Edinburgh breaks silence to announce Stancheva retractions

In October 2017, I brought an exclusive story of a mysterious sacking at the University of Edinburgh. The molecular biologist and epigenetics researcher Irina Stancheva was removed from her post as senior lecturer at the Scottish university, in total secret, all online traces of her employment rapidly deleted (even a promo video on Vimeo), her freshly obtained graduate school money redistributed to her faculty colleagues. The journal Nucleic Acid Research (NAR) soon after silently removed Stancheva as its Executive Editor. Still, I was able to gather some information, including leaked emails from Stancheva’s Head of Department David Gray (read here), but mysteriously no other media covered the story. Either heavily funded senior lecturers get sacked in Edinburgh on a weekly basis, or the university holds the newspapers in a vice grip in the Stancheva case. All my attempt at freedom of Information (FOI) were rejected by University of Edinburgh. There is a lot to hide: Stancheva is a third generation Edinburgh elite biologist: academic daughter of Professor of Human Genetics Richard Meehan and academic granddaughter of Meehan’s mentor, Professor of Genetics and Nobel Prize candidate Adrian Bird. Both Edinburg professors are co-authors on Stancheva’s papers flagged on PubPeer.

Now, after 8 months of silence, I received out of the blue an email from the same data protection officer who used to deny telling me the time of the day, with a list of Stancheva papers about to be retracted. The list follows below.

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Jessus critics defiant, reactionary cock-up and Chicken of Dishonour Legion

ch science revolution is happening, and the corrupt elites are scared. As the daily Le Monde started brought into the public light the Catherine Jessus affair with its whitewashed data manipulation and the growing academic protest against such institutional endorsement of research misconduct, a counter-revolution put its foot in. A signature list in the worst Stalinist tradition was published, organised by the very elite of French academia (mostly members of Academie de Sciences), and signed by hundreds, mostly professors and CNRS group leaders, including the former CNRS president Alain Fuchs, the one who in 2015 oversaw the secret Olivier Voinnet investigation. The Stalinists demand: to uncover the identities of the 10 anonymous authors of the counter-report, which exposed the corruption and incompetence of the Jessus investigation by the Sorbonne University, and to have them as well as the Le Monde journalist David Larousserie punished. Those demands were endorsed in a secret press release (sic!) by CNRS president Antoine Petit and Sorbonne University president Jean Chambaz.

Other newspapers might have been intimidated against such massive and organised pushback from the elites of society. But the Pravda-esque denunciation of traitors and enemies of the people is unlikely to lead to an intended purge. It appears to have already now backfired badly, and the Stalinists who signed it already started regretting it. Indeed, many names were removed, and the list was closed to further signing, left standing at 503 shameful sycophantic signatures. Another main French daily, Le Figaro, brought its own Jessus-critical article, while Le Monde hit CNRS and Sorbonne University back where it hurts. The newspaper exposed the enormous conflict of interest behind the Jessus investigation and made clear who the man behind that whitewashing farce was and still is: the Sorbonne professor of biochemistry and cell biology, Francis-Andre Wollman, Academie de Sciences member and Knight of the Honour Legion. Wollman was defending Jessus and attacking her critics long before he was tasked with investigating her, and as Le Monde indicated, the investigative report was written by or at least together with Jessus herself. Finally, Le Monde reported that the Stalinist signature collection was published on a web platform hosted by Wollman and Chambaz. From another source we learned the investigative report lied that the journals involved accepted the explanations and agreed not to do anything: the journal editors actually are still deliberating what to do about the data manipulations in Jessus papers.

Here I publish the English version of the counter-report, together with a statement forwarded to me by its 10 authors, so that also the international community can see what disreputable deed Wollmann and his CNRS Politburo pulled off and now defend tooth and nail.

