The headlines read as follows: “Engineering publisher pulled 57 papers in a day for peer review ‘irregularities.’”1 Or: “Another Springer Nature journal has retracted over 300 papers since July.”2 (The article appeared that November, which means an average of 50 papers a month retracted.) And this: “Wiley shuts 19 scholarly journals amid AI paper mill problems: Fake science challenges academic publishing.”3 And this: “Faked results lead to retraction of high-profile cancer neuroscience study.”4 (At that point, they found only “113 instances of fabrication in the study”—a cancer study, mind you—”as well as issues with several of its images.”) Or “Wiley journal retracts two papers it said were fine following criticism years ago.”5 And this: “Nature retracts highly cited 2002 paper that claimed adult stem cells could become any type of cell.”6 (This paper, before retraction, had been cited 4,500 times.)
And here’s one: “Do we have Alzheimer’s disease all wrong? Retracted studies and new treatments reveal the confusing state of Alzheimer’s research.”7 What about this? “Paper recommending vitamin D for COVID-19 retracted four years after expression of concern.”8 (Only four years?) And this: “‘All authors agree’ to retraction of Nature article linking microbial DNA to cancer.” 9 (This retracted paper, another cancer study, had been cited, before retraction, only 615 times.)
A headline that I especially loved. “Science and the significant trend towards spin and fairytales.”10 (Fairytales in science? If surprised, you’re naïve.) And this, not quite the same as retracted cancer research papers, but still: “‘No animosity between us’: Lungless frog finding retracted after 16 years.”11 (All those years for scientists to finally discover that the frog had lungs, after all.) “Faked heart papers retracted following Ohio State investigation.”12 And this article has some interesting elements: “Publisher retracts more than 450 papers from journal it acquired last year.”13 (Only 450 peer-reviewed papers by bona fide science professionals. Nothing to see here.) This, too: “Biochemistry journal retracts 25 papers for ‘systematic manipulation’ of peer review.”14 (The article quoted the journal as saying it uncovered “systematic manipulation of our peer-review and publication processes by multiple individuals.” Individuals? Certainly, it can’t mean “individuals,” as in, like . . . scientists—über-objective-seekers-of-truth-come-what-may-and-no-matter-where-the-evidence-leads—could it?)
How about this doozy? “PICTURE IMPERFECT: Scores of papers by Eliezer Masliah, prominent neuroscientist and top NIH official, fall under suspicion.”15 (The article showed “breathtaking” image manipulation by a man deemed “among the world’s top 10 scientists in certain subfields,” and whose questioned papers have been cited 18,000 times, “often by leading scholars,” and in some cases the questioned data directly impacted research about a Parkinson’s Disease drug worth hundreds of millions of dollars.) Or this: “An Alzheimer’s drugmaker is accused of data manipulation. Should its trials be stopped?”16 (Certainty the article couldn’t mean that Big Pharma would be anything but honest and scrupulous, following only the strictest protocols of scientific procedures and ethics in its drug research would it, especially when human lives were at stake? Of course not, even if the company “announced it will pay $40 million to resolve the SEC investigation into whether it misled investors with doctored data.”) And this one, too, retracted in 2024. “Pluripotency of mesenchymal stem cells derived from adult marrow.”17 (Cited 4,489 times before retraction—and 6 times afterward.) And here’s a headline that should warm our hearts: “Cancer specialist faked data in at least ten papers, VA and UCLA find.”18
Retraction Watch
Welcome to Retraction Watch, a blog that tracks the retraction of scientific papers worldwide. Each one of those above headlines, a smattering of what they report on, were taken directly either from Retraction Watch itself or from a site it linked to. Six days a week at 7 AM, Sundays excepted, for about five years now an email from Retraction Watch with headlines about scientific fraud, fakery, plagiarism, honest error, and/or incompetence appears in my inbox. A few months on the Retraction Watch mailing list, however, should help disabuse even the most naïve from the ubiquitous myth of science as this unflaggingly heroic pursuit of objective truth—no matter how contrary to the accepted norms, including the accepted norms of those who fund the science (or even to their financial interests)—by men and women untainted by pride, career objectives, funding, power, ideology, or by the common human foibles and weaknesses that impact even the most honest and dedicated professional scientists.
