Smut Clyde brings you a lovely expose about predatory conferences, or scamferences, and the scholars who lend their names to them as organisers and plenary speakers. At the events by The Scientistt and other scammers with silly names you shall meet Yehuda Shoenfeld, member of Israeli Academy of Sciences and president of Ariel University, who as vaccine critic used to go to bed with hardcore antivaxxers, Ruggiero Santilli, disreputable businessman, looney inventor, and a rabid antisemite with a fetish for sockpuppets and bullshit honorifics, Thomas Webster, the ex-Northeastern University professor of nanofabrication who was first suspended and then departed after a misconduct investigation, Guilio Tarro, the Neapolitan cancer quack, and Elias Aifantis, the Orthodox Über-Daddy. All characters known to my regular readers.
And then there is Harald zur Hausen, the octogenarian winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine of 2008 “for his discovery of human papilloma viruses causing cervical cancer” and emeritus president of the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg, Germany. As I will tell you at the very end, zur Hausen not only wilfully frequents these scamferences to share his DKFZ-funded research about mysterious cancer-causing infectious plasmids in milk and beef, he even threatened me by advising the fraudulent scamference organisers in India to sue me for slander. And DKFZ silently hinted that they fully support all this.
Then we engineered a wild reunion In a Berlin Alleyway
By Smut Clyde
Having blogged more than once about predatory conferences, I rate myself as the world’s leading authority on this phenomenon of late-stage academia, so it is a disappointing mystery that no-one has tried to recruit me to deliver the Plenary Address at a predatory conference on the topic.
It is also disappointing that no-one asked me if it was a good idea to appoint Ruggero Santilli and Thomas Webster as Keynote Speakers at the 2nd International Conference and Exhibition on Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, August 17-18 2020, in Miami (theme: Creating Intelligence structure and composition of the Nanotechnology).
Both are old friends of Riddled and For Better Science.
Of course I would have advised strongly against concentrating so much bullshit and bafflegab within a single venue, for fear of exceeding the critical density and triggering a collapse of the Informational Space-Time Metric into its ground-state of nescience.
The compressed digest of my expertise is this: any number of scammers started out as parasitical publishers, relieving desperate wannabee-researchers of their universities’ funds in exchange for helping them meet their Research Output quota. Then they realised that more money could be made, more easily, by relieving researchers of their universities’ funds in exchange for providing an excuse for an overseas vacation.
Thus aspiring publisher Dylan Fazel reinvented himself as “M. Osman, M.D.” bombarding all and sundry with invitations to attend ESMED Global Conferences, while his portfolio of journal-shaped jizzmops was left to decay into desuetude and moribundance.
The OMICS empire of fraud includes not only PULSUS and Allied Academies and Longdom and umpteen other marques (hopefully less redolent of corruption and putrescine than the OMICS brand itself), but also ‘ConferenceSeries’ and EuroSciCon / LifeScienceEvents, MeetingsInternational, and so much more.
Not content with Crimson Publishing, Iris, Lupine and Biomedical Journal of Scientific & Technical Research, Sudheed Kaku (Colorado-resident failed code-monkey) registered ‘conferenceseries.us’ as a domain. His short-lived ‘Biomedical Conferences‘ mimicked the look-and-feel of ConferenceSeries scamsites as closely as possible, in an attempt to freeload on the good reputation of OMICS.
Ashutosh Tiwari found several ways to profit from the vanity of nanotech and advanced-materials academia. His special innovation was to book function rooms aboard the Viking Line fleet of overnight ferries that connect countries around the Baltic Sea, and sell them as Baltic Cruise Conferences. Before that, though, he leveraged his post as Docent Lecturer at Linköping University (Sweden) into a vanity-publishing career, as “VBRI Press”. The back-catalog of “Advanced Materials Letters” was free-to-read… then it vanished, and came back as pay-to-read (if you can’t read the pay-to-publish contents, you can’t criticise or laugh at them).
I’m not sure which of Balwant Rai’s portfolio of grifts is currently active. His “JBR Conference Group” meetings aboard the Copenhagen / Oslo overnight ferry (from where could he have taken the idea?) sank without trace in 2019. His JBR-themed journals are moribund. A qualified belief in one’s bullshit gives advantages for monetarising it, but for Balwant Rai – Space Dentist and broad-spectrum fabulist – his active fantasy life may have overpowered his commercial instincts.