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Karolinska gets taught German medical ethics

A most bizarre thing happened. In the aftermath of the scandal around the thoracic surgeon and regenerative medicine enthusiast Paolo Macchiarini, which left many patients dead, his former employer Karolinska Institutet (KI) in Stockholm, Sweden, requested a retraction of one of his papers. It was not about a trachea transplant, but about unethical and painful medical experiments on a dying patient (actually, two of them). KI’s decision to request a retraction of the paper Jungebluth et al, “Autologous peripheral blood mononuclear cells as treatment in refractory acute respiratory distress syndrome”, Respiration, 2015 was based on the investigation commissioned by Swedish Central Ethics Review Board (CEPN). The Swiss-German and family-owned medical publisher Karger and its journal Respiration however categorically refused to retract the paper and ordered KI not “to patronize the readers of the journal ‘Respiration’.”

It gets much worse. The German Editor-in-Chief of this journal has a huge conflict of interest. It is better you just read on, because if I try to summarize it here, I might get sued by Macchiarini’s German friends and associates once again, and next time it might even be prison for me. In Germany, doctors have a very special status. Journalists or even patients do not, as I learned in court.

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David Latchman, the reckless Master of Birkbeck

This is a story of David Latchman, Master of Birkbeck at University of London, professor of genetics at UCL and Commander of the Order of the British Empire. All this he achieved also by his impressive publishing record, part of which will be discussed below by my regular contributor Smut Clyde. Just part of it, because there are in fact oodles of Latchman co-authored papers discussed on PubPeer for evidence of data manipulation. As Birkbeck and UCL were repeatedly bombarded by whistleblowers, Latchman was (pretend)-investigated on misconduct charges twice. Naturally, neither whitewashing report was released to public. After the first investigation of 2015, we only learned:

“UCL confirms that the conclusion of its investigation is that Professor Latchman has no case to answer in relation to research misconduct”.

Last month, UCL declared that Latchman committed “recklessness” and was “insufficiently attentive” to what his junior researchers used to do in his lab and in his papers, namely the cardiologist Tiziano Scarabelli and the cancer researcher Anastasis Stephanou. The former is presently professor of medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) Medical Center in USA, while the latter is professor at European University Cyprus. These two were found guilty of having manipulated images in 7 papers. All other Latchman co-authored papers (of the 32 investigated) are perfectly fine, and anyway, as Birkbeck explained:

“The matter does not relate to Professor David Latchman’s leadership of Birkbeck, which has been excellent for the past 15 years. Furthermore, there is no suggestion by UCL that Professor Latchman had any knowledge of, or involvement in, the image manipulation identified”

This is a typical academic attitude. When a paper is needed to get promotion and funding money, boss claims the main credit. When a paper is exposed as fraudulent, boss never had anything to do with it (see for example this Spanish case).

Retrospectively, both UCL investigation look even more of a farce, as Latchman himself seems to have been instructing the university how to properly investigate others and not him:

“In my view, the investigation should focus on those actually involved in preparing the questionable figures and those directly involved in supervising their production”

Despite at least 5 retractions, Latchman remains in his position as Master of Birkbeck, where he is paid GBP 400k a year, one of the highest rector salaries in UK. Without diminishing the responsibilities of Scarabelli and Stephanou (in fact, Smut Clyde presents much more below), there seems to be a pattern at UCL of finding the exclusive blame with those no longer employed, while their English-bred senior professors turn out utterly blameless. Recent revelations in the Macchiarini trachea transplant affair also suggest that. However, some of problematic Latchman papers have neither Scarabelli nor Stephanou as co-author. Very reckless of UCL not to have investigated those.

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UCL trachea transplant inquiry: scapegoating, obfuscation and a lost nose

In 2017, the great London university UCL invited an external expert commission to investigate its role into the deadly trachea transplants performed by the former UCL honorary professor and scandal surgeon Paolo Macchiarini. An already sacked UCL nanotechnology professor, Alexander Seifalian, whose lab made the two UCL plastic POSS-PCU tracheas in 2011, was announced as the main culprit on UCL side for all the suffering of these two patients Andemariam Beyene and Keziah Shorten, as well as some recipients of vascular grafts. All this despite Seifalian’s having had no clinical role, training or ambitions, as he professed in his interview to the investigative committee, which I now obtained.

