In the current environment - with Obie doing everything he can to torpedo our trust in our country´s medical care system and its practitioners - I am very wary of anything like this. Skeptical. And I haven´t the foggiest notion who Dr. Yuan is.

Now are not supposed to trust our food, our churches, our doctors, the companies that make life-saving pharmaceuticals. Children need government-supported preschools because parents are no longer believed to be equipped to train young children. The list goes on and on. And I am not ready to buy into it.

There is a Pulitzer for any journalist who really decides to investigate the publication process regarding research. It goes both ways - shoddy research being published, like this article points out, and research that funders don´t like getting tossed aside.

The latter is the situation with Dr. Andrew Wakefield and the "autistic enterocolitis" first described in a series of 12 patients in The Lancet in 1988. The Lancet later retracted the paper and even went so far as to claim ´fraud´, which was widely picked up. However, a number of other researchers have come to the same conclusion, including an article published just this month showing that the gastro "signature" of autism patients is different from that of Crohn´s or ulcerative colitis patients. "New" findings...that were first published 15 years ago, but nobody wanted to listen back then.

Lying in scientific research is hardly new, but it´s usually caught. Since JH was making a fortune off government funds for the fraudulent research, I wouldn´t be surprised if they didn´t worry too much about questions on the research´s accuracy.

Money for research that comes from the government is biased in the direction of the contemporaneous administration that grants it.

Is it any wonder why there´s a "consensus" in climate change/global warming? With all of the money being doled out, you better get on the gravy train, or end up out of your field, out of the prestigious institutions.

An acquaintance is a respected scientist who was fearful that his research project would be rejected by NOAA. "If I don´t get this funding, I will have to uproot my family and move to someplace like Oklahoma."

Go along to get along.

Good for Dr. Yuan.

Fraud is rampant in the research field. Let´s face it, if the researcher has been told in advance what result he is to report, why in the name of common sense should he do the research? Why do all that work if he has to fake it at the end to get paid? Why not save the time, trouble, and expense, and get to faking the research from the outset, and move on to the buffet?

Perhaps this explains why we see this seesaw phenomena about various drugs, global warming, diseases...

It´s all about the money.

Johns Hopkins? Pediatric Department? Why would that ring a bell? Can´t you guys see a hit job when it´s right in front of you? As soon as Ben Carson gave his speech, anyone with a brain knew the media would suddenly find excuses to go after Johns Hopkins and anything else related to Carson.

Taxpayer money funding junk science studies and projects? Now there´s a newsflash.

It appears Lin took the "Publish or Perish" maxim litterally....

A careful read of this article, which is long, reveals that Yuan has a number of gripes with Nature. Although he says he contacted them about publishing his criticism of their original publishing of the study, he gave them only two weeks to respond.

He is clearly using the Washington Post writer to use his case for his own resolution (he sounds to have had some other problems at Johns Hopkins which resulted in his demotion and eventual termination). The issue is further complicated by his "attack" having been on only the first part of the study; the second was apparently OK.

I am paraphrasing, but you have a disgruntled employee, who believes he was underappreciated (and is suing about his supposedly "wrongful" termination), using a liberal paper to further his cause. Expecting Nature to jump to his bidding.

I have serious doubts about Yuan and how he and the WaPo are using each other to promote their respective agendas.

Perhaps Nature has not answered Yuan´s doubts because they were invalid?

Judging by my own eyes and ears from years ago, fraudulent scientific studies are not rare but normal. They are rarely found out and when they are, they are covered up.

The setup is that the studies are done by employees, postdocs, grad students who are entirely dependent on the recommendation of their boss/professor for their future. The boss/professor does not come to the lab except to show off and/or intimidate. So the employees, postdocs, grad students fake and fabricate, prostituting themselves not necessarily for advancement, but for career survival.