Founded in 2010 by two science writers and editors, Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus, Retraction Watch basically keeps track of as many retracted scientific papers as it can in an attempt to bring more accountability to scientific publishing, especially when it comes not merely to retracting faulty papers but to getting the news out, which doesn’t aways happen quickly and so some papers, even after retraction, are still referenced or quoted.
Science is a human endeavor and, as such, can be tainted or even corrupted by… the common foibles that impact even the most honest and dedicated scientists.
“One example Oransky points to concerns a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that claimed to have found a molecule that could make breast tumours respond to a drug that they are not usually susceptible to. The paper was later retracted, but not before Wnt Research, a company based on this breast cancer result and others, was founded.”19 (In this case, the company acknowledged the problem and came clean with it.20)
When first starting Retraction Watch, Oransky and Marcus worried that they might not have enough material. That was not a problem. The first year, 2010, they reported on about 200 retractions. In October 2019 their data base had 20,000. In 2021, wrote Oransky, “Our database — the most comprehensive source for retractions by a wide margin — surpassed 25,000 retractions.”21 In 2023, there were more than 45,000.22
In London’s The Guardian, under the headline, “There’s far more scientific fraud than anyone wants to admit,” Oransky and Marcus claimed that about a tenth of a percent of the papers published in any given year are retracted, and that number is growing, even though it doesn’t come close to what should be. “The truth, however,” they write, “is that the number of retractions in 2022—5,500—is almost definitely a vast undercount of how much misconduct and fraud exists. We estimate that at least 100,000 retractions should occur every year; some scientists and science journalists think the number should be even higher. (To be sure, not every retraction is the result of misconduct; about one in five involve cases of honest error.)”23
All the science money can buy
Scientific journals, publishers, and most scientists who write for them aren’t thrilled to have their work criticized, much less exposed as in error or, even worse, as fabricated. “They punish whistleblowing underlings,” write Oransky and Marcus, “sometimes by blaming them for their misdeeds. They sue critics. Although they rarely prevail in court, the threat of such suits, and the cost of defending against them, exerts a chilling effect on those who would come forward.”24 So much for this objective-search-for-truth-no matter-what idea behind science, especially when—with Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Oil and Big Tobacco—billions of dollars are at stake. Could one be cynical enough to think that all those MDs and PhDs in chemistry or biology (after signing non-disclosure agreements) doing science for Big Tobacco were never tempted by lucrative salaries and bonuses to downplay or cast doubts on the health dangers of tobacco? Of course not. What scientist would do that?
Years ago, I heard a former US Cabinet official on the radio, at the time a spokesman and lobbyist for Big Dairy, a $793.75 billion industry in 2023 America, wax poetic about how healthy dairy was (after all, what possibly could be harmful to humans about drinking the same fluid that causes a baby calf to gain 400 pounds in a year?)—and he had all the science money could buy to confirm it, too. (A Loma Linda medical doctor friend once told me, “You want to know the outcomes of a scientific study, just find out who’s paying for it.”) What an uplifting thought, especially when it comes to health research.
Speaking of which, what do Cerivastatin, Lorcaserin, Valdecoxib, Pemoline, Propoxyphene, Terodiline, and Temafloxacin have in common? They are just a handful of the FDA-approved drugs recalled over the years. Pemoline was on the market for 35 years before being recalled for liver toxicity. Propoxyphene (commonly known as Darvon and Darvocet) was sold for 55 years until attributed to 2,110 deaths due to heart and liver toxicity. Temafloxacin lasted only six months before pulled for three deaths; severe low blood sugar; hemolytic anemia and other blood cell abnormalities; kidney disfunction (half of the cases required renal dialysis); allergic reactions including some causing life-threatening respiratory distress. Who and what (onemight humbly ask) was behind the science that approved these drugs to begin with? Honest human error, or perhaps some Big Pharma bucks (1.6 trillion in 2023 alone) has something to do with the science that puts dangerous drugs on the market, sometimes for decades?
Here’s what the NIH National Library of Medicine (National Center for Bio-technology Information) posted in 2013 under the headline: “Institutional corruption of pharmaceuticals and the myth of safe and effective drugs.” The opening lines read: “Over the past 35 years, patients have suffered from a largely hidden epidemic of side effects from drugs that usually have few offsetting benefits. The pharmaceutical industry has corrupted the practice of medicine through its influence over what drugs are developed, how they are tested, and how medical knowledge is created. Since 1906, heavy commercial influence has compromised congressional legislation to protect the public from unsafe drugs.”25
The point?