If you don’t have your own academic email account, with its spam tray overflowing with more examples, they can be found at D. H. Kaye’s FlakyC blog. Then there’s BIT Congress Ltd (a.k.a. BIT Life Sciences and BIT Group Global Ltd): an outlier in this list as it operates from China, selling tourism / travel / accommodation without a history of predatory publishing. It also operates as “Pioneer Century Science” and “Global Century Science Group”.
[Jürgen Hescheler, stem cell researcher and institute director at the University of Cologne, used to organise BIT Congress scamferences in China, e.g. here and here. He seems to have stopped after I informed the university,- LS]
After that introduction, meet OLC, Outlook Conferences International.
Our conferences instill a rewarding experience and will empower you to rub elbows with many of the industry leaders. The community of ambitious and accomplished professionals surely helps you spread your impact and optimize your research goals.
All this restless activity generates a Swiftian ecology of greater fleas and lesser fleas – the latter consisting of various Big Name scientists who are willing to monetarise their reputations and sell their prestige to any shabby little charade in need of credibility, and to deliver Plenary Address in return for flattery or payment. By now, Leonid’s readers should not be shocked by the venality of Nobel Laureates nor by the low price of their virtue.
Meanwhile Professor Herbert Gleitner (Academician of German Science) works both sides of the street, performing for Tiwari’s Malacca-Strait cruises but also for BIT.
There is little more to learn about the Webster / Santilli Nanotech meeting in Miami, or how close the world came to runaway informational collapse, for snapshots of the website archived in the Wayback Machine end a month earlier. One of the diagnostic features of scamferences is a policy of amnesia, with websites disappearing as soon as the last cheques have cleared, in contrast to legitimate organisers who take pride in previous meetings in a series, and preserve a record of them.* We can only say that the first basic step for anyone setting up a real academic meeting is to secure a venue and default accommodation options for attendees, whereas the speculative Miami event lacked all of this.
But wait, there’s more! Webster had already signed up as Judas Goat for another Miami nanotech meeting on the same weekend (without Santilli): the 9th Global Nanotechnology Congress and Expo, to be held at Crown Plaza Miami Airport and / or Sonesta Miami Airport Hotel, with the theme “Intensifying : Next level of Nanotechnology”.
This one was first postponed to August from April on the pretext of the COVID pandemic, then cancelled (on the pretext of COVID) during that narrow window of time between “the trickle of registrations is drying up” and “the hotel needs a deposit to book the Function Room”. Attendees (if any) were fobbed off with a ‘webinar’ a month earlier. Leaving the 2nd International Conference & Exhibition in undisputed command of the Nanotech scene in Miami that weekend, and sparing Webster the embarrassment of a double-booking.
As it happens, “Scientific Federation” (behind the 9th Global Congress and Expo) and “OLC” (behind the 2nd International Conference and Expedition) are the same scammers: Sunnapalli Reddy Sekhar and Vijay Tippani Kumar, of Hyderabad, directors of SciFed Private Ltd and of Outlook Conferences Private Ltd according to the Indian company registry.
In these capacities they staked out domains and websites for more interchangeable scamference companies with the same staff (almost as if avoiding the name ‘SciFed’ as it becomes synonymous with mendacity): TheScientistt [Exploring Science : Promoting Innovation], and PrimeMeetings [capable of conceptualizing, planning and execution of events in technical field], and AlbedoMeetings [Let’s Reflect Knowledge], and ContinuumForums. Who came up with these names, Oglaf’s Vocabulary Bears?
I claim some expertise on the activities of these wee scunners, after their incessant, heavy-handed spam goaded me into earlier bloggery. Call me a Con-man Hipster if you like (a phrase I did not expect to be writing today), but I knew them when they were still petty grifters with a dream, before they sold out and went commercial. They are the classic example of Hyderabad chancers, inspired by the flow of research funds into the OMICS trough to jump aboard the parasitical-publishing scamwagon themselves, before realising that the real money-stream lay in mockademic meetings. Readers with a university e-address will be familiar with the SciFed deluge of spam, each solicitation ending with the invitation “to revert” if you wanted to be taken off their list of targets targeted with even more. I can only say that they would not be so cavalier with that suggestion if they had seen me reverting on full-moon nights.
