Fake cancer study in Norway

Kjetil Halvorsen linked to this story, “Research cheats may be jailed,” from a Norwegian newspaper:

State officials have been considering imposing jail terms on researchers who fake their material, but the proposal hasn’t seen any action for more than a year. More is expected now, after a Norwegian doctor at the country’s most prestigious hospital was caught cheating in a major publication. . . . The survey allegedly involved falsification of the death- and birthdates and illnesses of 454 “patients.” The researcher wrote that his survey indicated that use of pain medication such as Ibuprofen had a positive effect on cancers of the mouth. He’s now admitted the survey was fabricated and reportedly is cooperating with an investigation into all his research.

And here’s more from BBC News:

Norwegian daily newsaper Dagbladet reported that of the 908 people in Sudbo’s study, 250 shared the same birthday.

Slap a p-value on that one, pal.

Speaking as a citizen, now, not as a statistician, I don’t see why they have to put these people in jail for a year. Couldn’t they just give them a big fat fine and make them clean bedpans every Saturday for the next 5 years, or something like that? I would think the punishment could be appropriately calibrated to be both a deterrent and a service, rather than a cost, to society.

P.S. Update here.

4 thoughts on “Fake cancer study in Norway

  1. You would think that if someone were going to commit scientific fraud, he would at least try to do a good job of it. And yet these people are always found to have fudged their data in the most haphazard way. How difficult would it be to write a routine to choose birthdays from a uniform distribution over the days of the year?

  2. Well, I'd go a step farther, and remove them from any professional positions, and ban them from them in the future. There is a deep pathology present if you are willing to fabricate data – you shouldn't be doing research, treating patients, or anything similar.

  3. What EnlightenedDuck (great name, BTW) said. This is medical research – faking it could easily indirectly cost real lives.

    And of course you're right about jail. In fact, there's a good policy argument that short jail terms provide the worst of all possible worlds – jail makes first offenders into hardened crims, but a short sentence won't keep them off the streets for long enough. Assuming (as most of the evidence says) that deterrence is actually a pretty weak mechanism for crime prevention.

  4. Wow bet there would be irony in this story if he actually did have a clever randomization scheme for the birthdays and it came up.. 250 of them sharing the same birthday.

    This reminds me of a script I have been meaning to write in R. I want to scan the setseeds for something outrageously unlikely for weeks on end. Some simple little obnoxious randomization result but at each iteration I forward setseed by one and check a p-value. Then when I have discovered something blazingly unlikely unleash it unsuspecting forums asking what is wrong with my code!

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