The interview also makes perfectly clear that the investigative committee’s surprise finding, namely that the nanotechnology specialist fabricated non-GMP certified plastic grafts for clinical use behind everyone’s back, was actually slanderous. Not only did UCL know very well that the product, which their own business branch UCLB approved for clinical use in Iran, Switzerland and India, was not GMP-certified, they even used it on their own patient at UCL hospital UCLH, in an attempt to grow a plastic nose. Even the UK regulatory authority MHRA was informed, and apparently did not mind or interfere. All this did not stop UCL investigators from publicly fingering cancer survivor Seifalian as the only culprit for that GMP-non-compliance.

Finally, the committee had information that Birchall allegedly proposed to make a plastic trachea for the child patient Ciaran Lynch in December 2009. Seifalian refused, for technical reasons, but this definitely and literally saved the boy’s life. Ciaran, presently one of just 3 known survivors of ~20 trachea transplants performed by Macchiarini and his former close associate, the UCL laryngologist Martin Birchall, was operated in London in March 2010 with a freshly decellurised cadaveric trachea graft supplied from Italy; Macchiarini was the surgeon. That clever Birchall-attributed idea, of being the first one to implant the utterly untested plastic trachea, and into a child no less, was somehow dropped from the final UCL report. Sod knows why. Continue reading “UCL trachea transplant inquiry: scapegoating, obfuscation and a lost nose” →

No good news, instead a major disaster in appeal court re: Macchiarini affair

The German justice has spoken on trachea transplants again, in the appeal hearing at Kammergericht Berlin, and found the problem to lie with the journalists and press freedom. Good news first: I might have won the first injunction case against Philipp Jungebluth, or at least in large part, so I will probably get most of my money refunded there (Update 30.05.2018: the court tricked me and rejected my appeal on that injunction too. It remains valid to 1/3 just as before, see below). This only happened because the judges regarded how exactly Jungebluth left his job in Heidelberg being a minor enough issue (they did advice him to sue a Swedish newspaper for interviewing him about his sacking in Sweden (sic!)). This money I then will pay back to Paolo Macchiarini‘s acolyte and the court, and much, much more on top, because the three appeal court judges announced to uphold the second injunction in full. These are their oral arguments from yesterday summarised: Continue reading “No good news, instead a major disaster in appeal court re: Macchiarini affair” →

Zauli and University of Ferrara announce libel suit, criminal prosecution against me

My report from just a week ago, about the data irregularities in papers from Italian haematologist and cancer researcher Giorgio Zauli provoked a response of a legal threat, of both criminal and civil prosecution. Zauli is namely rector of the University of Ferrara, and he issued this threat in this official capacity, acting for his Italian university. I was already made aware of Zauli’s threats of suing me from a first-hand source, and my site was indeed accessed by Italian State prosecutor’s office the day after I published my article about Zauli’s flawed cytometry and other problematic data in research papers he mostly co-authored with Ferrara’s Head of Department, Paola Secchiero. This letter from Zauli below, which reached me today per certified mail, is the more bizarre due to the fact the university denied any knowledge of Zauli’s legal threats (see the update here).

In any case, here is the letter, on the headed paper of the University of Ferrara, which even paid the postage. Zauli and his university apparently assume that their research publications and public institutional profiles are personal data, protected by EU privacy regulations. Maybe rector Zauli is confused at to where the Latin-derived word “publications” comes from. It’s from “public” and certainly not from “pubic”, hence definitely not his sphere of personal privacy. Though his publications could profit from some data integrity hygiene. In any case, the Ethics Commission of University of Ferrara will convene on June 1st to decide what to do about the publicly available PubPeer evidence I reported about. The scanned original is here. Please disseminate widely. Continue reading “Zauli and University of Ferrara announce libel suit, criminal prosecution against me” →

For Better Science

Science journalism by Leonid Schneider, on research integrity and academic publishing in life sciences and biomedicine