Their special innovation as scammy spammy journal-founders was to create the names of “editorial assistant” sockpuppets for their email solicitations by appending one plausibly-European forename after another (at a time when their competitors in the market preferred First-name+Initial-Letter combinations, in the belief that the victims of the spam were more likely to trust anonymous sockpuppets). This nominal profligacy might explain why the LinkedIn accounts for supposed SciFed publishing functionaries are identified by job titles but no names at all, our heroes having exhausted their stock.
All that is moot, now, and those nameless LinkedIn accounts have nothing to occupy their virtual time… Sekhar and Kumar stopping bothering to pay domain fees, so their journal website and all the archives vanished back into the quantum vacuum from whence it sprang.** I should be more sympathetic to the gullibillies who paid $$$ to have their opuscules and brain-droppings published hosted in perpetuity on the Interweb, but nothing of value was lost.
I should also show more sympathy to people who handed over $$$ to attend a SciFed / Prime / Outlook / Continuum / Albedo / Thescientistt congress that was cancelled at the last minute never designed to occur. Comments in a ResearchGate thread are consistent: ‘Reimbursing fees for a cancelled event’ is not part of the SciFed business model.
Sometimes, almost by accident, meetings do happen. Suffice to say that the hosting competence of this pair of wazzcocks matches their publishing capability. At an earlier stage of their career, they listed the details of their paid-up suckers in a spreadsheet (including email addresses for future spamming), and then left it lying around, unsecured, on their website.
We linger on the topic of Thomas Webster. Under the aegis of TheScientistt, he also signed up as Plenary Judas Goat for the Global Summit on Biomaterials and Applications 2020, in Valencia. “Due to the outbreak of COVD-19”, GSBA-2020 was postponed for a year to allow more Abstracts and fees to trickle in, while morphing into Global Summit and Expo on Materials Science and Engineering, GSEMSE-2021 (the pandemic has been a great boon for the scamference industry). But perhaps Webster’s name lost its cachet as a drawcard.*** Anyway, a small-print last-minute announcement informs us that the 2021 version was cancelled.
This one-year delay was not enough for accommodation options to materialise, nor a physical venue where this speculative event might convene. No sign of a provisional program, not even an Organising Committee tasked with pulling a program together. It is clear that our heroes never intended to make the meeting a thing. I am confident, though, that Webster was not a knowing party to the con.
So far the menace of COVID-19 has not forced the cancellation of not one, not four, but three TheScientistt congresses to be staged in Marseille over a single weekend in mid-November [h/t Pepijn van Erp]. Venues have yet to be determined, but if they collapse into a single Function Room at the Marseille Ibis with three symposium streams speaking at three podia concurrently, this is part of the standard scamference practice and business model.
Keynote Speaker for the Vaccines Research & Development thread will be another old friend: Yehuda Shoenfeld, bringing the imprimatur of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities to legitimise this con, while rehashing his personal brand of anti-vaccine flim-flam. The presence of other promised speakers is less certain, for sometimes fly-by-night fraudsters have been known to lie about stuff. Professor Peter Hotez of Baylor College of Medicine is listed, which came as a surprise to Hotez when Leonid emailed him. [Hotez replied to me when I informed him about Shoenfeld and Santilli: “Oh wow, I had no idea those guys were speaking. They asked me, I don’t think we accepted.” -LS]
Please excuse a brief digression about earlier Vaccines events, held with confusingly-similar titles under the SciFed rubric. Only fragments survive of the 3rd Global Conference And Expo On Vaccines Research & Development, March 25-26 2019, in Milan. Someone did preserve a record of the speakers. To show the quality of the curation, celebrated antivaxxer Antonietta Gatti was an Invited Speaker, reporting her latest discoveries of nanoparticles everywhere making vaccines deadly. Also, Giulio Tarro.
Tarro must have found the experience fulfilling (and they awarded him a Certificate!!), so he reappeared at the 4th Global Conference and Expo on Vaccines Research & Development, February 10-11 2020, in Lisbon (theme: “Enhancing the Quality of Vaccine and Initiation of New Medicine“). As well as the first Plenary Speaker, he featured on the Organising Committee as Conference Chairperson. In that capacity, a link informs us that he was 2019’s “most important virologist of the year and nominated for the Nobel award”.
The website is even more of an optical crime scene than usual, with clashing garish colours, agitated movement, flashing police-emergency lights, and intrusive pop-up suggestions that you provide them with your email details for additional begging letters.
