Duke University Fined Over $100 Million for Research Racket

Lately, this blog has been primarily focused on highlighting scientific fraud. I get little feedback on those pieces (and somewhat less interest, based on click counts), but I wonder how many readers believe the claims of systemic academic fraud to be overstated.

Fresh on the heels of the college admissions scandal, Duke University has agreed to pay an enormous fine of $112.5 million for years of scamming the US government's academic funding bodies. It was estimated that the amount of grants for the fake research amounted to over $200 million. That's at a single institution! It's not even the kind of fraud we focus on here - mostly where study results are either misinterpreted or ignored. This was the result of an insider who blew the whistle on the outright fabrication of data. It was deliberate fraud.

It took a whistleblower, of course, because the quality of academic research is so poor that funding agencies have no way to tell the real garbage from the fake. The major surprise is that the DOJ would pursue the case. I wan't sure if they were still in the business of investigating actual crimes, or it was all political treachery at this point. I guess the lesson is that the federal government is primarily concerned with it's own interests, enough so that don't take lightly to being scammed by their ideological brethren in the ivory towers. That's actually a good thing. We're so far down the rabbit hole that converged institutions routinely work against their own interests to aid the cause. For example, the city of Chicago allowed itself to be scammed by a high-profile false police report.

The Duke biology department is at the center of the fiasco. Medical research is so untrustworthy that pharmaceutical companies are opting to roll their own research rather than gamble money on the publicly funded results. Fraud is rampant in cancer research field as well. Many people, by now, are aware that the biggest so-called charities take most of the donations for themselves as "overhead" or to "raise awareness," as if no one ever heard of breast cancer before. What they don't know is that even the dollars that make it to the researchers are often squandered if not outright embezzled.