I just read this article, where the seduction of money (and maybe other things?) led a highly regarded researcher on Alzheimer to get involved on illegal activities. I will not tell the details as I don't want this post to be too long, but it is in the linked content. The illegality seems to be related to the fact that information about results of clinical trials not available to the public were being released to traders, but on the other hand I also think of it as a problem of conflict of interest, I mean, I think to some extent being involved with such kind of money and with clinical trials, and the money being linked to the results of the trials, may led to, say, bad research.
I have this opinion that we live in a world that put us very far from the ideal environment to do scientific research, because of all the conflicts of interest. I is sort of the elephant in the room. Although there are a lot than can be said regarding this issue, it is a heavy issue and I just want to mention the cases where researchers do their own statistical analyses, which happens many times. To me the issue is the same as blinding in a drug trials, where blinding so be extended to whoever analyzes the data and in particular, researchers listed as author in the paper should not do the statistical analyses. And now we are not talking only about trials, but any research. If a researcher, who wants or needs to publish papers, is the one who analyzes the data, then there is the potential for what has been sometimes been called p-hacking, which basically relates to searching for p-values that are of interest, even if not very consciously. Besides this, practices like making the data available, making the codes used for the analysis available, review of policies related to privacy (so that data can be made available), replication of results are some of the things I think we could easily improve on.
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