Giulio Tarro was once again a headline act at the 5th Global Conference And Expo On Vaccines Research & Development. This supposedly occurred March 15-17 2021, in Osaka, though in the absence of a venue or a Scientific Program, skepticism is understandable. The organisers took “Providing Foundations To Understand The Role Of Vaccines In Improving Health Across The Globe” as their theme, but in a fleeting moment of honesty about priorities they promoted it as “Providing a holistic experience of academic tourism“.
Imagine my surprise to find that Giulio Tarro has accomplished nothing since his work as Albert Sabin’s student in the late 60s / early 1970s, and all his prizes and titles and Nobel nominations are purchased or self-conferred. His incapacity explains his subsequent steady rise through the feudal ranks of Italian academia, as the Italian mediocracy has been compared to organised crime, in the way that the Baroni value incompetence in their minions as an unfakeable signal of loyalty (actual ability could easily lead to independence).
As for Tarro’s collaboration with Sabin on herpesviruses as the cause of cancer, his main accomplishment then was to rob his mentor of reputation and several months’ work, as Sabin pored through data and re-performed experiments while he traced the source of the fraudulent results.
Suffice to say that Tarro is yet another old friend of For Better Science (and of OcaSapiens). Sunnapalli Reddy Sekhar and Vijay Tippani Kumar, if you’re reading this, and if you need more disgraced charlatans and mountebanks for your next mockademic con-job, there must be a few names left in Leonid’s archives.
Enough of that digression. We are waiting to hear back from Prof Harald zur Hausen, 2008 Nobel Prizewinner in Physiology / Medicine, about his advertised talking-bear prostitute performing-bear status at at least four of these money-extraction opportunities [you shall hear from him at the end of this article,- LS].
As ScientificFederation, our heroes assert that Prof. zur Hausen addressed the 13th International Conference And Expo On Nanotechnology & Nanomaterials on July 12-14 (theme : Exploring Novel Facets To The World In Nanotechnology), on the topic “Bacterial plasmid-derived infectious agents as a novel class linked to common human cancers (colon, breast and prostate)”. The claim would be more plausible if the link to the Abstract Book led anywhere else but to a 404 Error, or if the Venue Address was more specific than just “Barcelona”.
Wearing their TheScientistt hats, they promise his Plenary presence at the Global Summit on Cancer Research and Therapy (GSCR2021) in Marseille, November 11-13, 2021. Details of other speakers have stalled at the stage of “will be updated soon”.
Also, the Global Summit on Women Health and Breast Cancer (WHBC2022) in Tokyo, April 21-23, 2022. His topic: “A novel class of infectious agents and their relationship to breast- and colon cancer”.
This follows immediately after PHARMAMEET2022, International Meet on Pharmaceutics and Drug Delivery Systems in Tokyo, April 18-20, 2022 (organized by Albedo Meetings) – saving Prof. zur Hausen an extra trip. This will be a star-studded event, with the other Plenary Speakers including Prof. Sir Tom Blundell, Director of Research at Cambridge (also listed as Chairman of the sorry charade); Terry Rabbitts FRS of the ICR; and … wait… Shoenfeld again. Oh joy, more confirmatory emails to send.
The theft of Nobel Committee intellectual property (i.e. the Nobel medal as background adornment for webpages) is in keeping with the rest of SciFed ethics.
These phantasmagoric pseudo-seminars proliferate and pullulate beyond the capacity of one person to check the attendance of everyone who’s listed. Readers are invited to trawl through the plethora of Speaker lists in search of familiar names. The border controls protecting New Zealand from COVID remain in force, making it unlikely that Prof. Olaf Diegel (of the University of Auckland, NZ) will attend 3D PRINTING-2021 in Paris (September 20-21). I have emailed him, asking if the promise of a Plenary Speech is reality-based, and (if it is) requesting his review of the event experience.
That said, it is plausible that Elias Aifantis (another old friend of For Better Science) will speak at the 2nd Global Summit and Expo on Nanotechnology and Nanomaterials (GSENN2022) in Copenhagen.
