[east2west]

It was initially a programming error but the Duke researchers refused to acknowledge it and reanalyze their data, because that might mean retracting their prominent paper. From there it just snowballed. It was certainly fraud after the error was pointed out to them. There might also be other elements of fraud in their paper. I watched a presentation by MD. Anderson researchers who spotted the error and spent more than two years trying to call attention to it.

[aheilbut]

The smoking gun was an error, but there were something like 9 Potti papers that ended up getting retracted. There's no way that someone could have accidentally made that many mistakes...

[east2west]

Interestingly, the fraudsters were caught because of a false claim on a CV, and that finally destroyed their creditability.

It is intentional fraud, no doubt about it; they restarted halted clinical trials. I was just pointing out they did sloppy work too.

[michaelhoffman]

They were caught due to their bad behavior in the case you listed earlier. But Duke refused to do anything about it until Anil Potti's false claim of a Rhodes Scholarship came to light.

[SilasX]

Wow, that's messed up.

Fundamental methodological error -> "Come on, these are competent people, you have to trust that whatever error they made didn't effect the final result."

False claim of accolade -> "How dare you fucking try to pass off this garbage as legitimate science?!?!?"

[apathy]

Welcome to academia

[chris_wot]

Why is that?