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Scientific fraud kills people. Should it be illegal? (www.vox.com)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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You probably haven’t heard of cardiologist Don Poldermans, but experts who study scientific misconduct believe that thousands of people may be dead because of him.

Poldermans was a prolific medical researcher at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, where he analyzed the standards of care for cardiac events after surgery, publishing a series of definitive studies from 1999 until the early 2010s.

One crucial question he studied: Should you give patients a beta blocker, which lowers blood pressure, before certain surgeries? Poldermans’s research said yes. European medical guidelines (and to a lesser extent US guidelines) recommended it accordingly.

The problem? Poldermans’s data was reportedly fake. A 2012 inquiry by Erasmus Medical School, his employer, into allegations of misconduct found that he “used patient data without written permission, used fictitious data and… submitted to conferences [reports] which included knowingly unreliable data.” Poldermans admitted the allegations and apologized, while stressing that the use of fictitious data was accidental.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

The Theranos case is not a scientific fraud in that sense if I understand the article correctly. Holmes had raised hundreds of millions of USD over several years before the first scientist even joined the Theranos board. They apoarently never had a technical (and assumably no financial) due diligence for their 'blood test', let alone a research paper. I'd call that a financial fraud, not a scientific fraud.