A few comments from someone who regularly guest lectured for the MBA program at Leavey School in Santa Clara.

1. We must set up an independent entity to handle research misconduct that reports to the Department of Justice. Such fraud is criminal, but unlikely to be prosecuted. The current system in which a few people with academic backgrounds and prejudices in favor of professors and established parties --- is broken.

I speak from experience, and direct knowledge that multiple universities (possibly almost every major one) are quietly saddled with "responsible officials" as part of consent decrees entered into to avoid prosecutions. These responsible officials, like most academics that serve on committees evaluating misconduct, know precisely what their job is. Their job is to bury, befuddle, and otherwise eliminate any possibility of financial impact on the university, and reputational impact as well.

Reality is that grad students and some undergrads are the ones that know what is really going on. Grad students that stand up and speak receive grievous treatment by their professors and their universities. I helped a grad student report an extreme abuse by a post-doc. That eventually hit the pages of scholar-sheet press, and it was denied that a Joseph Mattapallil had falsified data from whole cloth for a paper that got him a professorship in immunology. How did the grad student know this? Because she had access to the primate center records, and those records had no blood draws that could align with the dates given in the paper. The head of that lab was aware.

I reported some matters as well in that lab, that I was pressured to write a "good paper" based on data that was screwed up and could not justify what it was supposed to, and then fired for saying so. (And nobody at the university told me that the professor was not allowed to do that once the accept you.) I was told by the NIH ORI, "The statute of limitations is over," and words to the effect that, "grad students are below post-docs and the professor running the lab." I note that the "statute of limitations" of 6 years is something they just made up. If that idea was abroad in the past in science, the "Case of the midwife toad" would have never been.

The problem is visible in this article --- the investigative academic in charge had a conflict of interest.

2. It is important to understand the view of the money-perns at VCs. Even the better VCs will take a flyer on something that they don't know if it's bullshit or not --- for instance, quantum computing. A party who worked in quantum mechanics and experimental physics was asked his opinion at a lunch. The question was, "Is it impossible?" He had to allow that he couldn't say that. But he took them through the problems of things like decoherence.

Why do VC's have this attitude? This is because they know that even if it is bullcrap in toto, if the calliope can just go long enough to get to IPO (the situation now with AI) they can reap great rewards. The poster-child for this is Uber, a corporation that has never had a plan to get to profitability, and has always projected and reported massive losses. Uber as a business is quite insane. And yet, Uber has enough money in the bank to continue to lose billions per year for a very long time. The main thing is that the VCs all got out, made money, and nobody lied about the business model.

The job of a VC is not to be right all the time. Their job is to pursuing being right about investments, but they have to be wrong often enough that they don't miss that one time that it financially explodes and makes them filthy rich. VCs trade on the uncertainty of the future.

I wrote money-perns because these days there are female venture capitalists. Some of them are even as obnoxious as their male counterparts often are. So far, it's a smattering and no female human has made the billions that Peter Thiel did on Facebook. (Peter then proceeded to set his fortune on fire because he believed neo-classical economics about FOREX. But he pulled out of that with 10% of his fortune left, which is why people still listen to him. Yes, Mr. Thiel is capable of learning when hit over the head with an anvil.)

The VC field attracts a lot of people who go into it for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks, and this shows in the results. The top quartile of VC funds make all the money. Most VCs lose money or barely break even and return the principal to their limited partners (LPs). There's a good paper by Mulcahy "We have met the enemy and he is us" analyzing the Kauffman Fund's investments in VC. She's great. I love that paper - she skewers the J-curve, skewers the 5 year turn (meaning invest and sell in 5 years), and a number of other things.

There is an element of hype in a lot of investments. Familiarity with the madness of crowds is helpful for some. Skilled, practiced liars learn they can get away with lying. They usually aren't the sharpest tool in the shed, (a trait they share with terrorist leaders) but they are cunning, and very knowledgeable about people and how to manipulate them. Science is really the last place such people should go, but when they do, they wreak havoc because most scientists are... avoidant personalities. Sort of the opposite of cops.