For Ruggero Santilli is also a headline act, and he and Aifantis run in the same circles:
FLOGEN SIPS conferences, where Nobelists meet fringe scientists and frauds
[h/t Pepijn van Erp again]
Sir Santilli, I should say: since his induction into the Equestrian Order of St Agatha by the Republic of San Marino, he insists on the honorific. I suspect that an opportunity to unfurl his list of self-assigned titles and accomplishments is all the incentive Sir Santilli needs to provide a Plenary Speech, requiring no other honorarium. Although not a Nobel Laureate, Sir Santilli boasts of having sockpuppets and meatpuppets to nominate regularly him to the Nobel Committee, which is practically the same thing.
What is it about Nanotech, by the way, that attracts these grifters? Do the researchers have more surplus funding to flush down the scamference toilet compared to other academic specialties, or do they just have less to fear from scrutiny by their funders?
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
UPDATE: Leonid asked me to add something about ‘Pagesconferences’ as well, brought to us by ‘Pangea Global Events’. The websites for these events are similar to those of the SciFed stable. This may just reflect the curriculum of web-design education in Hyderabad, as it is the work of a different grifter: Pavan Kumar Jalluri. His indefatigable skiving and unfamiliarity with English caught the attention of D. H. Kaye. I don’t want to lead you too far this rabbit-hole… but just look at the speakers for Global Conference on Traditional and Alternative Medicine, March 14-16 2022, in Barcelona! GCTAM2022 is going to be epic.
Thomas Webster is there, still claiming Northeastern University as his affiliation. Bharat Aggarwal is a litigious vexation and an Alt-Med fraudster on an industrial scale, who stopped curing cancers with turmeric and left the University of Texas (MD Anderson Cancer Center) under a faked-results-shaped cloud back in 2015, but he still uses that affiliation for purposes of grifting. The cream of the jest, though, is the presence of Alireza Heidari, whose “California South University” is entirely his own invention.
There are serious doubts about Heidari’s very existence, for the only extant image of him is a Photoshop composition using a stock “library-shelves” background… he may be an elaborate hoax, or a way of flagging the parasitical predation of the 639 journals that recruited him as Editor, or a prolific paper-faking algorithm that gained sentience. This did not stop the International Conference on Immunology and Microbiology, November 15-17 2021, in Luxembourg City, from promoting Heidari to its Scientific Board – this time representing the American International Standards Association, which is just as non-existent as CSU.
More relevantly, Prof. zur Hausen has evidently succumbed to Pangean blandishments and will legitimise ICIM2021 with an invited speech (along with the egregious Tarro). I can’t help wondering how many perfectly cromulent invitations he has to turn down, to leave spare time for all these scamferences.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* Other characteristics include rogues-galleries of Plenary Speaker headshots that suffered Procrustean compression or elongation from their original dimensions to fit into a square grid, with grotesque consequences; and annoyingly animated websites, pimped out with scrolling image carousels and endless activity and every blinking pop-up distraction that the HTML-jockeys could find. ‘Understated elegance’ is not a visual-communication virtue taught in Hyderabad schools of web design.
** In lieu of those vanished SciFed journals, MPDI outlets are listed as Journal Partners for several of these congress-shaped phenomena, with an implied intention of publishing the Proceedings. This is in keeping with what we know of MPDI.
*** As any fule kno, a Cachet is a small cache.
Professor zur Hausen and his beef with scamferences
You will have learned a lot from Smut Clyde about The Scientistt scamference circus and the pseudoacademic freaks and clowns patronizing them. But even Smut Clyde was not sure if the Nobelist Harald zur Hausen really agreed to lend his name to these events, or even personally appear there.
Well, maybe his opening an OMICS conference in 2014 which he co-organised, and taking a flower bouquet from none other but the OMICS owner Srinubabu Gedela himself is a clue. As zur Hausen’s DKFZ once explained to me, they deem OMICS to be predatory only since 2017.
But here is zur Hausen’s email to me, translated from German. Enjoy:
“Dear Mr. Schneider,
I have received your warnings regarding “scamferences” and my projected participation in “robbery conferences” in Tokyo and Barcelona. In principle, I support your activities.
Your concern regarding my possible participation in the conferences you have named and your thoughtful message to the Scientific Board of Directors of the DKFZ, Professor Baumann, Ms. Katharina Gudd and the press spokeswoman of the DKFZ, Dr. Kohlstädt, impressed me and probably the other addressees as well.
