Seconding the FOSS advice from the perspective of a fellow learner.
I’m a scientist first and foremost, so I’m learning programming on the side. A lot of code that’s written by scientists is pretty grim, so attempting to understand and contribute to FOSS projects has been useful in understanding how a complex project is organised, and how to read code as well as write it.
Contributing can be pretty small, even opening a git issue for a problem, or adding some info to an existing issue. You won’t be able to just dive in and start solving problems all over, and it can feel overwhelming to try as a relative beginner, but it massively improved my skills.
Something about potential wide scale fraud came out recently about a prominent Alzheimer’s researcher. This article covers it quite well: https://www.science.org/content/article/research-misconduct-finding-neuroscientist-eliezer-masliah-papers-under-suspicion
It’s grim, especially when considering the real human cost that fraud in biomedical research has. Despite this, like you, I am also optimistic. This article outlines some of how the initial concerns about this researcher was raised, and how the analysis of his work was done. A lot of it seems pretty unorthodox. For example, one of the people who contributed to this work was a “non-scientist” forensic image expert, who goes by the username Cheshire on the forum PubPeer (his real name is known and mentioned in the article, but I can’t remember it).