SCIENTIFIC MISCONDUCT

Dr. Timothy Noakes continues his discussion of the various abuses of science that led to the widespread and misguided belief that dietary fat is the single most important factor contributing to one's risk of developing heart disease. In this installment, Noakes focuses on research and events that transpired between 1959 and 1967.

Dr. Timothy Noakes reanalyzes the findings from the famous Framingham Heart Study and notes the flaws and biases in lead researchers' conclusions. Rather than supporting Ancel Keys' diet-heart hypothesis, the study demonstrated "the absence of any relationship between diet and blood cholesterol concentrations or CHD risk."

A New York Times article published in the 1990s encapsulated the fat-related hysteria of the day by recommending buttered movie popcorn come with a life insurance add-on. Meanwhile, Dr. Robert Atkins, creator of the Atkins diet, was touting a low-carb diet high in fat and ruffling more than a few feathers along the way. When Atkins died in 2003, his detractors were quick to blame his diet, even if that meant distorting the facts and breaching several codes of ethics.

Dr. Timothy Noakes continues to examine the events leading up to the academic world’s acceptance of Ancel Keys’ unproven diet-heart hypothesis. Beginning with the Framingham Heart Study in 1948, Noakes then discusses the contributions of John Gofman, Edward Ahrens, and Norman Jolliffe while analyzing how their work became supplanted by a reductionistic model in which just one causative factor — cholesterol — could be considered of overwhelming importance to the study of heart disease.

In the previous column, Dr. Timothy Noakes listed the sequence of events that were critical in directing the global acceptance of Ancel Keys’ diet-heart and lipid hypotheses. In this column, he investigates the relevant events that unfolded between 1910 and 1948 and discusses Dr. Vladimir Subbotin’s alternative hypothesis for coronary atherosclerosis.

Prof. Timothy Noakes highlights 70 events he claims were critical in advancing the global acceptance of Ancel Keys’ diet-heart and lipid hypotheses. Noakes’ timeline details the major studies, scandals, and recovered trial results that ultimately disproved Keys’ hypotheses, which nevertheless continue to influence global eating habits and metabolic health.

When Ancel Keys received funding to evaluate his diet-heart and lipid hypotheses in the late 1960s, he was dismayed when his study comprehensively disproved his theory about dietary cholesterol's role in heart disease. Instead of leveling “ruthless scepticism toward [his] own work,” as Karl Popper claims a scientist must, Keys and his colleagues buried the data. Here, Prof. Timothy Noakes tells the story of how Keys blurred the line between belief and proof, transforming the landscape of scientific research for decades to come.

Most of what we understand about the safety and harms of different medicines emerges from published drug trials in the peer-reviewed literature, which is often unduly influenced by industry funding, selective reporting, and a lack of data transparency. Maryanne Demasi, Ph.D., discusses how the Statin Wars demonstrate the scope and stakes of this problem.

In these contrasting pieces, two authors provide differing argumentation regarding whether the replication crisis, p-hacking, and similar well-documented issues indicate science is broken or working as intended in a self-correcting process.

In part two of his series on pathological science, Gary Taubes estimates the extent to which self-deceit has infiltrated scientific research and further investigates whether entire disciplines have become pathological. His inquiries lead to meditations on the necessary characteristics of rigorous scientific study. One indication that health-related research has become pathological, he suggests, is its experts’ tendency to view “placebo-controlled, double-blind, randomized-controlled trials as the ‘gold standard’ of scientific evidence.” This view, he argues, represents “a lack of understanding of the scientific endeavor,” because “these trials are simply what’s necessary to establish reliable knowledge.”

In this three-part series, Gary Taubes investigates what Irving Langmuir terms “pathological science,” or the “science of things that aren’t so.” Taubes distinguishes pathological science from fraud, which is characterized by a person’s attempt to deceive others, arguing rather that participants in pathological science delude themselves. He compares this self-deceit to what Richard Feynman famously called "Cargo Cult Science." And while researchers and philosophers of science have long expressed concern over the possibility of self-deceit distorting scientific truth, Taubes questions whether the problem has grown rampant today. “The possibility exists that entire disciplines may be essentially pathological,” he writes.