Of course – after the end of a short vacation – I immediately followed up on your statements and will forward copies of your cover letters to the organizers or institutions of the inviting parties you have indicated so far – with a request for their comments, and (if necessary, if they find the statements conveyed here to be incorrect) I like to put at their discretion to take legal action in this regard.
Please let me know if you have similar information from me on numerous other previous international conferences. I would address these points in an analogous manner. Please assume that I will also pass your information on to them.
Otherwise I would be grateful if you would relieve me of further correspondence.
Kind regards.
Harald zur Hausen“
I replied to zur Hausen and DKFZ that I understand from his email he not only confirms his participation in these scamferences, but also invites their fraudulent organisers to take legal action against me for slander. Neither the Nobelist nor DKFZ ever replied since, so I must have understood correctly.
So what is going on? Quite simple. For many years, zur Hausen, his wife and fellow DKFZ professor Ethel-Michele de Villiers, and their academic “offspring” Timo Bund have been studying the REAL cause of colorectal and breast cancers. Which they say are some mysterious virus-like DNA plasmids present only in dairy cows, named BMMF (Bovine Milk and Meat Factors). By consuming milk and beef from cows (but not from buffalo, sheep or goats), humans get infected already as babies, some develop as the consequence cancer later on.
There is even a 2019 interview with a German magazine where zur Hausen explains his discovery, for example how he arrived at it:
“The starting point of my considerations around 20 years ago was that there is a strange geographical correlation between the occurrence of colon cancer and breast cancer worldwide – in North America as well as in Europe, Argentina, Australia and South Africa. Most colleagues explained this with the western diet. When countries like Japan and Korea changed their diets after World War II and primarily imported beef from North America, it increased 20 to 30 years later these cancer rates there too. […]
It is interesting which countries were partially or completely unaffected: China- 80 percent of the meat food there comes from pigs; Bolivia and Mongolia – mainly other types of cattle, zebus and yaks are kept there. These countries have strikingly low rates of colon and breast cancer. The lowest used to be in India, where they don’t eat beef at all. But that is changing with breast cancer because India has been since the 1980s bringing in European herds of cattle as milk suppliers to improve infant nutrition.“
I shan’t further comment on this theory and its logic, since zur Hausen already threatens with lawsuits. Also, I can’t judge if it is the Nobel Prize which causes in its recipients the symptoms of Nobelitis, manifesting in fringe ideas, as it happened to Luc Montagnier, Kary Mullis, Linus Pauling any many others, or if this behaviour is actually the true sign of true genius.
zur Hausen even spoke of this theory of his in Stockholm, during his own Nobel Prize lecture in 2008. You can imaging that the majority of the scientific community is, ahem, sceptical about BMMF. zu Hausen is unimpressed. He published a discovery of infectious BMMF is supermarket milk (Falida eta 2017), previously in the same ASM journal zur Hausen and his wife postulated that not just cancer, but also multiple sclerosis (MS) is caused by those infectious bovine plasmids (Whitley et al 2014), apparently vitamin D deficiency is involved.
There was also a 2017 book chapter, where the zur Hausens postulated that BMMFs from milk and beef cause also lung, prostate and nearly all other cancers, plus of course MS, and Parkinson’s, Alzeimer’s, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), and in particular the Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, then also Crohn’s disease, atherosclerosis, and possibly even Type 2 diabetes. Why not autism, I am seriously disappointed…
The journals where the zur Hausens publish their BMMF research are a bit obscure, unusual for a Nobel prize winner. Most recently the academic family claimed that all colon cancer patients had BMMFs in their tissues, in a “contributed” (i.e. not independently peer reviewed) paper in PNAS (Bund et al 2021), zur Hausen’s privelege as US National Academy of Sciences member. It seems, even Nobel Prize credentials are not making it easy to publish the BMMF stuff.
What makes matters worse, after many years of this Nobelitis woo, zur Hausen’s peers may be reluctant to let him talk about his BMMFs at their proper conferences and to confuse the impressionable youth in the audience. That is not to say that zur Hausen isn’t invited to talk about BMMFs anymore, he may merely not get enough invitations to proper conferences and seminars, especially since the pandemic curtailed all these activities for everyone.
This is where the services by The Scientistt and other India-based scamferencers come in, who also are more than happy to host any unhinged tosh from Santilli, Tarro and Shoenfeld.
