patrick.net

Charles Piller and the team here at Science dropped a big story yesterday morning, and if you haven't read it yet, you should. It's about Eliezer Masliah, who since 2016 has been the head of the Division of Neuroscience in the National Institute on Aging (NIA), and whose scientific publication record over at least the past 25 years shows multiple, widespread, blatant instances of fraud. There it is in about as few words as possible. ...

That's what we're seeing here, and a 300-page dossier has been assembled with examples of it. Splicing, cloning, overlaying, copy-and-pasting, duplication of the same image with different captions about different research in different journals: a great deal of effort seems to have gone into carefully doctoring, cleaning, beautifying, and spicing up these papers digitally. After looking over examples, I find the evidence convincing and impossible to explain (at least in my mind) as anything other than sustained, deliberate acts of deception lasting for decades. Hundreds of them. Again and again. The dossier references 132 papers with apparent problems. ...

How many people do we need to check? How many figures do we have to scrutinize? What a mess.

At this point, I am going to work on the basis that the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was the origin of the coronavirus pandemic. It would take extraordinary and dramatic evidence to convince me otherwise, and I doubt that anything like that is coming.

Recently the independent physicist and YouTube star Sabine Hossenfelder managed to whack the hornet’s test of her erstwhile colleagues with a short address bearing the bluntly provocative title Should We Defund Academia?

Hossenfelder’s argument is essentially that scientific research funding in the United States – and in the Western world more broadly, as the same model has been adopted everywhere – is essentially a centrally planned, Soviet-style economy, which has inevitably produced all of the same pathological outcomes that one would expect, namely overinvestment and thus overproduction in some areas, at the expense of underinvestment and underproduction in others. ...

Hossenfelder’s model of diminishing returns through malinvestment neatly explains the declining breakthrough rate, in which disruptive scientific papers – works that change the paradigms of their fields so thoroughly that citations to the new works entirely eclipse citations to the previously foundational papers that they supplant – have all but disappeared from the contemporary academic landscape.




Scientific breakthroughs tend to come from the creative application of novel insights from one field of science to another; they tend to require an extended period of quiet contemplation on the part of the researcher who makes them; and they tend to be intensely resisted by established authorities. The current centralized national grant system for research funding inhibits all three of these.

Cross-fertilization is made more difficult by the aforementioned malinvestment: you can’t draw on new insights from other fields if those other fields aren’t advancing because no one is spending money on them.

https://x.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1908030521302471131

Yet the wounds fester and debates continue. Some readers of the New York Times were furious when The Daily, the newspaper’s flagship podcast, recently interviewed them, with subscribers arguing that the episode was not sufficiently critical of their stance. And some coverage of the book has criticized it for underplaying the danger of the disease.

In yet another under-the-radar but significant victory for taxpayers and transparency, the President Donald Trump administration has quietly terminated federal contracts with one of the world’s largest academic publishing conglomerates.

The funding cuts for Springer Nature come following mounting evidence of political bias, scientific censorship, and misuse of federal tax dollars.

Springer is accused of helping former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Dr. Anthony Fauci and ex-National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Dr. Francis Collins to cover up evidence that COVID-19 leaked from a Chinese lab. ...

The company controls prestigious science journals but has increasingly come under fire for operating more like a political advocacy group than a scientific institution. ...

Springer Nature has become infamous for pushing politically charged narratives, downplaying the COVID-19 lab leak theory, and censoring research to appease authoritarian regimes like China. ...

One of the most notorious examples was the now-discredited 2020 article in Nature Medicine titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2”, which sought to declare the lab-leak hypothesis “implausible” just weeks after the virus emerged.

The paper played a pivotal role in shutting down discussion of the lab-origin theory.

However, as the tide has turned, the lab-leak theory is now widely considered the most likely scenario, even by mainstream outlets.

A House Oversight Committee investigation in 2023 found that then-NIH leaders Fauci and Collins tracked the paper’s progress through the review process and pushed for its publication to silence dissent.

Dr. Collins even emailed Fauci, lamenting that the article hadn’t fully killed the lab-leak theory and asked if “there was anything more they could do.”

The committee’s conclusion was damning: “This is the anatomy of a cover-up.”