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

French 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 it. 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.

Wollman, this Chicken of the Dishonour Legion, is still afraid of admitting his role as Jessus investigator and pretends to be a victim of persecution by his 10 anonymous peers. Chambaz was elected as Chair of League of European Research Universities (LERU), so you can imagine which policies we can expect from him there. CNRS president Petit is simply scared of his Politburo comrades and does as he is told. He recently opened a conference in Montpellier together with Jessus, to show loyalty.

What we have here, is a lesson on how science is utterly unable to self-correct itself and how important investigative journalism is for science to function. Were it not for Le Monde, the counter-revolution would have been a horrible success. The Politburo of Jessus, Wollman, Petit, Chambaz and Fuchs would have responded to anonymous protests with a purge. Not just junior researchers of CNRS would be screened for political loyalty and sacked where dissident activities were suspected, also senior tenured CNRS figures would face serious consequences. Colleagues would rat each other out, to advance own career. Data manipulation would become accepted scientific practice in French science (at least for those loyal to the Politburo), and indeed some of the characters who signed that Stalinist turd of an open letter had their own papers flagged for suspicious practices on PubPeer.

The Chronic of Revolution so far, assisted by the chronic published by Le Monde.

5 September 2017. I published an article on my site listing some evidence of data manipulations in papers co-authored by Catherine Jessus, it was updated with additional evidence coming in from my readers. Same day I shared the evidence on PubPeer, linking to my article. The hyperlinks and credits to my unnamed readers were removed by PubPeer moderation, only uncommented images were left standing.

13 September 2017. Le Monde was interviewing Jessus about my article and PubPeer evidence. Wollman hurried out of his office to educate the journalists how to think properly: the accusations are “utterly stupid“, and that “rigour and integrity of Catherine Jessus impressed the entire community“.

28 November 2017. Jessus announced that she was cleared of suspicions of misconduct by an investigation at Sorbonne University (then UPMC/Paris VI), according to a tweet by London-based CNRS research director Philippe Froguel (my article is seen on her slide):

18 January 2018. CNRS interim president Anne Peyroche was deposed after data manipulations in her papers were reported by my readers on PubPeer (against particularly heavy moderation) and then on my site in November 2017. Peyroche now faces full scale investigations, by the book, and a possible sack, though the central 2 Molecular Cell papers with most worrisome evidence both feature the same CNRS-employed author, Benoit Le Tallec. Antoine Petit took over as CNRS president.

21 January 2018. According to Le Monde, Jessus wrote to the editor of Developmental
Biology to negotiate a favourable editorial decision. She declared that the Sorbonne investigation took place “from September to November” 2017. Le Monde also writes that Jessus’ English-language explanations of the findings of the investigative committee are “word for word match the translation of the expert report”. Did she actually investigate herself?

20 February 2018. I published an article reporting recent paper corrections by Jessus, which appeared in Cell Cycle on 27 January and in Journal of Cell Science on 1 February respectively, and highlighted the irregularities in those corrections.

21 February 2018. CNRS issued a press release accusing me personally of libel and lies, and publishes the full investigative report by the Sorbonne University, which was dated with 16 February.  The investigation is said to have taken place 18 October 2017- 15 February 2018. The report’s authors are not named, the data manipulations were either declared to be good scientific practice or defended as non-existent, despite absence of original data. Read my article for details. Le Monde reported (very critically) on 26 February. Petit used the occasion to call PubPeer commenters “assholes” (in French connards).

15 March 2018. Based on whistleblower information, I reveal in my article the suspected identity of the author of the Sorbonne report. It is the cell biologist and Sorbonne professor Francis-Andre Wollman, and in fact Le Monde later confirms that the report is signed with same initials “FAW” which Wollman uses for his public documents, and that his identity was “confirmed to us by several independent sources, but not formally by the person concerned“. In a radio interview, Petit threatens to use internet surveillance tools to expose anonymous PubPeer commenters, whose activities he described as similar to paedophilia slander.

16 May 2018. A Counter-report is published on the website Sauvons l’Université !, authored by 10 anonymous French biologists. It explains what a western blot is, dismantles the arguments of the Sorbonne report one by one, elaborates why copy-pasting pictures of gel bands is not acceptable practice in science, why original data and especially its non-existence is important, and declares the commission to be incompetent at best. See my article here.

