Matt Kaplan

There are a number of places that are rolling this out.

And I think it has the potential to bring about more creativity and more tolerance for outside ideas and researchers who might normally not get the attention of big grant awarding bodies.

And I don't want to say that this is my idea.

Other people have had this idea, but it's starting to make its mark.

And I think that's a good thing.

Well, it actually would reduce fraud because when you're a scientist and you've got to pay your mortgage and you've got to put food on the table for your kids, ensuring that you continue to get the grant money is incredibly important.

And if an experiment is not working out and you're off by just a tiny fraction of a percent, there is a powerful incentive to adjust the numbers accordingly.

in a manner that no one would ever detect.

And that leads us to more Louis Pasteur-like behavior that's becoming ever more common.

And right now, you do that, and I mean, that's bad.

Because if you and I were to steal $100,000 from a bank, we would go to jail.

But

If you lie about your results, and someone reads those results and goes, oh, that's really interesting, I want to run a follow-up experiment on that, and applies for a $100,000 grant to follow up, but they don't know that your work is fraudulent, they have now just taken $100,000, very likely from taxpayers, to do work that is built on a house of cards that is going to collapse one day, and it's a waste.

And right now, if you engage in fraud, there's very little punishment for

other than being put on administrative leave from the university and being removed from your teaching circuit.

If we were to establish some significant penalties for engaging in fraud and also establishing some better systems for detecting it, that would probably help too.

But if you increase the pressure on researchers by cutting funding, it increases the pressure for them to then behave badly.

If we ease the pressure, then I think fewer people are put into that sort of a situation.

You know, the first step to resolving the anti-science stance that we've got, and I was just talking about laws and sausages and talking about how science needs to communicate what it's doing better because there were a lot of miscommunications during the pandemic.

I think talking about the problem, recognizing that we've got a problem, and then stating how we're going to solve that problem by having scientists communicate more clearly, getting the science journalists on task, and educating the public