinformation as science.
I suspect that the Sun’s pulsar core has been worshipped by different cultures as the Creator and Sustainer of life by different names since the dawn of civilization.
omanuel: does this Neutron Repulsion theory imply that researchers attempting to create Fusion power with lasers are barking up a wrong tree?
I agree.
Almost, if not, all fields of science have been corrupted and the very survival of humankind put at risk.
Our governments have squandered huge amounts of talents and funds to protect citizens from imaginary threats, and left us vulnerable to real threats from the Sun’s pulsar core.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10640850/Chapter_2.pdf
“Oh what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive !
Perfect example of researching to please your grantor, i.e. the government. It doesn’t take a slide rule to figure out that the government wants the researcher to find out that something is “bad” so they can tax it, regulate it, or ban it (so that some big political donor, who just happens to own a patent on the next best substitute, can step in to fill the market void).
Science is completely corrupted by the feeding frenzy to get a government teat, which in turn only keeps flowing if the researcher comes up with the right result. There is some policing just to give it an air of integrity. This poor b*stard must have got on somebody’s bad side. So they killed two birds with one stone. Got rid of an undesirable and they get to proclaim how stringent they are. They couldn’t out every crooked researcher or all the research departments at all the major universities across America would have to shut down for lack of manpower. This guy got the short straw or was just too sloppy. I wonder how big an iceberg of rigged research there is under the visible tip?
Alas, another black mark on my beloved alma mater. 🙁
Postnormal science is a tool of government propaganda that George Orwell started writing about in 1946, the same year that Fred Hoyle published two papers claiming that
1. Stars are composed of hydrogen
2. H-fusion powers solar energy
Both of these claims were adopted without discussion or debate, as Hoyle himself admited on pp. 153-154 of his 1994 autobiography, Home Is Where the Wind Blows.
Yes, indeed, and he puts out his begging bowl to gullible politicians and robs his honest colleagues of funds. BTW See PE 1356 21 Dec. page 34 – cut backs in costs are crippling honest research while governments throw buckets of cash at anything that has the magic words ‘carbon’, ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’ somewhere in the project spec.
“The educated man and the scientist are as prone as any to become victims of their own prejudices. He will in defense thereof make shipwreck of both facts and methods of science, by perpetrating every form of fallacy, inaccuracy and distortion.” Karl Pearson
Does anyone know what English law has to say about this?
I squirm when hearing the bleats of normal science starved of resources while the post-normal scientists fleece everyone and bring misery and penury to poor people who cannot afford heating costs.
I remind you – post-normal science explicitly, and shamelessly, uses pseudo-science to advance the interests of the researcher and the university. The “quality” of PNS is measured by the research money collected and the honours awarded, definitely not by the veracity of data on which alarming hypotheses are erected.
As Lord Turnbull pointed out long ago, the CAGW scare was created by a small coterie of self-serving academics and journal editors. Surely these charlatans can be brought to book somehow? The damage they are doing through the decarbonisation policies they have promoted is incalculable.
Question – how can we prosecute snake-oil salesmen?
What a sad, sad state of affairs for science and for members of society that use manufactured products (foods, medicines, bridges, nuclear reactors, etc.) that depend on the validity of government-funded research.
“Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practice to deceive!”
cough, cough… Junk Science itself had the story before instapundit… and note that while the researcher is banned from any new contracts, there’s no clawback of his grants.
http://junkscience.com/2013/12/26/isu-researcher-implicated-in-aids-research-fraud/
Most modern science has only two objectives: to secure more Federal or private grant money or to protect some politically correct paradigm.
Someone should research the question: what is the reproducibility of university and industry research?
We are in the Obama Age – lies, lies, and lies.