Trofim Lysenko (on the left), preaching to Stalin as he destroyed
Soviet plant research by persecuting anyone who disagreed with him,
and caused famines that killed millions.

Two stories today in the peer-review journal Science illustrate bluntly the dry rot that has seeped into the entire peer-review scientific community, much of it caused by the politics and incompetence that always follows when too much government money is available to hand out.

In the first story, Science simply provided a horrifying overall summary of the misconduct and research fakery committed by Eliezer Masliah, who as head of the the Division of Neuroscience at the National Institute of Aging (NIA) beginning in 2016 was crucial in recommending who would get major grants for doing research into diseases like Alzheimer’s.

Masliah’s own published peer-reviewed research into Alzheimer’s helped guide him in awarding grants. His work had said that proteins found in brain tissue were a major factor in causing the disease, and thus based on his recommendations for the next decade huge amounts of money were devoted to following up that conclusion.

The problem was that Masliah’s work was garbage.

[O]ver the past 2 years questions have arisen about some of Masliah’s research. A Science investigation has now found that scores of his lab studies at UCSD and NIA are riddled with apparently falsified Western blots—images used to show the presence of proteins—and micrographs of brain tissue. Numerous images seem to have been inappropriately reused within and across papers, sometimes published years apart in different journals, describing divergent experimental conditions.

After Science brought initial concerns about Masliah’s work to their attention, a neuroscientist and forensic analysts specializing in scientific work who had previously worked with Science produced a 300-page dossier revealing a steady stream of suspect images between 1997 and 2023 in 132 of his published research papers. (Science did not pay them for their work.) “In our opinion, this pattern of anomalous data raises a credible concern for research misconduct and calls into question a remarkably large body of scientific work,” they concluded.

Today the National Institutes of Health finally released a statement [pdf] agreeing with these findings of misconduct and adding that Masliah is no longer head of the Division of Neuroscience.

The problem is that for almost a decade the entire research field studying ways to treat Alzheimer’s had been led down the wrong path by this man and the NIH, all because no one in during peer review had done the proper due diligence in reviewing his papers in the first place. A vast amount of taxpayer money was wasted, and worse, eight years of research time were lost.

The second story today is even more embarrassing. In November 2023 a paper was published outlining ways to increase the accuracy, reliability, and rigor of scientific research. The paper’s authors were so-called experts in this field.

That paper has now been retracted because of the “experts” who wrote it had done a bad job, their own paper filled with errors as well as shoddy, incorrect methods that produced false results.

In other words, the very people the science community considered its arbiters in describing how proper research should be done could not do it themselves.

“But Brawndo’s got what plants crave. It’s got electrolytes!”

None of this should surprise anyone. In fact, that this kind of misconduct and incompetence is only now being highlighted by the scientific community further illustrates the corruption within it. Such misconduct had become obvious back in the early 2000s when the Climategate emails were released. Rather than punish the wrong-doers in that case, such a Michael Mann, the science community circled its wagons, denying any wrong-doing while providing aid and comfort to those wrong-doers. At the same time it worked to blacklist those who blew the whistle on this bad climate research.

You see, there was simply too much money at stake, all being handed out by government agencies to the right people. Can’t have anyone interfere with that gravy train!

Sadly, the putrefaction in the climate field was merely a precursor to the putrefaction we discovered in the government health field during the COVID panic of 2020, which resulted in the tragedy of lockdowns and blacklisting. The response to that respiratory illness, led by the government and its health agencies, was an utter failure of momentous proportions.

These two stories today merely indicate how deep that rot has now become. And it will not be fixed until there is a major cut-off of government money to these institutions, because it is that government money, handed out with little supervision or care, that is the root cause of these problems.