Research-integrity sleuths say their work is being ‘twisted’ to undermine science

Some sleuths fear that the business of cleaning up flawed studies is being weaponized against science itself

Some sleuths say that their efforts to correct the literature are being taken out of context and used to discredit science.Credit: Ivan-balvan/Getty

For years, scientific sleuths have been uncovering flaws and fraud in research publishing, from duplicated images and fabricated data to fake peer reviews.

Their work has helped to bring about the retraction of problematic papers and changes to editorial policies. But now, say several prominent sleuths, their findings are increasingly being used out of context, to argue that science itself is broken.

“We try to point out those bad papers because we still believe in science and want to make science better,” says Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist and image-integrity specialist based in San Francisco, California. But, she adds, “I am very worried about how the work we do in pointing out bad papers is currently being misused, or even weaponized, to convince the general public that all science is bad”.

She gives the ‘alarming’ example of US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who referred to fraudulent studies on Alzheimer’s disease during his Senate confirmation hearing earlier this year. Kennedy said that the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) had propped up a “fraudulent hypothesis” — that sticky proteins known as amyloid-β cause Alzheimer’s disease — for two decades.

This statement seems to be based on the retraction of a high-profile paper, published in Nature in 2006, showing that amyloid-β caused Alzheimer’s symptoms in rats. During a two-year-long investigation, Bik and other sleuths proved that images in the paper had been manipulated, and it was eventually retracted last year¹.

The amyloid hypothesis is supported by other research, and amyloid-targeting treatments have shown mixed results in clinical trials. But at a budget hearing last month, Kennedy stated that Alzheimer’s disease is “now characterized in the medical literature as Type 3 Diabetes”. In an earlier hearing, he had said there is no cure for the illness “purely because of corruption at NIH”.

“It made me feel very anxious. Our work is being twisted and misused for the wrong reasons,” says Bik.

Sleuths’ efforts to correct the scientific literature, she says, are being taken out of context by people seeking to discredit entire fields of research. “It’s like pointing out one bad apple in a fruit basket and declaring that you shouldn’t eat all the other fruit, even though it looks perfectly fine,” Bik says. “They’re bending the truth in order to push their own agenda. And that is against everything science should be.”

Trust in science

Sleuths’ concerns have sharpened with US President Donald Trump’s return to office early this year. In May, Trump signed an executive order to restore ‘gold standard science’, instructing federal agencies to revise their research-integrity policies and protect ‘alternative scientific opinions’. The directive cites retractions and failures to replicate scientific studies as reasons for the public’s waning trust in science.

Research-integrity sleuths and specialists warn that this rhetoric could be used to cast doubt on established research and give politicians more power to decide what counts as ‘credible’ science. “I really feel as if the administration is engaged in reverse alchemy, and it’s turning America’s scientific gold into lead,” says David Sanders, a sleuth and biologist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.

“We are worried that the administration will also determine what is misconduct in their ‘gold standard’ declaration,” which could include researching topics such as climate change, vaccines, gender and diversity, says Bik.