I think major scandals such as this one are essential, and we need more of them.
Why? The misaligned incentives that drive (in my opinion) otherwise-well-meaning human beings to fraud in the biomedical sciences stem from competition for increasingly-scarce resources, and the deeply and fundamentally-broken culture that develops as a result. The only thing that will propel the needed culture shift is for the people who provide the money to see, from the visibility provided by such scandals, just how bad the problem is, and to basically withdraw funding unless and until the changes happen.
Some of those changes include:
1. Reducing competition for funds by reducing the number of research-focused faculty positions (a.k.a. principal investigators, or PIs) across the board. When people's livelihoods depend on the ridiculous 5% odds of winning an important grant competition, they WILL cheat. As it stands, 20 well-funded scientists are probably more productive than 100 modestly-to poorly-funded, most of whom will do nothing meaningful or useful while trying to show "productivity" until the next funding cycle.
2. Reducing competition for funds by providing reasonably-assured research funding, tied to a diversity of indices of productivity, NOT just publications. As an example, a PI should be hired with the understanding that they'll need `x` dollars over the next 10 years to do their work. If those dollars aren't available, the person shouldn't be hired.
3. Reducing the number of PhD- and post-doctoral trainees across the board. These folks are mostly used as cheap labor by people who are well-aware, and don't care, that there will likely be no jobs for them.
4. Turning those PhD and post-doctoral positions into staff scientist positions, for people who want to do the research, but don't want the hassle of lab management. Staff scientist positions already exist, but in the current environment, when a PI can pay a postdoc $40k a year to work 80 - 100 hours a week, versus a staff scientist $80k a year to work 40 hours a week, guess which they pick.
5. Professionalizing the PhD stream. A person with a PhD in the biomedical sciences should be a broadly-capable individual able to be dropped, after graduation, into an assortment of roles, either academic or industrial. Right now, the incentive to produce publications tends to create people who are highly expert in a tiny, niche area, while having variable to nil competencies in anything else. Professionalization increases the range of post-PhD options for these folks, only one of which is academia. As it stands now, there's the tendency to feel that one has nothing if one doesn't have publications -- which increases the tendency towards fraud.
Why? The misaligned incentives that drive (in my opinion) otherwise-well-meaning human beings to fraud in the biomedical sciences stem from competition for increasingly-scarce resources, and the deeply and fundamentally-broken culture that develops as a result. The only thing that will propel the needed culture shift is for the people who provide the money to see, from the visibility provided by such scandals, just how bad the problem is, and to basically withdraw funding unless and until the changes happen.
Some of those changes include:
1. Reducing competition for funds by reducing the number of research-focused faculty positions (a.k.a. principal investigators, or PIs) across the board. When people's livelihoods depend on the ridiculous 5% odds of winning an important grant competition, they WILL cheat. As it stands, 20 well-funded scientists are probably more productive than 100 modestly-to poorly-funded, most of whom will do nothing meaningful or useful while trying to show "productivity" until the next funding cycle.
2. Reducing competition for funds by providing reasonably-assured research funding, tied to a diversity of indices of productivity, NOT just publications. As an example, a PI should be hired with the understanding that they'll need `x` dollars over the next 10 years to do their work. If those dollars aren't available, the person shouldn't be hired.
3. Reducing the number of PhD- and post-doctoral trainees across the board. These folks are mostly used as cheap labor by people who are well-aware, and don't care, that there will likely be no jobs for them.
4. Turning those PhD and post-doctoral positions into staff scientist positions, for people who want to do the research, but don't want the hassle of lab management. Staff scientist positions already exist, but in the current environment, when a PI can pay a postdoc $40k a year to work 80 - 100 hours a week, versus a staff scientist $80k a year to work 40 hours a week, guess which they pick.
5. Professionalizing the PhD stream. A person with a PhD in the biomedical sciences should be a broadly-capable individual able to be dropped, after graduation, into an assortment of roles, either academic or industrial. Right now, the incentive to produce publications tends to create people who are highly expert in a tiny, niche area, while having variable to nil competencies in anything else. Professionalization increases the range of post-PhD options for these folks, only one of which is academia. As it stands now, there's the tendency to feel that one has nothing if one doesn't have publications -- which increases the tendency towards fraud.