Science unsettled

Michael LaCour, the former UCLA graduate student accused of faking research for a much-publicized study on attitudes about same-sex marriage, just keeps piling up dubious research tactics and suspected lies. The journal Science published LaCour’s research in December and retracted it in May. LaCour admits he lied about some funding sources and incentives used to attract participants and that he destroyed the raw data, Science Insider reported.

It now appears, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, LaCour also used bogus data for a study investigating political ideology and its influence on viewer and listener program choices and lied about several items on his curriculum vitae.

Although the LaCour debacle may be an embarrassment to his colleagues and to the journal that published his research, it may also be a wake-up call. Already some in the scientific community have taken steps to tighten up ethical standards and procedures.

The journal Science has released a new set of comprehensive guidelines for publishing research studies, The New York Times reported. Science editors say they began drawing up these guidelines long before the LaCour ordeal occurred.

The LaCour case is symbolic of a larger problem in science, said Trisha Phillips, a research ethicist at West Virginia University, in the journal Nature. Seventy-two percent of scientists in a survey said they had witnessed colleagues using questionable research practices, Phillips said.

Part of the problem, according to Phillips, is that universities push researchers to get funded and to “publish or perish,” a situation that makes questionable research practices tempting. She suggests training graduate students better and providing more direct supervision over researchers’ methods and data.

Faked research is “a predictable consequence of the scientific community’s winking at the practice of senior scientists putting their names on junior researchers’ work without getting elbow-deep in the guts of the research themselves,” said New York University journalism professor Charles Seife in a Los Angeles Times editorial.

“When scientists are rewarded for producing flashy publications at a rapid pace,” Seife wrote, “we can’t be surprised that fraud is occasionally the consequence.”

Bionic breakthrough

An optometrist in British Columbia has invented a surgically implantable bionic lens that could give patients perfect vision and make glasses, contact lenses, and laser surgery obsolete. People with the specialized lenses would never get cataracts because their natural lenses, which decay over time, would have been replaced. The surgery takes eight minutes, and the patient’s sight would not only immediately improve but would be three times better than 20/20 vision. “If you can just barely see the clock at 10 feet, when you get the bionic lens you can see the clock at 30 feet away,” Garth Webb, inventor of the lens, told CBC News. Pending clinical trials, Webb said the bionic lens could be available in about two years. —J.B.

Back to the future

It may not be possible to zoom back to the future on Marty McFly’s hoverboard, but Toyota Lexus has built a prototype hoverboard similar to the one made famous by the 1989 movie Back to the Future Part II, according to Bloomberg Business. The board uses magnets and superconductors cooled by liquid nitrogen. Lexus plans to test the prototype this summer in Barcelona and promises to disclose more information on Oct. 21, the day that Doc, Marty, and his girlfriend, Jennifer, went back to the future. —J.B.