22 May 2018. Le Monde publishes the article “Intégrité scientifique à géométrie variable” describing the counter-report. The journalists support the criticisms against the Sorbonne investigation with statements and feedback from many other anonymous scientists and one named: the Barcelona-based plant biologist and CNRS scientific advisory board member Pere Puigdomènech.

23 May 2018. Le Monde journalist David Larousserie publishes a blog detailing the hair-raising attitude to research integrity among senior French scientists: “those are breaches of scientific integrity, but it does not affect the integrity of authors”, “Nobody is fully clean in research”, “Basically everyone is a bit the same in the labs” and
“Nobody got killed”. Wollman himself is unnamed but is obviously quoted with

“I do not see where the conflict of interest is, which is a rather Anglo-Saxon concept. It’s not even in our French manners. You have to trust the experts”.

27 May 2018. A website is set up, https://scienceactive.net/, hosting a Pravda-like Stalinist Open Letter “Ethique Scientifique, Ethique Journalistique”. The authors (several members of Academie de Sciences, and an ethics committee member of INSERM) rally behind the unsigned Sorbonne report, which they declare to have been written without any conflicts of interest whatsoever. Jessus is defended as a victim of slander, including the blatantly false argument that such kind of data manipulation was an acceptable scientific practice 15 years ago. The authors denounce as “witch hunt” the counter-report by 10 anonymous peers (“self-proclaimed experts”) and attack critical Le Monde reporting. Journalist Larousserie is explicitly fingered for punishment. Signatures quickly gather speed (here backup 29 May), thought the numbers do go up and down as some names are removed. Even the list of all signatory emails was accidentally made public. The campaign eventually closes at 503 signatures, no other names can be added. Days after the closure, a post-hoc announcement is added  to the website as if it was always there:

“Inclusion on the list of signatories is closed after more than 500 signatures”.

28 May 2018. Petit and Chambaz issue their own press statement (a secret one, sic!), forwarded exclusively to the academia-serving French news agency AEF, which distributed it to subscribing recipients by email only (read in full here). The two Politburo comrades declare that they “refute the accusations of the recent anonymous open letter published on the site Sauvons l’université”. Insisting that it is immoral to hide behind anonymity when questioning anonymous reports, Chambaz and Petit “do not accept this anonymous questioning of the integrity of the members of the commission set up to deal with the suspicions of scientific misconduct against Catherine Jessus and her coauthors”. The secret press release adds that

“Sorbonne University and the CNRS vouch for the scientific reputation of the experts chosen and the absence of any conflict of interest. They accept the choice of not having disclosed their identities, precisely to protect them from this type of attacks”.

A paper Frochot et al 2012 co-authored by Chambaz turned out to have traces suggestive of data manipulation, as spotted by my readers. PubPeer edited my comment to remove my statement of Chambaz being president of Sorbonne University and LERU. But an anonymous reply below passed moderation.

29 May 2018. In Le Figaro article, which also takes a CNRS- and Sorbonne-critical view on Jessus affair, Petit invites the 10 authors of counter-report to contact him confidentially outside of anonymity. This, given Petit’s other public statements, is basically an invitation to their own execution. Petit also admits in the newspaper that upon his appointment as president

“the CNRS did not have a permanent tool, clear and shared, to deal with cases of suspicion of scientific fraud”.

30 May-1 June 2018. Two senior CNRS researchers, Patrick Lemaire and Alain Trautman circulate emails protesting the signature action by their peers (quoted in French here and here). Apparently, with the attack on free press and the demand to sack Larousserie those 503 Stalinists went too far. Lemaire is member of editorial board at the journal Development. He declares:

“One of the most problematic claims of this report, and repeated in the text of the petition, is that corrections in some journals (Development, Journal of Cell
Science) were accepted. They still are not, more 3 months after the publication of the report”.

5 June 2018 Le Monde publishes the article “Comment nous avons enquêté sur une affaire d’intégrité scientifique” where we learn, among other things that the website scienceactive.net is hosted by Citoyenseneurope.org association which vice-president is Wollman (apparently also former CNRS president Fuchs was involved, who also signed)

So who signed that Stalinist letter? Naturally, most research directors at Jessus’ own institute INSB-CNRS in Paris signed. Otherwise it was mostly CNRS researchers trying to prove their loyalty to the regime before the purge starts. Some probably had more personal reasons to sign against research integrity: several signatories had their own papers flagged on PubPeer. Martin Crespi even featured in one of my articles, others are Guido Kroemer (with a rather long list of questionable achievements on PubPeer), Arndt Benecke (an interesting paper here) and Olivier Voinnet collaborator Monsef Benkirane (2 papers here). The latter also organised a conference at Montpellier, which was opened on 8 June 2018 by Petit, Jessus and ERC president Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, as if nothing at all has happened. Two of the invited speakers were Academie de Sciences member Geneviève Almouzni and INSERM ethics board member and Sorbonne professor Hervé Chneiweiss, both have organised that Stalinist signature collection. Did IGH director Benkirane sign strategically, to get all those Jessus-friendly eminent speakers to come to his conference?

