TRA proud of falsifying medical data to align with his politics

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[–]motionlessoracle 44 insightful - 1 fun44 insightful - 0 fun45 insightful - 1 fun -  (8 children)

I sincerely hope the owners of the study know that happened and think it's irrelevant to the study, otherwise their data is fucked for all time.

What worries me are the retrospective studies. Sometimes, researchers go back and pull data from various studies done by different groups in the past in an attempt to look at other variables. Say a researcher wants to go back to clinical trials and look at how drug <x> affects female patients of a certain age. How will they know that the data they are grabbing hasn't been altered? Poisoning the female data with data from people who were male at birth potentially endangers female people.

[–]VioletRemi 17 insightful - 3 fun17 insightful - 2 fun18 insightful - 3 fun -  (0 children)

And then we will have another thalidomide scandal. Again.

[–]EnnuiOz 10 insightful - 1 fun10 insightful - 0 fun11 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

This is one of those cases that I just don't believe. How did the person get a hold of the dataset in the first place and, why wasn't it stripped of identifying variables that would give them a clue whose gender they were 'amending'?

I have worked in social research and statistics for 25 years and data anonymisation is one of the first steps to securing the confidentiality of respondents. Going to call bullshit on this ever happening.

E: Even if this person was part of the research team, they should never be able to get hold of an unconfidentialised dataset. If what they did really did occur, that's a sackable offence and has just inVALIDated the results of the study

[–]motionlessoracle 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

You make a good point about the anonymity of data. Somewhere, for any human study, there is a key that permits connecting real human beings to the ID numbers in the data. Perhaps that was what was being amended?

[–]EnnuiOz 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

You are absolutely correct about the 'key' which is always stored separately and securely. However, even the key is in code so noone should be able to amend that either.

[–]Nona_Biba 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Poisoning the female data with data from people who were male at birth potentially endangers female people.

This makes me so angry I could vomit. #ProtectFemalePatients, make THAT go viral!

[–]IridescentAnaconda 32 insightful - 1 fun32 insightful - 0 fun33 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

/thathappened

Seriously, as someone whose entire career involves medical research, I can tell you this could never happen without PI's authorization. If it did, the project has bigger problems than a loose cannon TIM.

[–]immersang 10 insightful - 1 fun10 insightful - 0 fun11 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I'm glad to read that, seriously. If this can actually happen in a serious research project it's scary stuff.

[–]EnnuiOz 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Absolutely second this.

[–]Anandamide 19 insightful - 1 fun19 insightful - 0 fun20 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Well that research is quite possibly fucked. This person well ought to be fired; and medical research isn't so big of a field that a reputation for data falsification won't haunt them for a long time.

[–]Anna_Nym 15 insightful - 1 fun15 insightful - 0 fun16 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

But JK Rowling is a transphobic bigot because no one is trying to erase sex.

[–]Terfenclaw 12 insightful - 1 fun12 insightful - 0 fun13 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

what the fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck

This is so unethical and potentially dangerous to the health of those patients (or to future ones, depending on how the information is used).