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He won’t be stoned, stretched or imprisoned for pushing the cause of science or exposing research methods that might make Sir Isaac Newton choke on an apple.

But Londoner Etienne LeBel has made himself a pariah by exposing questionable work of more senior scientists competing for hundreds of millions of tax dollars.

The 33-year-old LeBel calls himself the hobo scientist and no wonder: He’s set aside ambitions of becoming a well-paid professor to reveal the secrets of senior scientists, the journals that publish their work and a federal agency that last year alone spent $345.9 million on research.

“I’ve gotten hate mail, basically, from senior colleagues,” LeBel told The Free Press Friday.

As a PhD candidate at Western University in 2010, LeBel was already queasy about some psychological research he read or assisted with when he saw the study that set him down the path as a rebel. An Ivy League professor claimed that ESP was real and college students could predict random events.

The study by Cornell University professor Daryl Bem, published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, was headline news but other scientists reacted with scorn. They later replicated Bem’s methods and found no evidence of psychic powers.

If you think that psychic study was just an oddity, think again. Just last week, a joint effort by 270 researchers including LeBel fired a broadside at the field of psychological research. The team replicated experiments used to produce 100 studies in leading journals and fewer than half produced evidence the authors had claimed — a finding published in the world-leading journal Science and reported in headlines around the world.

A point person for the so-called Reproducibility Project praised LeBel as a Canadian trailblazer.

“He is more than talk, he gets stuff done,” said Brian Nosek, who started and leads the Center for Open Science based in Charlottesville, Va.

Long before LeBel challenged social science and humanity academics that in Canada alone include 24,000 full-time professors, he overcame steep odds. Growing up in a small francophone community in Sturgeon Falls, 20 kilometres west of North Bay, he was the first in his family to attend university. He studied math and computer science at Waterloo.

Competing with top young math minds in the country, LeBel struggled, then switched to psychology, bringing with him a scientific rigour he said is lacking in his new field.

Too often, scientists make bold claims backed by thin veneer. They used tiny sample sizes without statistical rationale. They glossed over key variables, pick arbitrary ways to compare results and repeat experiments until they get the result they sought, never disclosing the unflattering evidence along the way, LeBel said.

“We weren’t being honest enough about negative results.”

He isn’t accusing colleagues of fraud but of taking scientifically iffy short-cuts to publish as many studies as possible — a pressure inherent when professors must be magnets for research funding if they want tenure.

That pressure went unchecked, because until recently, even dubious findings went unquestioned because all funding went to original work, not replicating studies.

“It’s a perfect storm for publishing ideas that may not hold water,” he said.

At Western, LeBel tried to replicate four studies, even increasing sample sizes and repeating efforts, but none produced results claimed in the original. His faculty adviser suggested he stop.

“You’re throwing people under the bus. You’re going to create a lot of enemies,” LeBel said he was told.

Instead, LeBel pushed harder, creating a website, psychdisclosure.org, and asked scientists to reveal all evidence and methods and not just what had been published in leading journals. Though his website triggered some hate mail, enough scientists shared what he sought that last year the journal Psychology Science increased reporting standards and cited LeBel’s work as a reason.

“I’m crazy enough to put scientific views above self-interest,” LeBel said.

That sentiment prompted him to create a second website, Curatescience.org, where scientists are encouraged to publish replication studies and link them to the originals. The site also includes links to data so other scientists can check work, too, and will soon allow researchers to run cloud-bases analysis online.

That latest effort has led to demand for LeBel by other maverick academics at leading universities in Europe and the United States — he’s leaving Sept. 12 for a three-month tour that will include Harvard and Cambridge.

His work has impressed his key ally at Western, Lorne Campbell, a professor in whose lab LeBel works as a research associate. Scientists should be much more open about their work, and their studies should be subjected to replication, said Campbell, who has done replication studies himself.

“I think (scientists) are going to move in that direction,” he said.

jonathan.sher@sunmedia.ca

Twitter.com/JSHERatLFPress

 

About Etienne LeBel

  • Born in northern Ontario and first in family to go to university.
  • Schooled at Waterloo and Western; psychology PhD at the latter.
  • Awarded $105,000 for PhD work by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
  • Created two websites exposing questionable research and advocating for better science and disclosure.
  • His faculty adviser warned his path might be career suicide.

WHO’S WATCHING PUBLIC TILL?

  • The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada doles out tax dollars for research and scientists, $345.9 million last year alone.
  • None of that cash goes to scientists to check the work of others, so-called replication studies.
  • The council doesn’t require recipients to report their work fully and publicly, Etienne LeBel says.
  • Council officials couldn’t be reached for comment Friday.

 

 

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