Science is immersed in a crisis of reproducibility, but how can science go so badly wrong? Here, an anonymous author with intimate knowledge of the academic world and its research and publishing practices addresses this question, drawing examples from his formative years in the university and ensuing professional life. Citing firsthand experiences wherein he witnessed the impact of questionable research practices, conflicts of interest, and perverse career incentives, he explains how “the very enterprise of research can deviate systematically from the paths of truth.”

Gary Taubes is an award-winning investigative science and health journalist, and author of numerous books related to nutrition and the obesity epidemic. In this talk, delivered at the annual CrossFit Health Conference in Madison, Wisconsin, on July 31, 2018, Taubes turns a critical eye toward a more expansive subject, historicizing the corruption of postmodern science and examining the distinctions between good and bad scientific research.

This 2019 piece documents the work of English anesthetist John Carlisle, who has developed and used statistical methods to identify published research papers with questionable results. Carlisle’s work has found data issues within and outside the anesthesiological research space and has led to high-profile retractions, such as that of the PREDIMED, a study that drove increased interest in the Mediterranean diet in 2013.

Dr. Maryanne Demasi earned a Ph.D. in rheumatology from the University of Adelaide, but perhaps the most formative experience she had with the medical sciences occurred while she was an investigative journalist with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). During her tenure with the ABC, she produced a two-part series called “Heart of the Matter,” which challenged the role of cholesterol in heart disease and addressed the overprescription of statin drugs. The fallout from the series was not swift, but it was decisive. In this presentation, delivered on June 8, 2019, at a CrossFit Health event at CrossFit Headquarters, Demasi shares her personal experiences and the challenges she faced while trying to relay the limitations of statin data to the public.

Commercial interests have discovered numerous ways to co-opt the loyalty of health professionals to promote company-sponsored studies and marketing messages. Here, Dr. Maryanne Demasi describes just a few of the indications that Australia’s National Heart Foundation (NHF) has sold its soul to industry. She focuses specifically on the NHF’s ties to junk food and pharmaceutical companies, citing responses from various scholars who have expressed deep concern over how the NHF’s receipt of industry funding might threaten public health.

In 1993, Prof. Peter C. Gøtzsche co-founded the famous Cochrane Collaboration, an organization formed to conduct systematic reviews of medical research in the interest of promoting unbiased evidence-based science. During his tenure with Cochrane, Gøtzsche fought to uphold its original values. However, when Gøtzsche attempted to correct the path of consensus science or point to industry-related bias, Cochrane sought to censor him and eventually expelled him in 2018 after what he calls a Kafkaesque “show trial.” Here, Gøtzsche shares the research that led to his fallout with Cochrane as well as his firsthand experiences witnessing the organization’s moral collapse.

Dr. Glenn Begley, CEO of BioCurate and a respected hematologist and oncologist, is famous for producing a study in 2012 that demonstrated most preclinical research related to cancer drugs cannot be reproduced. In this lecture, he shares the criteria he used for evaluating the research and the methods he found researchers used to distort their data. He then presents his diagnosis of the problem inherent in the academic research cycle, which he claims fuels the desperation that produces such distortions.

In this 2017 narrative review, Michael Hengartner discusses the evidence assessing the effectiveness and harms of antidepressants. He finds the evidence of benefits insufficient and the harms sufficiently great to argue continued treatment should not be recommended for the majority of patients on an evidentiary basis.

In the final installment of their series on the sleights of hand that skew scientific research, Drs. Michael and Mary Dan Eades turn a critical eye toward examples of outright fraud. They place studies that stray from the scientific method, such as those published under the supervision of Dr. Brian Wansink, under the rubric of fraud; Wansink encouraged his students to torture data and retroactively create hypotheses to produce publishable papers. The Drs. Eades also cite examples of fraud from the realm of stem-cell research and ultimately ask whether, when published research findings are tainted, it’s possible for physicians to practice evidence-based medicine.