By Leonid Schneider, on research integrity, biomedical ethics and academic publishing
German Research Foundation (DFG) terminated the investigation against their Senator and Marburg University professor Roland Lill, after having found no research misconduct. No comments are issued on the integrity of the data in his papers on yeast biochemistry, or on some unusual image manipulations which were already admitted by Lill and his former PhD students
Giovanni Tarantino andC armine Finelli are two medical plagiarists from Naples in Italy, who became infamous after one of them was caught having stolen the work of a US colleague he was peer reviewing. In other cases, the two Napolitans were even too lazy to plagiarise. They simply republished their already plagiarised “works” several times, even as book chapters. The journals were informed, but most couldn’t care less.
The Paolo Macchiarini investigation was initiated in 2016 by the interim Karolinska Rector Karin Dahlman-Wright, finalised this year by the newly installed Ole Petter Ottersen. The irony is that several Dahlman-Wright papers were now scrutinised data integrity sleuths with the result that one wonders if Dahlman-Wright was the right person to supervise any research misconduct investigations. Also Ottersen himself might be tainted: he is co-author on an old paper with image duplication.
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.
David Latchman, Master of Birkbeck and professor of genetics at UCL was once again cleared of all suspicions of research misconduct, while his two subordinates took all the blame, for just 7 papers. Over 40 flagged for suspected data manipulations were ignored. Latchman is namely also Chair of the over £100 Million-heavy Maurice Wohl Charitable Foundation, which gave Birkbeck over £ 5mn.
On 7 April 2010 the Spanish diabetes researcher Margarita Lorenzo died of metastatic melanoma, aged only 51. Two months after her death, Lorenzo’s colleagues submitted a paper to the journal Diabetes. The paper, which studies the mechanisms of obesity and insulin resistance, seems to be full of manipulated western blot data. While Lorenzo was dying of cancer, her colleagues advanced their careers using her reputation, using their own disreputable Photoshop skills.
Neanderthals colonised Europe and Middle East long before modern humans and went extinct less than 30,000 years ago, when our species has spread there. Their story inspired the fantasies of generation of scientists, some of whom still cannot accept the idea that Neanderthals were just another kind of humans very similar or maybe simply just like us. Even new age phrenology is paraded as scientific explanation to why Neanderthal died out.
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