Award-winning neuro-scientist Quits due to Rampant Academic Corruption
Gifted scientist quits post at Duke University in “disgust” over unprecedented scale of corruption among academics. The Canadian-American brain researcher, Jean-François Gariépy posted a heartfelt condemnation on his Facebook page, shown below. 
Dr Gariépy (pictured) is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University. He is interested in how the brain generates social behaviors. Gariépy, who received the Next Generation Award from the Society for Neuroscience for his efforts in communicating science to the general public, says he was so disgusted with the poor standards of “research” in the social sciences that he resigned my tenured university teaching job at age 39.
He writes:
This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University with no intent to solicit employment in state-funded academic research positions in any foreseeable future. Many reasons have motivated this choice, starting with personal ones: I will soon be a father and want to be spending time with my son at home.
Other reasons have to do with research academia itself. Throughout the years, I have been discovering more and more of the inner workings of academia and how modern scientific research is done and I have acquired a certain degree of discouragement in face of what appears to be an abandonment by my research community of the search for knowledge. I found scientists to be more preoccupied by their own survival in a very competitive research environment than by the development of a true understanding of the world.
By creating a highly-competitive environment that relies on the selection of researchers based on their “scientific productivity,” as it is referred to, we have populated the scientific community with what I like to call “chickens with no head,” that is, researchers who can produce multiple scientific articles per year, none of which with any particularly important impact on our understanding of the world. Because of this, science is moving forward similarly to how a headless chicken walks, with no perceivable goal.
This issue reveals itself in a series of noxious conditions that are affecting me and my colleagues: a high number of scientific articles are published with fraudulent data, due to the pressures of the “publish or perish” system, making it impossible to know if a recent discovery is true or not. The fact that the peer-review system does not care about looking at the data is not in any way reassuring about this concern. Furthermore, a large portion of the time of a scientist is spent on frivolous endeavors such as submitting a grant request to 5-10 agencies in the hope that one of them will accept. Finally, our scientific publication system has become so corrupted that it is almost impossible to get a scientific article published in an important journal without talking one-on-one with the editor before submitting the article.
Read more by Dr Gariépy at Facebook.
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