To the Editor:
“Amid a Sea of False Findings, The NIH Tries Reform,” (The Chronicle, March 16) is based on an interview with Francis Collins, director of NIH, and others concerned with the irreproducibility of published research results. The problem is attributed to flawed research methodology that NIH will now address with a required course in experimental design for trainees. However, a study of more than 2,000 articles retracted from the scientific literature found that 67.4 percent could be attributed to research misconduct, i.e. fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism, with a ten-fold increase since 1975.
However, most published studies are honestly done and reproducible. Who then are those who commit research misconduct?
In a review of 146 reports of research misconduct issued by the NIH Office of Research Misconduct, inadequate knowledge of experimental design was not a contributing factor. The guilty were trainees near panic at the prospect of failure and faculty motivated by ambition, grandiosity, and psychopathy.
NIH could now adopt a policy of the National Science Foundation that emphasizes the need for training programs to provide trainees with mentors, not merely advisers. Mentor is well defined as adviser, teacher, role model, and friend, i.e. someone in a position to deal directly with those issues that foster research misconduct in trainees.
The continued success of faculty can, in part, be attributed to inadequate protection of whistleblowers and the lack of meaningful penalties for the guilty. It is within the power of federal agencies to address these deficiencies.
Dr. Collins has rightly said the perverse incentives in the world of academic science — such as high-profile journals that pursue flashy results, universities that reward researchers on their publication record, and funding agencies whose peer-review systems reward prior success — need to change, but we cannot await changes in the policies and culture of federal funding agencies and academic institutions when remedies are more readily available.
Donald S. Kornfeld
Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry
Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons
New York
