2023-08-22 09:00:12
Find all the episodes of the “Fraud Hunters” series here.
They and they are unparalleled in sniffing out a plagiarized article, detecting falsified images, etc. Whether amateur or professional detectives, scientific fraud hunters form a motley little club… to which Clara Locher does not feel like they belong. “Researchers like Elisabeth Bik do an extraordinary job of revealing breaches of integrityimmediately greets the pharmacologist, hospital practitioner at the University Hospital of Rennes. But the term “fraud hunter”, which refers to a police side, even a vigilante, seems to me to be simplistic and does not reflect the need to put in place a positive approach promoting good practices. »
On a daily basis, she does this in two main areas, acculturation and clinical research. As a methodologist, this passionate 39-year-old accompanies doctors and other professionals from her university hospital in their clinical research projects. Upstream, it helps them to delimit the scientific question, to define the method and the ad hoc means necessary to obtain interpretable and robust answers; downstream, it can guide them in the publication process. Beyond that, Clara Locher is invested in local missions, with Florian Naudetprofessor of therapeutics in the same hospital, to promote open science, in particular the sharing of data.
And then there are his own works. From the start of her pharmacy studies in Lyon, she had already contracted the research virus, which led her to do Normale-Sup bio in parallel, then a science thesis in immuno-oncology. But it is ultimately in meta-research, a discipline that has made research itself its main subject of study, that she specializes. Objective : ” take height “ about how science is done. At the risk of falling violently from his chair.
Methodological weaknesses
This is precisely what happened to him when he read the first publication by the team from the Marseille University Hospital Institute (IHU) evaluating the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) against Covid-19. We are in March 2020, at the very beginning of the pandemic. Stunned by the methodological weaknesses of this clinical trial on a very limited staff, accepted for publication in less than twenty-four hours, Clara Locher tries, with others, to temper the excitement with rational arguments. On Twitter (now X), she explains why the results are not usable. Neither one way nor the other. In vain. “We realized that this type of debate was inaudible to the general public, because of Didier Raoult’s argument of authority, linked to the prestige of his CV and his publications”she recalls.
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