OF ALL the issues that New ÐÓ°ÉÔ´´ covers, the most disturbing is bad science. At a time when scientists are fighting as never before for public support against political and religious manipulation, it is demoralising to discover that science is being undermined from within.
Last week Luk Van Parijs, an immunologist and associate professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was fired for research misconduct. The university began investigating Van Parijs more than a year ago when members of his research group complained. According to MIT officials, Van Parijs admitted fabricating and falsifying data in a published paper.
In parallel with MIT’s inquiry, a New ÐÓ°ÉÔ´´ investigation has raised concerns about at least three papers co-authored by Van Parijs between 1997 and 1999, including work that was not part of the MIT investigation. The papers deal with the detailed signals that prompt immune cells to commit suicide. New ÐÓ°ÉÔ´´ spotted uncanny similarities between supposedly different results. Five experts who were shown these results expressed doubts about their authenticity (see www.newscientist.com/dn8230).
Advertisement
To find such a high-profile researcher fabricating data is unusual. Van Parijs has co-authored 40 papers in the past eight years. The question now is how much of this body of work can be trusted. Caltech and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston are scrutinising papers queried by New ÐÓ°ÉÔ´´ that were written while Van Parijs worked at these institutions, but what is really needed is a re-evaluation of all his work.
Van Parijs’s collaborators and co-authors, none of whom are implicated in misconduct, have spent more than a year working under a cloud. Apart from the personal costs, they have been prevented from talking openly about their research. To what extent Van Parijs’s work has led these researchers and others into blind alleys has yet to be seen.
The toughest issue raised by this case is how to stop similar happenings in future. The researchers who first raised doubts about Van Parijs’s behaviour are to be applauded. The freedom to question and voice concerns are crucial to science. What is not needed is an Orwellian surveillance system for science. What is needed is constant reinforcement of the need for strict research ethics and the encouragement of supervisors and journal reviewers to be more sceptical.
Some will argue that science has done what it is meant to do: it has corrected an anomaly. But surely re-evaluating 40 papers and their consequences is too high a price. And while science may be self-correcting, its public image is not. For the sake of public trust, more must be done to discourage the fabrication of data and to detect it as early as possible.