Meet science's new fraud fighter

Politico

25-06-2025

INVESTIGATION
A new scientific integrity project aims to find 'bad medical evidence before it kills people.'
Or at least that's how James Heathers describes his new role, as director of the Medical Evidence Project, on LinkedIn. The nascent project is predicated on the belief that uncovering flawed research is a slow and arduous process with few enforcement mechanisms. And allowing bad research to go unchecked can have high stakes. If flimsy or incorrect studies are incorporated into health or medical treatment guidelines, they can cause widespread public health harms.
The Medical Evidence Project will operate on two levels: Whistleblowers can use a tip line to alert Heathers' team to problematic research and the team will build digital infrastructure to vet research more efficiently.
The project is funded through a two-year $900,000 grant from Open Philanthropy. The nonprofit Center for Scientific Integrity, the parent organization of Retraction Watch, a blog that tracks retractions in scientific publications, is running the initiative.
Heathers, a Boston-based research scientist leading the project, talked with Erin about the project's launch earlier this month and why correcting the record matters:
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How will you choose which research tips to pursue?
I triage things in terms of: What is it supposed to prevent? What harm could be caused? What actually happens? Let's say we were talking about vitamin K or another necessary supplementation to support healthy birth. That's really important. Is everyone eating enough salmon? Significantly less important.
If there are things that are inaccurate, obviously that's a problem. But if there are things that are inaccurate that are going to hurt people and the research is provably inaccurate, then I have officially become very interested, which is often a process that people who are less than honest do not enjoy.
If you identify research that's inaccurate and harmful, what happens next?
It depends on the nature of the inaccuracy. Let's say there were two studies in the same meta-analysis, and one was heavily plagiarized from the other, and it was fake, but it was being counted twice in a meta-analysis. Let's also say that the outcome of that was particularly harmful.
I have no interest in an 18-month process where they will eventually conclude that there was a problem if people are going to get hurt in the meantime.
Those things, frankly, go straight to press. The proper channels are unfit for purpose when it comes to things that hurt people. If we find a paper that's mathematically impossible, we don't need to have a conversation about whether or not they meant it, or what was in their heart when the paper was made wrong.
I don't really care. What I care about is the consequences of it being wrong. Something like that we would pursue immediately — in public.
If it's something more complicated, more abstract, bigger, less threatening, then I will probably have to take that to journals, universities, maybe scientific societies and try to get clarity on elements of what's happening.
Does pursuing action in public mean putting out reports or press releases? Calling The New York Times?
It could very well be all of those. Because we're a kind of sister organization of Retraction Watch, some of it will likely go straight to Retraction Watch. I'll look for larger or more prominent outlets based on the seriousness of what's found.
This is global, so if we have a problem that's within, let's say the Canadian gastroenterology guidelines, it's much better published in Toronto than it is in Sydney or Dubai or Singapore or New York.
It's an interesting time to launch a project on scientific integrity. Trust in the medical research enterprise is low right now in the U.S.
People have been very critical of the regulatory system here, but it's infinitely better than it is in a lot of other places. Historically, approval here carries a collective of weight internationally.
This country has an excellent, developed medical research infrastructure. It's also 4 percent of the whole world. So the other 96 percent have got what they've got, and usually it's not as good as the FDA.
For all its vagaries and oversights, I promise you, the rest of the world exists, and a lot of the time it's playing catch-up to Uncle Sam.
Is there anything else readers should know about the project?
I'll definitely take tips. It's very straightforward. It's [e-mail].
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WASHINGTON WATCH
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. offered perhaps his most extensive statement on his department's stance on psychedelic research during a House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee hearing Tuesday.
When Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) — who lost an eye fighting in Afghanistan and co-authored an amendment that passed in the 2024 spending bill to fund psychedelics trials for active-duty service members with PTSD — asked how he planned to accelerate psychedelic research and clinical trial access, Kennedy didn't hesitate.
He pointed to the 11 ongoing psychedelics clinical trials at the Department of Veterans Affairs and promised to launch trials at the Food and Drug Administration.
'We've brought on personnel to liaison directly with the VA. I talk with [VA Secretary] Doug Collins about it all the time. It's something that both of us are deeply interested in,' Kennedy said.
'Particularly for our retired service members, it's critically important that we make sure that the science on this is solid,' he said, adding, 'The preliminary results are very, very encouraging, and it's something that we want to pursue.'
Big picture: Psychedelics advocates have been trying to predict where the Trump administration stands on psychedelic medicine.
Last summer, at the end of the Biden administration, the psychedelics industry suffered a setback when the FDA rejected Lykos Therapeutics' application for MDMA, also known as ecstasy, combined with talk therapy as a PTSD treatment, on the grounds that the regimen was not proven to be safe or effective.
What's next: On Tuesday, Kennedy appeared willing to revisit that decision. 'These are people who badly need some kind of therapy. Nothing else is working for them,' Kennedy told Crenshaw.
'[FDA Commissioner] Marty Makary has told me that we don't want to wait two years to get this done,' he added. 'This line of therapeutics has tremendous advantage if given in a clinical setting, and we are working very hard to make sure that that happens within 12 months.'