#faulty data

By Gretchen Vogel Science Magazine

Diederik Stapel

One of the Netherlands' leading social psychologists made up or manipulated data in dozens of papers over nearly a decade, an investigating committee has concluded.

Diederik Stapel was suspended from his position at Tilburg University in the Netherlands in September after three junior researchers reported that they suspected scientific misconduct in his work. Soon after being confronted with the accusations, Stapel reportedly told university officials that some of his papers contained falsified data. The university launched an investigation, as did the University of Groningen and the University of Amsterdam, where Stapel had worked previously. The Tilburg commission today released an interim report (in Dutch), which includes preliminary results from all three investigations. The investigators found "several dozens of publications" in which fictitious data has been used. Fourteen of the 21 Ph.D. theses Stapel supervised are also tainted, the committee concluded. 

By Debbie Nathan The New York Times Published October 14, 2011

Undated photo of Shirley Mason

“What about Mama?” the psychiatrist asks her patient. “What’s Mama been doing to you, dear? . . . I know she gave you the enemas. And I know she filled your bladder up with cold water, and I know she used the flashlight on you, and I know she stuck the washcloth in your mouth, cotton in your nose so you couldn’t breathe. . . . What else did she do to you? It’s all right to talk about it now. . . . ”

“My mommy,” the patient says.

“Yes.”

“My mommy said that I was a bad little girl, and . . . she slapped me . . . with her knuckles. . . .”

“Mommy isn’t going to ever hurt you again,” the psychiatrist says at the close of the session. “Do you want to know something, Sweetie? I’m stronger than Mother.” The transcript of this conversation is stored at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, in New York City, among the papers of Flora Schreiber, author of “Sybil,” the blockbuster book about a woman with 16 personalities. “Sybil” was published in 1973; within four years it had sold more than six million copies in the United States and hundreds of thousands abroad. A television adaptation broadcast in 1976 was seen by a fifth of all Americans. But Sybil’s story was not just gripping reading; it was instrumental in creating a new psychiatric diagnosis: multiple-personality disorder, or M.P.D., known today as dissociative-identity disorder. Schreiber collaborated on the book with Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, the psychiatrist who asks, “What about Mama?” — and with Wilbur’s patient, whose name Schreiber changed to Sybil Dorsett. Schreiber worked from records of Sybil’s therapy, including thousands of pages of patient diaries and transcripts of tape-recorded therapy sessions. Before she died in the late 1980s, Schreiber stipulated that the material be archived at a library. For a decade after Schreiber’s death, Sybil’s identity remained unknown. To protect her privacy, librarians sealed her records. In 1998, two researchers discovered that her real name was Shirley Mason. In trying to track her down, they learned that she was dead, and the librarians at John Jay decided to unseal the Schreiber papers. (cut) One May afternoon in 1958, Mason walked into Wilbur’s office carrying a typed letter that ran to four pages. It began with Mason admitting that she was “none of the things I have pretended to be. “I am not going to tell you there isn’t anything wrong,” the letter continued. “But it is not what I have led you to believe. . . . I do not have any multiple personalities. . . . I do not even have a ‘double.’ . . . I am all of them. I have been essentially lying.”

Before coming to New York, she wrote, she never pretended to have multiple personalities. As for her tales about “fugue” trips to Philadelphia, they were lies, too. Mason knew she had a problem. She “very, very, very much” wanted Wilbur’s help. To identify her real trouble and deal with it honestly, Mason wrote, she and Wilbur needed to stop demonizing her mother. It was true that she had been anxious and overly protective. But the “extreme things” — the rapes with the flashlights and bottles — were as fictional as the soap operas that she and her mother listened to on the radio. Her descriptions of gothic tortures “just sort of rolled out from somewhere, and once I had started and found you were interested, I continued. . . . Under pentothal,” Mason added, “I am much more original.”

Mason was the most important patient in Wilbur’s professional career. She was preserving the tape-recorded narcosynthesis interviews she was doing with Mason and preparing to speak about the case at professional meetings. Wilbur told her patient that the recantation was “a major defensive maneuver,” merely the ego’s attempt to trick itself into thinking it didn’t need therapy. But Mason did need it, badly, Wilbur insisted. She was denying that she’d been tortured by her mother; this showed she really had been tortured.

Mason went home and composed a new letter. “One Friday,” she wrote Wilbur, “ ‘someone’ stalked into your office, imitated me [and] had a paper written about how she had now become well and was confessing . . . that it had all been put on. Well, you knew better.”

Wilbur instructed her secretary to schedule five sessions a week with Mason. She started the pentothal again.

Mason developed more and more personalities, ending up with a total of 16. Her “memories” of Mattie’s torture — of being sexually assaulted by her mother with kitchen implements; of seeing Mattie Mason conducting orgies in the woods with teenage girls; of being buried alive in a grain silo in her father’s workshop — were flowing.

Mason’s roommate, horrified by the treatment Mason was receiving, urged Mason to terminate her sessions with Wilbur. Instead, Mason left the apartment they shared on the West Side and found a tiny place on East 78th Street where she could live alone, just a few blocks from Wilbur’s home and office on Park Avenue. Wilbur paid the deposit on the new apartment and showered Mason with gifts: old rugs and drapes from her office, a fur-trimmed winter coat — even a cat.

By Sam Borden

The New York Times

The N.F.L’s first attempt at a long-range study on the effects of concussions was riddled with problems from the manner in which data was collected to conflicts of interest for those overseeing it. After criticism from outside experts and even members of Congress, the study was shut down by the league in late 2009.

Nearly two years later, however, the N.F.L.’s committee on concussion research is planning a considerably broader study — an effort that could begin gathering data as soon as next season, according to one of the doctors involved.

The doctor, Mitchel S. Berger, the chairman of the neurological surgery department at the University of California San Francisco, said Monday that he and the N.F.L.’s subcommittee on former players and long-term effects of brain and spine injury had been holding conference calls regarding the study every two weeks with representatives from the players’ union. He added that he hoped to make a final presentation to the union and Commissioner Roger Goodell “in the near future.”

Berger said he was aware of the issues surrounding the previous study, and said the latest model was completely different.

“There was no science in that,” Berger said in reference to the study coordinated by Dr. Ira Casson, who was also the league’s primary voice in discrediting outside research on concussions. Asked if he might use any of the data from Casson’s work, Berger shook his head.

Medical News Today

The Chronicle of Higher Education by Tom Bartlett

Marc Hauser, PhD

Marc D. Hauser, the Harvard psychologist found responsible for eight counts of scientific misconduct by the university, has resigned, ending speculation about whether the embattled professor would return to campus this fall. In a letter dated July 7, Mr. Hauser wrote to Michael D. Smith, Harvard's dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, that he was resigning effective August 1 because he had "some exciting opportunities in the private sector" and that he had been involved in some "extremely interesting and rewarding work focusing on the educational needs of at-risk teenagers." The letter states that he may return to teaching and research "in the years to come." It does not mention the scandal that damaged his once-stellar reputation and stunned his colleagues in the field.