Remembering Voinnet

As mentioned already, very obvious name is that of former CNRS president Alain Fuchs. That old bureaucrat, together with the chief CNRS biologist Jessus, was overseeing the investigation of the (until recently) biggest scandal in French biological research: that of Olivier Voinnet, originally a research director at a CNRS plant science institute IBMP in Strasbourg. As the evidence on PubPeer grew and grew, my reporting (back then for a German magazine) set off an avalanche in January 2015, eventually Le Monde reported and the affair started properly.

As a source informed me, an internal investigative committee was set up in the last week of January 2015 at the IBMP, and heard both Voinnet and his right-hand man Patrice Dunoyer. The case of 13 manipulated Voinnet papers (there were actually many more listed on PubPeer) was then passed on to CNRS in Paris, to a “commission d’enquete administrative”, which drew its conclusions, and then it was discussed in the “commission administrative paritaire” which also drew its conclusions. All of that is secret and was never published. We do not know who the committee members were, but what if Wollman was one of them?  In any case, deliberations were very short and concluded on 4 February 2015 with a decision, Fuchs and Jessus then issued the sanctions. Here are the published decisions of CNRS regarding Voinnet and Dunoyer, referred to as MV and MD, respectively. About Voinnet:

“Considering that these deficiencies are all the more serious as Mr. V, who belongs to the highest researcher ranks, was responsible for a team and had significant recognition of scientific community;

Considering that, moreover, these shortcomings have damaged the CNRS image and the community as a whole, since the national and foreign press echoed several repeated failures of Mr V;

Considering that the aforementioned elements legally justify the imposition of a disciplinary sanction with respect to Mr. V

DECIDED
Item 1: Mr V, research director of 1 class, is excluded for a period of two years from
from the decision terminating his secondment;

Item 2: The present sanction will be the object of a publication in the official bulletin of the CNRS”.

The decision was thus to suspend Dunoyer from CNRS employment for 1 year (of which 11 months were then pardoned, but earlier this year 2018 Dunoyer chose to close shop and leave France), while Voinnet was suspended for 2 years, which basically left this first class research director stranded where he was originality delegated as professor: at ETH Zürich in Switzerland. Which has absolutely no plans of getting rid of their cheating French guest, especially since he resumed publishing on a rather decent level.

Just before that CNRS decision on Voinnet was made public in summer 2015, Fuchs quickly redefined what research fraud is, or rather what it is not: namely data manipulation is not fraud. What Voinnet did, was defined by Fuchs as research misconduct of second degree, given that the Voinnet lab did some experiments after all and the gel bands were not drawn with a pencil. With the Jessus affair not even 3 years later, even digital gel image manipulation and band copy-paste was removed from definition of research misconduct, by the Politburo of Fuchs, Wollman, Chambaz, its new member Petit, and apparently also Jessus, who as it seems from Le Monde reporting, was investigating herself.

Voinnet was punished basically for same things Jessus was found to have done correctly: copy-pasting of pictures of gel bands between images of gels. Qualitatively, what we find in Jessus and Voinnet papers is very similar and equally disreputable. There is only the difference of quantity, because with Voinnet almost every single one of his many papers turned out manipulated to some degree, with new evidence being found whenever someone bothers to look. In fact, here is another dossier of some known and some hitherto unknown Voinnet data manipulations I received, addressing the Dunoyer et al Nature Genetics 2006 paper.

Thus, the cartoon Soviet dialectics of CNRS and French science elites entered a coucou phase. How can same kind of data manipulations be research misconduct in one case and good scientific practice in another? How loyal does one have to be to the Party to believe that Voinnet is guilty, and Jessus is a victim of a witch hunt, if they both have duplicated gel bands in their papers? How can Wollman be pronounced an independent, unbiased and conflict of interest-free investigator while he himself declares yes, I called the evidence “debile” from day one, yes I let my friend Catherine help me write the report about herself, but so what? To Wollman, the concept of conflict of interest doesn’t exist in France, while this pompous fluffed-up Chicken of Dishonour Legion sneakily sets up signature lists calling for the heads of his anonymous critics, but is afraid to take the shame and admit what everyone already knows anyway.

