How a Scientific Cartel Protects Fraudsters and Rakes in Billions of Taxpayer Dollars

Corrupt scientists rarely face accountability. The real victims are everyone else. 

From Reason. Excerpts:

"Sylvain Lesné, a neuroscientist at the University of Minnesota, published a paper in Nature in 2006 claiming to identify a specific amyloid beta protein assembly as the direct cause of memory impairment in Alzheimer's. This reinvigorated the amyloid hypothesis at a moment when skepticism about it was ramping up. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) devoted $1.6 billion to projects that mention amyloids in 2022 alone, nearly half of all federal Alzheimer's funding that year. Lesné was a star.

But there were rumblings. Numerous amyloid drugs made it to trials with billions invested by pharmaceutical companies. They failed repeatedly. A question arose in the pharmaceutical community: How can this be right? How can the trials keep failing if the underlying research is correct? 

In 2022, the Vanderbilt neuroscientist Matthew Schrag uncovered evidence that images in Lesné's paper had been manipulated. Science magazine found more than 20 suspect papers by Lesné, with over 70 instances of possible image tampering. Nature retracted the paper in June 2024. Every author except Lesné signed the retraction. Lesné himself resigned from his tenured position at the University of Minnesota on March 1, 2025, three years after his fraud was exposed.

More news and details trickled out over time. Charles Piller's 2025 book Doctored talks about the Amyloid Mafia, a nickname for a network that had prioritized novelty over replication and marginalized dissenters for decades. Anyone questioning the amyloid gospel was pushed out and watched their funding vanish."

"Lesné resigned, but was still rich. None of his grant money was clawed back. The system that was supposed to catch this—peer review, university compliance, journal editorial boards—failed repeatedly for years.

Lesné was not a lone bad apple. The rot and corruption of academic research are systemic and structural. Daniele Fanelli's 2009 meta-analysis of survey data in PLOS One showed that approximately 2 percent of scientists self-reported fabrication or falsification—and 14 percent reported witnessing it in colleagues. Self-reports mark the floor, not the ceiling.

J.B. Carlisle's 2021 paper, "False individual patient data and zombie randomised controlled trials submitted to Anaesthesia," showed that out of 153 trials with individual patient data available, 44 percent had untrustworthy data and 26 percent were zombie trials animated entirely by false data. In a 2025 PNAS study, researchers estimated that the number of fraudulent publications is doubling every 1.5 years, while legitimate publications double every 15.

At least 400,000 papers published from 2000 through 2022 showed signs of coming from paper mills. Former BMJ editor Richard Smith asked, "Is it time to assume health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?" A 2015 Lancet comment by Richard Horton put it bluntly: "Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue."

"The peer review process helps enable this fraud. The economist Bruce Yandle called it the "Bootleggers and Baptists" phenomenon: A group with strongly held moral beliefs will end up working with people interested in exploiting it financially. Self-righteous gatekeepers say peer review is required for integrity. As a byproduct, the publishing oligopoly extracts billions in profit by charging for access to taxpayer-funded research. Paper mills have become a shadow market worth, by one conservative estimate cited by Nature, hundreds of millions of dollars per year by publishing any slop they get their hands on, knowing that researchers desperate to publish would rather cheat than starve and that sociopaths would happily buy authorship with a credit card."

"The Food and Drug Administration Amendments Act of 2007 legally required public posting of clinical trial results on ClinicalTrials.gov. A 2015 New England Journal of Medicine analysis showed only 13.4 percent compliance in reporting summary results within the required 12-month window. The government has the authority to fine violators up to $10,000 per day; it could have collected $25 billion according to a 2015 STAT investigation. But it collected essentially nothing, because the agency doesn't want to fight the powerful institutions it regulates."    

More capitalist countries have lower income inequality

Tweet from Vlad Tarko. 

"More capitalist countries have lower income inequality, not higher. High income inequality is caused by cronyism which goes hand in hand with highly regulated markets. Welfare states also lower inequality, but you need free markets wealth to have generous welfare states."

 

"You can't derive causality from raw data. Those scatter plots are just a description of reality. If your causal picture of the world makes you expect the opposite patterns, you should re-evaluate. The cronyism comment is an alternate causal theory that fits the pattern.

In any case, if you think I'm deriving my whole world view from a few scatter plots, that's a very uncharitable interpretation. No, that's not what I'm doing. While, yes, empirical evidence is very important. Too many people have theories that are intuitive but flat out wrong.

The correlations on the upper-left and lower-right are actually quite strong. The other two less so, which further enhances the point! 1 Size of govt weakly correlated with equality, unless in rich country. 2 Even in rich countries, capitalism doesn't increase inequality."   

Trump Halts the Blockade of U.S. Ports

His waiver of the Jones Act is helping U.S. oil supply, so why not repeal the 1920 law?

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

"So far, about two dozen waiver voyages have been reported complete as of April 30, according to the Maritime Administration."

"Mr. Trump’s initial suspension of the Jones Act was for 60 days, but late last month he extended that for another 90 days, with the White House calling it a great success. “New data compiled since the initial waiver was issued revealed that significantly more supply was able to reach U.S. ports faster,” a spokeswoman said. “This extension will help ensure vital energy products, industrial materials, and agricultural necessities are maintained.”"

"Funny, it also sounds like a good argument for permanent Jones Act relief. In a crisis, such as a hurricane in the Caribbean or a menacing in the Persian Gulf, the archaic law becomes an acute problem, because it limits the flexibility of American supply chains to respond."

"The Jones Act’s defenders call it an America First policy to protect a U.S. shipbuilding industry and merchant marine. A century later, that clearly hasn’t worked." 

