Author: Shane Morris
Remember the game “fact or opinion” from grade school? The teacher makes a statement like, “the sky is blue,” or “vanilla ice cream is better than chocolate,” and students decide whether it’s a fact or an opinion. The game is meant to show that only observable or scientific facts are objective (the sky is blue), while value judgments are mere opinions (vanilla is better than chocolate). Things we can see, hear, taste, touch, or smell are non-negotiable. Everything else? Well, it depends on who you ask.
But what if the teacher instead said, “Falsifying scientific papers is always wrong.” Is that a fact or an opinion?
The question is not hypothetical. Last month, the National Institutes of Health found one of its top neuroscientists guilty of scientific misconduct. The Associated Press reported that Dr. Eliezer Masliah, who served as neuroscience director at NIH’s National Institute on Aging, apparently used manipulated or duplicated images in an untold number of studies.
Specifically, Masliah published the same “figure panels” supposedly showing experimental results in different studies of different people’s brains and cells. Some even appear to be edited in a way that duplicated or “cloned” pixels within an image or between images. In other words, they did not show what the papers claimed they showed, and what everyone who read them assumed they showed.
Although the NIH has already notified two journals of the misconduct they were tricked into publishing, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The journal Science reported that Masliah has published numerous papers about synapse damage in Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, some when he was a researcher at the University of California. Reviewers now say that more than 100 papers co-authored by Masliah as far back as 1997 contain suspect images, and some of these papers have already played a role in developing medications and treatments.
“I’m floored,” one prominent Alzheimer’s researcher told Science. “Hundreds of images. There had to have been ongoing manipulation for years.”
One German neuroscientist called the misconduct “breathtaking.” “I was falling from a chair, basically,” he said.
It’s still unclear how far the misconduct by this top government scientist reaches and how many patients’ lives have been affected by it. And that should leave us all uneasy. What are the chances there was only one bad apple? Why wasn’t he caught sooner? This is another blow to the credibility of mainstream science and the medical establishment at a time when their public image is already in poor shape. And it makes one wonder what’s next.
As journalist Andrew Egger remarked on X: “My pet theory is that all of academia is just riddled with plagiarism and other corner-cutting shoddiness, that it’s basically the subprime mortgage market circa 2007…”
Which, of course, means a crash could be coming.
Author and theoretical chemist Neil Shenvi identified the reason why such misconduct destabilizes and discredits science: “There can be no science without virtue.”
Think about that for moment: Everything scientists do—from performing experiments to gathering data to writing up their results to seeking publication to applying for grants—all of it depends on virtue, specifically, the virtue of honesty. Scientists must assume as a non-negotiable from the beginning of the scientific process that falsifying results, no matter what the motive, is wrong. And they must understand that this is no mere opinion like “vanilla is better than chocolate.” It is an objective fact on par with “two plus two equals four,” and any undertaking recognizable as science (as opposed to propaganda or scam artistry) depends on this belief in truth.
C.S. Lewis understood this when he wrote a book all about how teaching students to treat values as subjective would inevitably lead to The Abolition of Man. In other words, he thought right and wrong are fundamental to our humanity, not only when we’re on the pulpit or the jury box, but when we’re in the laboratory, the operating room, or even the art studio.
Our knowledge of what is depends intimately on our belief in an ought. Without trust in one another’s ethics, we have no reason to value anyone’s expertise. The questions no doubt swirling in the field of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s research today are proof enough of that.
So, education must include moral formation. The “fact or opinion” game teaches precisely the wrong lesson: that only concrete and observable things are “real.” It turns out that concrete and observable things about which scientists write are at the mercy of the first scientist who wants to cut corners and knows how to use Photoshop. And that’s not just my opinion. It’s a fact.