Many Scientists Are Making False Statements in Grant Applications Asking for NSF or NIH Money

In my very long post here, I extensively documented misstatements and lies in the literature of materialism. Very many of the untrue statements that I list in that post are statements by scientists themselves. Nowadays very many scientists make untrue statements in interviews, in the articles they write, and in the science papers they write. It is not at all true that almost all scientists are careful to be rigorously truthful when writing scientific papers. Nowadays scientific papers very often have titles boasting that the described research showed some grand thing that it failed to actually show. 

But what about the grant applications that scientists write, in which they ask the US government to give them money for some type of research? Are almost all scientists careful to avoid misstatements in such grant applications? It seems not. While examining the abstracts of only a very small number of research projects approved by the National Science Foundation or the National Institute of Health, I found many misstatements. Such misstatements are a particularly serious matter, because when they occur it is an offense as bad as lying on your income tax return. A person who lies on his income tax (asking for a refund) is someone asking that the government give him money that he should not have. A person who lies on a research grant application is typically someone asking for research dollars from the US government that the person should not be given. Even if a research project may deserve a certain small amount of money (say, $100,000), a scientist is guilty of a crime as bad as lying on his income tax if the scientist makes false claims in his grant application, causing his project to look more necessary or important than it is, and leading to that project getting a higher amount of research dollars. 

I can give some examples of false statements I read after examining the abstracts of only a very small number of research projects approved by the National Science Foundation or the National Institute of Health. I got these examples by reading abstracts after doing queries on the search tools of the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Health, tools allowing you to look up particular research projects and how much money has been allocated to such projects. We can assume that the same false statements were made in any grant application made for the same projects. 

• The term "engram" refers to the theoretical idea of a specific location in the brain where a memory is stored. One research project claimed in its abstract that specific engrams had been located and activated. The claim has no basis in fact. Various studies have claimed to have located or activated engrams in rodents. But all of these studies are very low-quality studies guilty of poor research practices such as using way-too-small study group sizes and using unreliable techniques to try to judge whether fear recall occurred in rodents.  This research project received more than $200,000 in funding. Claims of "engram discovery" typically involve noise-mining in which someone looks for some place of higher neural firing when a rodent is learning or recalling. Because neurons fire randomly between about 1 and 200 times a second, some little places of higher neural firing can always be found, regardless of whether engrams exist or not. 
• Another study awarded much less money made the incorrect claim that engram cells in the brain can be tagged, and that fear memories can be artificially activated in some situation in which an organism has no source of fear. The claim is incorrect, and stems from claims made in poorly-designed junk science studies using way-too-small study group sizes. 
• One project awarded more than  $100,000 claimed in its abstract that the accelerating expansion of the universe is evidence for the multiverse, the idea that there are many universes. The expansion of our universe does nothing to suggest that there are other universes. 
• Awarded more than $200,000 in federal funding, another research project claimed in its abstract that memories had been transferred from one animal to another. The claim has no basis in fact. A study claimed to have transferred memory from one sea slug to another. But the study used a study group size so small and memory recall techniques so unreliable that it cannot be taken seriously as evidence for such a claim. 
• Awarded more than $1,000,000 in federal funding, another research project claimed that a particular small fraction of the brain encodes rewarding memories.  There is no adequate basis for any claim that any part of the brain encodes memories, and scientists lack any credible theory of how experiences or learned knowledge could be converted into brain states in some act that could be called an encoding of memory. Very much human brain tissue has been examined by very powerful microscopes, but microscopic examination of human brain tissue has never discovered any trace of anything humans learned. 
• Awarded about $1,000,000 in federal funding, another research project claimed that learning produces changes in extremely tiny  features in the brain called dendritic spines.  There is no robust evidence that this claim is true. Dendritic spines are short-lived  unstable things subject to rapid turnover, things too unstable to be a storage site of memories that can last for decades. You  can study some dendritic spines and watch them change over a period of time when some organism is learning something. But there is no reason for thinking that the learning did anything to produce the changes in the dendritic spines you observed. Similarly, you can track  changes in the flowers of your garden as you take a college course; but there is no reason for thinking your learning did anything to produce such flower changes.  
• One research project awarded a million dollars contained two terrible misstatements in the first two sentences of its abstract. One of these used the old deceit of defining morphogenesis as a mere problem of how the shape of an organism arises. Morphogenesis is properly defined as the process by which an organism develops from a speck-sized zygote to the full organization of a newborn or adult body, something that is a billion times more complex and more hard-to-explain than a mere origination of a shape. In its second sentence the research abstract repeated the Great DNA Myth, the lie that there is in DNA or  it genes a genomic program determining morphogenesis. As discussed here, DNA does not specify the full shape or form or structure of any organism, nor does it specify how to make any organ of an organism or any cell of an organism. 
• Another research project awarded about a million dollars was guilty of the same two deceptions described above. 
• Another research project awarded about a million dollars told us the huge lie that developmental biology has been hugely successful in reducing the seeming miraculous self-organization of a fertilized egg to a fetus and adult to a list of genes and the instructions for their regulation in the noncoding genome.  Nothing of the sort has occurred.  DNA and its genes do not specify any of these things: how to make a full human body, how to make any organ system, how to make any organ, how to make any cell, how to make any of the organelles that make up a cell.
• One research project awarded a large sum of federal money was all based on the claim that a certain subject had a type of memory failure that the subject did not actually have. 
• Another research project application abstract made the false claim that "sharp-wave ripples" are crucial for memory consolidation. The claim is an "old wives' tale" of neuroscientists, having no basis in sound science. As discussed here, studies trying to support the claim are typically very low-quality science studies using way-too-small study group sizes. 
• Another research project application abstract made the false claim that a particular lab had identified molecular mechanisms of memory consolidation. No molecular mechanisms of memory consolidation have ever been discovered, and any claims to have done that will not hold up to scrutiny. An example of a very low-quality paper claiming a relevant experimental result is the paper here. The only study group sizes used are way-too-small study group sizes such as only 4 or 5 rodents. 

