Pity the Poor Fraudster?
19/04/12 14:46 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Submitted by S. Pelech - Kinexus on Fri, 04/20/2012 - 14:46.
Research grant fraud primarily stems from the pressures to demonstrate proof of concept to review panels that aim to promote hypothesis-driven research. While it is hard to accept Dr. Peter Francis as a victim of the present system, his behaviour does reveal how easily it can be abused. Apart from the two or three grant panel members that actually read a grant application, which in principle is destroyed after the competition, how could the validity of the presented preliminary data ever be checked?
The best way to ensure the integrity of scientific data is to generate it in a non-bias fashion to start with. Systems biology scale, "omics"-based research produces a wealth of data that can be deposited into public databases and mined to formulate much better hypotheses for testing. However, it is a waste of time and energy to have to write and submit a 3 year grant application to get funds to test very specific hypotheses 6 months or more down the road in the unlikely chance that it actually gets funded. Leading-edge science does not work this way and progresses at such a snail-pace rate. In reality, investigators get the funds and then do what they think best as new data in their own lab and from elsewhere becomes available.
A better grant funding system that takes into account the realities of scientific research would be to fund established investigators primarily on the basis of their recent productivity and less so on their ideas. Ideas are plentiful, but the ability to deliver is much rarer. The present funding system in the biomedical sciences promotes competition rather than collaboration. Collaboration occurs when the parties need to work together, because separately they have insufficient resources or expertise. If more scientific investigators were successfully funded with less money, there would be higher incentives to cooperate with each other. More dynamic and natural collaborations would be struck, and I suspect the resulting work would be far more innovative and differentiated than what we see today and in the past. Regretfully, what is transpiring now is that a smaller number of laboratories are supported with heftier grants, and in these large groups, the competition is even sometimes internal within the same lab.
Link to the original blog post
Research grant fraud primarily stems from the pressures to demonstrate proof of concept to review panels that aim to promote hypothesis-driven research. While it is hard to accept Dr. Peter Francis as a victim of the present system, his behaviour does reveal how easily it can be abused. Apart from the two or three grant panel members that actually read a grant application, which in principle is destroyed after the competition, how could the validity of the presented preliminary data ever be checked?
The best way to ensure the integrity of scientific data is to generate it in a non-bias fashion to start with. Systems biology scale, "omics"-based research produces a wealth of data that can be deposited into public databases and mined to formulate much better hypotheses for testing. However, it is a waste of time and energy to have to write and submit a 3 year grant application to get funds to test very specific hypotheses 6 months or more down the road in the unlikely chance that it actually gets funded. Leading-edge science does not work this way and progresses at such a snail-pace rate. In reality, investigators get the funds and then do what they think best as new data in their own lab and from elsewhere becomes available.
A better grant funding system that takes into account the realities of scientific research would be to fund established investigators primarily on the basis of their recent productivity and less so on their ideas. Ideas are plentiful, but the ability to deliver is much rarer. The present funding system in the biomedical sciences promotes competition rather than collaboration. Collaboration occurs when the parties need to work together, because separately they have insufficient resources or expertise. If more scientific investigators were successfully funded with less money, there would be higher incentives to cooperate with each other. More dynamic and natural collaborations would be struck, and I suspect the resulting work would be far more innovative and differentiated than what we see today and in the past. Regretfully, what is transpiring now is that a smaller number of laboratories are supported with heftier grants, and in these large groups, the competition is even sometimes internal within the same lab.
Link to the original blog post