Science journalism by Leonid Schneider, on research integrity and academic publishing in life sciences and biomedicine
I am an independent science journalist, with around 13 years of biomedical research experience in molecular cell biology, stem cells and cancer research.
The usual science journalism restricts itself to repeating after the cues given by scientific elite and leading research institutions. What we mostly read in the science news, is the voice of power and money. The climate of fear is omnipresent in science: bad science is very rarely exposed in the open, fraud and ethics breach are routinely covered up, while accusations and criticisms are raised only behind closed doors and are often unfairly or even wrongfully assigned. There are many good and honest scientists out there, but they have no voice. My site is for them.
Therefore, one goal of my site is to give voice to such concerned scientists who would normally never dare to speak out their critique, for fear of their influential colleagues. Some of these voices are named, some names are confidential. You can be one of them, just contact me below.
My conference presentations are available for you to browse and re-use at Slideshare. Some of my seminars are available as videos on YouTube. My academic CV and original research publications are listed on ORCID. Finally, I am also a cartoonist, please visit my Facebook page Science Cartoons.
You can also find me on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and consider following me on Twitter: @schneiderleonid
I welcome your opinions, suggestions and stories for my future journalistic investigations. Confidentiality guaranteed! Please leave a functional email address where I can reach you, if you want me to follow up on information you share.
Yours, Leonid Schneider
PS: those of my “special” readers, who aren’t interested in talking to me, but rather in engaging lawyers and German courts to stop my reporting, can save time searching for my residence address (Landungsanschrift): Taunusstr. 11, 63526 Erlensee, Germany
Too many scientists defend the practice of not probing for loading controls for each protein gel. They say a “library” method perfectly suffices, when one separate loading control gel is run once for reference. Such sloppiness can sometimes be a hint of even worse practices taking place.
Paediatric surgeon Paolo De Coppi claims to grow all possible internal organs in his lab at UCL. Though his career started with his association with Macchiarini, and their regenerative medicine ideas sound strangely similar, De Coppi is celebrated as a modest genius poised to save lives of uncounted children, and the funding money flows.
First gene-edited human babies were allegedly born, two twin girls. Jiankui He, associate professor at the South University of Science and Technology of China claimed to have used CRISPR gene editing technology, in a registered clinical trial, to make babies resistant to HIV. Did this really happen? In any case, everyone now takes distance to He.
Eric Lam is yet another of the many “Curing Cancer with Photoshop” researchers which PubPeer is full of. This professor of molecular Oncology at Imperial College in London is responsible for several papers with duplicated gel bands, but does it matter? He has 250 more.
Smut Clyde will take you on a meditative Ayurvedic trip where the most respectable of research institutions and their world-renowned academics were caught dancing with the Guru Deepak Chopra himself. Famous cardiologist and medical writer Eric Topol and the Nobel Prize winner Elizabeth Blackburn were just two most prominent US academics listed on Chopra’s Panchakarma clinical trial.
A “defamation Complaint” was lodged with Google, against 6 of my articles and one cartoon. Each of them affects to some degree the British laryngologist Martin Birchall, professor at UCL and former close associate of scandal surgeon Paolo Macchiarini. I also show that Birchall and UCL even now continue researching plastic tracheas on pigs, for future use in humans patients. This grant is presently funded by UK government.
With nobody above him, ICR director Paul Workman was seemingly investigating himself, and found two female colleagues guilty of placing fake data into his papers, primarily the ICR emeritus Ann Jackman. One paper was retracted, another received an outrageous correction. The previous ICR CEO, Alan Ashworth, together with his right-hand man Chris Lord, have their own impressive, but hitherto ignored, record on PubPeer.
This is my review of the Russian book “Megagrant”, which tells of Macchiarini’s adventures with the plastic trachea, much of it played out in Russia, funded by a state Megagrant of €4.5mn. Some books are namely only good as court evidence.
In September 2010, trachea transplant surgeon Paolo Macchiarini was basically at the end of his career of fraud and patient abuse, unwanted by everyone. Except by Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, which pushed the recruitment process through in just 3 weeks, despite warnings from colleagues in Florence, Barcelona and Hannover not to employ someone who was basically a lying psychopath. Yet Karolinska leadership was desperate for some positive reviews for Macchiarini. They finally got them from London, from UCL and GOSH.
Russian officials found an ingenious way to cure cancer and to impress their autocratic president Putin: they simply rig statistics.Continue Reading
Videregen, the Liverpool-based company which bought the trachea regeneration patent from UCL, deployed lawyers against the academics Patricia Murray and Raphael Levy, precisely via their employer University of Liverpool. Main issue is the parliamentary submission by Levy and Murray, subject to absolute privilege. Yet Videregen also cites from the confidential notice of suspected research misconduct Murray and Levy submitted in good faith to UCL.