What is going on in such grant applications is some lying and a great deal of recitation of dubious dogma, and repetition of groundless socially constructed triumphal legends of biologists, who exist in cloistered belief communities in which many "old wives' tales" are repeated, and many faulty speech customs are followed. 

There are various things that could be done to reduce the amount of money given to lying or misleading applicants. They include the following:

(1) None of the project abstracts I examined had any references to previously published science papers. A standard could be established that all abstracts for research proposals should have citations backing up any claims made that are not universally recognized. This would make it easier to check whether there exists a sound basis for some claim made to try to show that the suggested research is important. 

(2) Instead of granting very large awards such as $1,000,000 covering all funding for a multi-year project, funding could be provided on a yearly basis, with additional funding for that project based on an examination of whether the project was producing high-quality reproducible research following best practices. 

(3) Research grants could be denied for projects that did not supply a detailed research plan specifying the exact number of subjects to be used, the exact method of gathering and analyzing data, and so forth. This would help exclude cases in which huge amounts of money is awarded to Researcher X even though Researcher X has only a hazy or half-baked notion of how he will spend the money. 

(4) All research proposals (funded or not-yet-funded) should be viewable under some public interface allowing knowledgeable scholars to submit comments disputing the accuracy of statements in research proposals or comments criticizing the proposed methods or reported methods. 

(5) A system could be put in place where any individual can submit a "claw-back request" complaining that statements in the research proposal are inaccurate, or that the money spent did not result in credible high-quality research. Upon reviewing such "claw-back requests" US government officials might request some university or college granted a certain amount of project funding to repay that funding back to the US government. 

Postscript: A professor of neuroscience recently boasted that experimental science "has a powerful, century-old tool kit for limiting false inferences," one that includes "preregistered analyses." But the professor confesses that "preregistration remains rare in neuroscience." Oops, it looks like our neuroscientists are not doing what they need to do to avoid false inferences.