Revolution goes international

The 48-page strong counter-report by the 10 anonymous authors, originally written in French, was discussed in my previous article. Now these brave scientists prepared an English-language version for the international scientific community, please find it here:

Open letter from an anonymous group of experts in response to the anonymous commission report investigating the publications of Catherine Jessus’ laboratory

12 June 2018

Augmented translation of the original document published on May 11, 2018, entitled:
“Lettre ouverte d’un groupe d’experts anonyme concernant le rapport de la commission anonyme ayant enquêté sur les publications dont Mme Jessus est co-auteur”

The 10 authors provided me also with an English-language statement, a 3 page document I share here. This statement and the English version of the 48-page report were also published on Sauvons l’Université !. Some excerpts follow.

“We are a group of concerned career researchers in genetics, biochemistry, cellular and molecular biology, who have fact-checked this report and analysed it point by point. We conclude that each and every one of the arguments of the Commission of Inquiry go against the common rules of good scientific practice and interpretation of results which form the basis of research integrity.
Worse still, and this is the reason that we were pushed to react with our open letter, as it puts the weight of the most respected scientific institutions in the country behind actually encouraging this kind of manipulation of images, which is universally recognized as fabrications and falsifications of results.

Here we are indeed faced with a paradox: the very institutions put in place by the CNRS and by Sorbonne University to combat scientific fraud, have instead become themselves complicit in the commission of such fraud. Instead of exposing and imposing consequences on the disgraced researchers, thus upholding good standards in French institutions, the authorities chose to conceal, cover-up, and whitewash this fraud through a misleading and factually incorrect report aimed at confusing a non-scientific audience.

Is this factually incorrect report the result of the CNRS and the Sorbonne University simply appointing an incompetent commission? Or could it be that the members of these ethics commissions have an interest in being lenient with their colleagues’ fraud to hide their own misconduct?”

On data manipulations reported in 11 Jessus-coauthored publications:

“a recycled image was used to fabricate a needed figure without performing the experiment it was claimed to represent – this represents the deliberate and fraudulent invention of scientific results. If these researchers had simply taken a magic marker and sketched out an imaginary result, there could have been no greater misconduct.”

On the Anne Peyroche affair, the fallen president of CNRS and former member of CNRS ethics committee COMETS:

“when she was COMET’s member and then CNRS’s president, one wonders whether Anne Peyroche would have helped to conceal the frauds carried out in Catherine Jessus’s laboratory, in order to minimize those carried out in her own? Is fraud so widespread that two highest ranking scientists in the country, the two people at the head of the CNRS, are both incriminated? Or is fraud perhaps the best way to access positions of responsibility at the CNRS?”

On the Stalinist signature letter:

“CNRS and Sorbonne University have nevertheless obtained the support of 503 prominently positioned French scientists in defense of a scientifically baseless inquiry report that exonerates and encourages scientific fraud. Furthermore they claim as justification that “practices surrounding the publication of scientific images have evolved considerably over the past 15 years” and that “the scientific journals where these works have been published have accepted the corrections proposed by the authors”(6). However, both these arguments are incorrect. Firstly, good or bad scientific practices are independent of the year of publication; recopying and recycling of images is simply fraud. In fact it has become necessary over the last fifteen years for scientific publishers to write more and more detailed instructions for good scientific practice, in an attempt to reduce the increasingly frequent cases of fraud that are being encountered. Secondly, only one of the incriminated articles (#10,  Daldello et al.) has been accepted for correction by the Journal of Cell Science”.

All that Pravda-esque Stalinist travesty might have been for nothing, except for a major embarrassment for its signatories. As I learned, Jessus’ term as director of CNRS biology section expires by the end of 2018. She is unlikely to candidate again. But those 503 reactionary signatories of the pro-Jessus rally already chose to stand up and be counted while following the mental contortion of 2+2=5 as ordered by the CNRS Politburo. Now their names will remain in public domain, as a warning to prospective PhD students and open to peer and media ridicule. Deleting the signature webpage won’t help. We all made backups.

---