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.
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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
This is a story of a plant scientist in France, Steffen Reinbothe. He and his sister Christiane used to hold academic positions in Germany, but now they both moved to France, to Grenoble. The move might have had to do with a dossier from 2009, made by a former lab member and circulated among peers.
Whatever concerns any peers might have had: Steffen and Christiane Reinbothe could rely on the “contributed” track at PNAS.
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.
Another one of Paolo Macchiarini’s past trachea transplant patients has died on 9 July 2018. She received from Macchiarini a cadaveric decellurised trachea in December 2010. By 2018, Zhadyra’s situation critically deteriorated, the dying patient was used for another experiment. On June 5th 2018, Zhadyra received in Moscow another trachea transplant. Responsible was same Parshin who performed the first trachea transplant together with Macchiarini.
Paloma was supposed to the second trachea transplant patient of Paolo Macchiarini’s in Barcelona, in summer 2008. The scandal surgeon gave her a fake diagnosis of a lethal tracheal cancer which she never had, and also “accidentally” mislocated her stent during a enforced bronchoscopy. All to coerce his patient to agree to a trachea transpalnt. Paloma had a lucky escape, twice. She namely also encountered Thorsten Walles.
Karolinska Institutet announced its decision on 6 papers by their former professor and surgeon, Paolo Macchiarini. All are to be retracted, 7 scientists were found guilty of research misconduct, including one of the whistleblowers.
In the aftermath of the scandal around Paolo Macchiarini, which left many patients dead, his former employer Karolinska Institutet requested a retraction a paper. The Swiss-German medical publisher Karger and its journal Respiration however categorically refused and ordered KI not “to patronize the readers of the journal ‘Respiration’.” The German Editor-in-Chief had namely a huge conflict of interest.
In 2017, UCL invited an external expert commission to investigate the deadly trachea transplants performed by the former UCL honorary professor 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. 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.
