The Independent Neswpaper UK - Tues 18th June 2013
The Bad Science Scandal - How Fact Fabrication is damaging UK's Global Research Name.
After a string of high profile cases, a new agreement between scientists and the people who fund them aims to usher in a new era of
'research purity'
Britains leading scince institutions will be told on Monday that they will be stripped of many millions of pounds in research grants
if they employ 'rogue researchers' who fake the results of experiments The Independent has learnt.
The clamp dwon comes as retractions of scientific claims by medical journals are on course to top 500 for the first time in 2013 - having been just 20 a year in the late 1990's, when Andrew Wakefield notoriously claimed that the
MMR vaccine casued autism in children.
In April, the UK's first researcher was jailed for falsifying data over a prolonged period.
The Government is concerned that Britain's prized second place in global reearch, behind the US will be threatened if more fact-fabricators are exposed.
It knows that hundreds of thousands of jobs could easily go to foreign rivals if British laboratories do not keep coming up with new product ideas,
to be made by major multi national companies in UK factories to sign a new
Concordat for Research Integrity
having been warned by major fund providers that those who do not will be refused access to more than £10 billion in research grants
funded each year by British tax payers - ad as much again from the private sector.
A spokesman for Universitites UK, which chaired negotiations with the grant providers, said
'' from next year, Universities in the UK will have to prove compliance with the research grant. They are doing this to help demonstrate to
Government
Business,
International Partners and
the wider public,
that they can continue to have confidence in the research.''
Retractions of medical claims alon in 2013 - logged by the Retraction Watch Blog - are certain to be more than 400 and could easily top 500.
some result from genuine mistakes, several plagiarise other scientsist's work, breakthroughs that haven't been checked.
But as many as one in ten of them contain lies.
Retractions watch last week reported that the Pharmacueticals giant
GlaxoSmithKline is believed to have fired Jingwu Zang, a former Senior Vice President and head of the R+D at it's Shangai facility, after claims he made in the journal.
Natrue Medicine were, as a company spokes woman admitted, ''misrepresented''
This is just an excerpt of the article and more can be read about it on the Independent Newspaper's website.