Ican already hear the shrills, the claims that Retraction Watch is evidence for one of science’s great attributes: it is self-correcting. Yeah, well . . . there’s truth to this as there’s truth to Al Capone being a generous man. If, per Oransky and Marcus, there were 5,500 retractions (in 2022) when there should have been 100,000 or more, then that’s like saying because Customs seized x tons of cocaine last year, drug interdiction is working even though an estimated 20x makes it in. And, of those 5,500 retractions, how many were Oops, we made an honest mistake, as opposed to If you don’t retract your fraud, we will expose and sue you? Contrary to the myths, science doesn’t easily change or admit mistakes. It is, after all, only human.
In one of the most influential texts of the 20th century, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a powerful critique of how science supposedly progresses, Thomas Kuhn quoted quantum physics pioneer Max Plank, who wrote: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”26 If that’s not a confidence builder, what is?
And the point of all this? The point of all this is that far too many people kowtow and bow in intellectual subservience to every claim “It’s science!” as if science were the Urim and Thummim of all truth, and that whatever science declares, like billions of years of evolution, must be true. Too many Christians are fooled by the undeniable, and at times astonishing, technological achievements of science—which is a separate issue from whether the theory behind the technology is true. The history of science is filled with technological achievements based on theories now deemed false. And who knows what workable technology today is based on theories that will be trashed tomorrow?
Retraction Watch, then, is a powerful reminder that—whether practiced by scrupulous (but fallible) seekers of truth, or PhD con artists in lab coats—science remains a purely human business motivated by all the good and the bad that motivates people to do good or bad. And considering that most of the bad, the malfeasance reported on Retraction Watch, deals with the here and now, with things that can be x-rayed, dissected, assayed in labs, and so forth—why so many Christians fall over themselves in accepting what scientists declare about long-lost evolutionary events from a supposed 500 million years ago or so is a mystery that I, still, can’t fathom.
This is even more mysterious because evolution is driven by a philosophical ideology known as materialism, which itself is not science (the self-proclaimed source of truth). After all, what scientific experiments, what math formulas, what lab work shows that all reality consists only of natural objects that follow only natural laws? None. Instead, the materialist ideology that dominates the entire evolutionary paradigm is an unproved philosophical assumption that’s becoming increasingly farcical in the face of the overwhelming and obvious evidence of purpose, intelligence, mind, and design that dominates all life. The orthodox faithful, however, have to deny any inkling of purpose, intelligence, mind, and design as they deride or even seek to destroy the careers of those who might look at, for example, the stunning complexity, beauty, design and obvious purpose of human eyes and argue that the chance of them rising from the mindless and purposeless mechanisms that evolutionary ideology dogmatically demands is so statistically and logically improbable that there’s a better chance of an iPhone arising by the same forces that they claim evolved the eyes, not to mention the brain, without which the eyes would be useless.
It’s pretty heavy that, based on a false philosophical assumption, the life sciences have been for more than a century working off an absurd and obviously wrong foundation, which is why it has come up with an absurd and obviously wrong theory: that life arose from chance, with no purpose, intelligence, intention, mind or design involved when purpose, intelligence, mind, and design were exactly, and obviously, how life got here to begin with.
How, then, did science get things so wrong? It’s easy: science is a human endeavor and, as such, can be tainted or even corrupted by pride, career objectives, funding, greed, power, ideology, or by the common foibles that impact even the most honest and dedicated scientists.
And six mornings a week, at 7 AM, headlines in my mailbox like these (in just the last few days)— “Retractions begin for chemist found to have faked data in 42 papers”27; “’A flood of fraudulent scientific papers’ in the dietary supplement industry”;28 “Stanford expert on ‘lying and technology’ cites two nonexistent papers under oath”; “Worryingly high prevalence of retraction among top-cited researchers”29—remind me of just how human it all is.
3 https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/16/wiley_journals_ai/
7 https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/355108/alzheimers-disease-drug-approval-research-retraction
17 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature00870
18 https://retractionwatch.com/2024/11/19/cancer-specialist-faked-data-in-at-least-ten-papers-va-and-ucla-find/#more-130429
22 https://retractionwatch.com/2023/0/
23 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/09/scientific-misconduct-retraction-watch
24 Ibid.
25 J Law Med Ethics. 2013 Fall;41(3):590-600
26 Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press, 1962), 151.
28 Ibid.