But DKFZ believes. The biggest German cancer research institution, which director the now 85 year old zur Hausen was for 20 years, from 1983 till 2003, still funds his research into BMMF. Here is a DKFZ press conference from 2019, led by the institute’s director Michael Baumann, where Germany’s top cancer authority warned never to feed babies with cow milk, at least those under the age of 12 months.
The DKFZ-funded BMMF lab is run by Bund, and advised by zur Hausen and his wife de Villiers. Imagine all these students and postdocs who arrive to Heidelberg, proud to work with a Nobel Prize winner, and end up under the expectation to prove and reproduce something in a lab which many scientists assure does not exist. What happens to those who fail deliver? I personally shudder to think.
By the way, this is not the first time DKFZ had a Schneider problem with scamferences. One of their own Ombudspeople (responsible for research integrity), Stefan Eichmüller, resigned from this position right after I informed the institute that he co-authored falsified science and participated in an OMICS scamference (read here).
Now I informed DKFZ that by their silence they would confirm to unconditionally support both zur Hausen’s BMMF lectures at scamferences, and his request for the scamference organisers to sue me for libel. DKFZ silently concurred. Must be the milk and beef products in the DKFZ cantine causing mass dementia.
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I really do not get why anyone takes Ruggiero Santilli seriously, or is it all just performance art?? His isoredshift theory is plainly bonkers, starting from false premises and proceeding inexorably to conclusions that are laughably rubbish. (He has also threatened me via one of his sock puppets, but that was over a decade ago…)
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Impressed by this mighty sickness called scamferences. And much more impressed to see refugee-like Thomas Webster next to Heidelbergs hochherrschaftlicher Harald zur Hausen. Reminds me of young Winston Churchills Influenza poem:
The rich, the poor, the high, the low
Alike the various symptoms know
Alike before it… eh… stops?
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That’s not quite how Churchill’s doggerel goes, but near enough. https://www.nationalchurchillmuseum.org/winston-churchill-the-influenza-poem.html
On Tue, Aug 10, 2021 at 9:10 AM For Better Science wrote:
>
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Doggerel? He received the NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE 1953 – and joined the Yalta Scumference, ha, ha
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I forgot to say – Robert Malone, one of the Plenary Speakers here, is evidently the Inventor of mRNA Vaccines, at least according to his websites and press-releases.
This came as a surprise to people who only know him as a minor author on two papers on the basic concepts, from 25 years ago. Nevertheless, he is venerated in Antivaccine circles, on account of his announcements that current mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 are DOING IT WRONG and can’t possibly work. From the Antivax perspective, the fact that Malone is saying what they want to hear is all the proof they need that he is the World’s Leading Authority.
Looks like he was already grifting in 2019.
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The 7th annual conference of the ACSE, the Asian Council of Science Editors, will take place on 21 August 2021. This conference is sponsored by a.o. publishers “Science Alert” and “ANSInet”. Source: https://archive.is/833Ja Both publishers were listed by by Jeffrey Beall as a potential predatory publisher, see https://beallslist.net/ Muhammad Sarwar, the secretary of the organizing committee of this conference, is since 2012 “Chief Executive Officer” of “Science Alert”. Source: his LinkedIn profile.
It is towards my opinion remarkable that an Elsevier employee, Joan Marsh, is scheduled for a talk at this conference (“Supporting Sustainability in Editorial Work through the EASE Environmental Manifesto Prof. Dr. Joan Marsh MA PhD | Deputy Editor, The Lancet Psychiatry”).
Does this implies that there are motives to argue that Elsevier has no objections against collaborations with predatory publishers? The homepage of Joan Marsh at Elsevier does not list an affiliation with a university. This is towards the best of my knowledge necessary when using the title ‘Prof’. Anyone any idea if this homepage is outdated? Source: archive DOT is / eXLMM
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Copy/pasted from https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvab020 (published 11 August 2021): “Finally, the intense proliferation of predatory journals has given rise to predatory/fake conferences, equally pernicious for academia, and the subject of warnings from COPE (2019), as ‘predatory journals and conferences are two sides of the same coin’ (Cortegiani et al. 2020). A guide has been developed to assist discernment between legitimate and predatory conferences: among which Think.Check.Attend. (https://thinkcheckattend.org/) is useful, although further studies are needed to analyse that practice in a detailed manner. In particular, the 400 or so conferences that MDPI sponsored in 2019 (MDPI 2020) should all be carefully scrutinized.”
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