Entrepreneurs Flocked to Colorado. Now Red Tape Is Driving Some Away

Proposed AI bill has many wondering whether state’s regulations killing its entrepreneurial spirit

By Owen Tucker-Smith of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"A widely circulated report last month from the state’s chamber of commerce reported a loss of publicly traded companies based in the state, estimating that Colorado had lost workers from some 98 firms to relocations or failed site-selection opportunities since 2019."

"Companies’ latest complaint is over a landmark state bill regulating artificial intelligence. A previous version of the bill would have required companies to take steps to reduce the risk that AI-based algorithms used for high-stakes decisions such as employment or healthcare discriminate against users."

"The state added half a million jobs in the mid-2010s as startup culture and domestic migration drove explosive growth, but the economy has recently grown sluggish."

"Blake Scholl, chief executive of the Denver-based aviation company Boom Supersonic, moved to Colorado a decade ago, inspired by its thriving business climate, but said the pileup of regulations has delayed his construction projects."

"the AI bill would add compliance costs and distract attention from companies when they need to focus on winning the AI race." 

Globalization’s Overlooked Economic Benefits

Antiglobalist ideas have motivated many Trump voters, but free trade benefits the average American

Letter to The WSJ.

"In his column “What Happened to the Pragmatic Trump of the First Term?” (Editor At Large, May 5), Gerard Baker wisely decries President Trump’s second-term pursuit of a misguided and extreme ideological agenda. Mr. Baker points out that antiglobalist ideas motivated voters in 2016—views that globalism “facilitated mass migration and the elevation of international capital that ravaged communities at home.”

A better name for “the elevation of international capital” is “free trade.” This term reveals the increased freedom of ordinary people to spend their incomes as they choose, while avoiding the mistaken suggestion that lowering trade barriers benefits only Davos-vacationing capitalists at the expense of the masses.

And where are these “ravaged communities at home” that voters were so worried about? Politicians and pundits still talk incessantly about these communities, but scholars who make serious attempts to locate them encounter difficulties. Economist Jeremy Horpedahl studied the 10 metropolitan statistical areas in the U.S. that suffered the largest negative hits during the infamous “China Shock” of the early 2000s. According to Mr. Horpedahl, all of the metropolitan statistical areas “hit hard by the China Shock still managed to have significant and positive real wage growth across the distribution since 2001 . . . Wage gains in several of these places, in fact, are better than the national trends.”

Whenever economic change occurs, some particular workers lose jobs, and some particular locations lose business and population. Economic growth requires economic change and adjustment. This has always been and will continue to be the case. But the story of America is that ordinary people recover over time and become wealthier. It’s an error to single out the freer trade of the past few decades as a unique source of economic change that justifies greater skepticism of globalization.

Prof. Donald J. Boudreaux

George Mason University

Fairfax, Va." 

Airlines and Overzealous Antitrust Enforcers

It’s a mistake to blame deregulation for Spirit Airlines’ demise

Letter to The WSJ. 

"Regarding your editorial “Spirit Airlines and the Antitrust Left” (May 4): Many people think that because carriers like Spirit Airlines have lower costs, they should be able to compete with the major airlines by offering lower fares. That’s a fallacy.

On any route involving a hub city of a major airline, the major airline’s network will support more flights (and therefore more possible connection options) than the low-cost carrier, which relies on point-to-point traffic. This product advantage, among others, generally allows the major airlines to charge and receive higher ticket prices than the low-cost carriers.

The revenue from these premium tickets will normally cover the cost of a network carrier’s flight before all the seats are sold. This means the remaining seats can be sold profitably at any price necessary to fill them. Unless travel demand is so high, or industry capacity so low, that major airlines can fill their planes at premium prices, it will generally make economic sense for them to match any price that a low-cost carrier offers if doing so is necessary to fill a seat.

The antitrust left is now blaming deregulation for Spirit’s demise. But there are far more airline flights, with more destinations served, at lower prices in real terms, than before deregulation. This is because deregulation allowed airlines to develop networks, that efficiently aggregate and distribute traffic through mergers, international alliances and organic growth.

During the era of deregulation, I was on the staff of the Civil Aeronautics Board, which regulated airline routes and prices until 1978. The architects of deregulation, Michael Levine and Alfred Kahn, didn’t know what form airline competition would take. They were confident, however, that business executives, freed from regulatory constraints, would find the most effective ways to increase output and reduce price. That is what has happened, despite resistance from regulators and occasional missteps by misguided judges. Unfortunately, the Biden administration’s antitrust enforcers and Judge William Young prevented Spirit Airlines and JetBlue from helping airline competition continue to evolve.

Ben Hirst

Wayzata, Minn.

Mr. Hirst is former executive vice president of Delta Air Lines." 

The U.S. Indicts a Mexican Governor

Charges made in New York mean President Sheinbaum will have to choose a side

By Mary Anastasia O’Grady. Excerpts:

"Mexican civil-society groups have long accused the political class of aiding and abetting cartels. Activists, family members whose loved ones are among the 130,000 gone missing since 2006, and journalists are some of the brave Mexicans who have tried to raise the consciousness of their nation about what they allege is a link between the gangsters who terrorize them and the state. It’s dangerous work."

"For more than a decade, the Cartel, under the rule of the Chapitos Leaders, and, before them El Chapo and El Mayo, has paid cash bribes to public officials at each level of the government, in exchange for protection of the Cartel’s drug trafficking operations. These corrupt government and law enforcement officials, including the defendants, are essential to the Cartel’s drug trafficking operations.”"