A leading obesity researcher (and scaremonger) has admitted to fabricating data in 17 grant applications that secured over $3 million in federal funding. I’ve said before that given the pressures to produce compelling research that generates headlines, the media needs to give more scrutiny to health-related research. Many times, the data is much less conclusive than the language that goes into the press releases would indicate, and at times, the two are out and out contradictory. Grant-writers want researchers that gets attention, not research that’s ultimately inconclusive, or gets ambiguous results.

That’s not an aspersion on all health-related research. It’s just wise to keep in mind that the whole field is based on questionable incentives.

The industry folks at the Center for Consumer freedom point out another oddity in the story — obesity researcher David Allison continues to insist the guy is innocent, even though he’s admitted to the charges. Allison’s one of the authors of the now-discredited study attributing 300,000 annual deaths to obesity (the original study came out in the early 90s, it has since been updated to 400,000, then retracted by the CDC).

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 31st, 2005 at 12:14 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.