Schneider Shorts of 15 April 2022 – a resurrected career of a French biologist, a Spanish martyr saint takes revenge on two more apostate sinners, a limitless indulgence for sins past, present and future for a cancer cheater in Texas, Elsevier’s half-hearted exorcism of a Greek antivaxxer, papers to get rid of, and a self-righteous Italian diva in Zürich waving another sockpuppet.
Table of Discontent
Science Elites
- Jessus has Risen! – the fallen chief biologist of CNRS returns to the stage
- St Carlos of Oviedo, harassed – Spanish University investigates two professors for blasphemy
- Sood trolling – MD Anderson cheater tests limits, finds none
- Papers to get rid of – A British eugenicist for you to worship
- Shilling for Coke – “Bill Nye, the Sellout Guy”
News in Tweets
Science Elites
Jessus Has Risen!
Remember Catherine Jessus? Former chief biologist of CNRS, exposed as research cheater by my reporting? Who investigated herself together with a close friend, and then CNRS decreed that all those Photoshop forgeries were actually the proper way to do science?
Of course that CNRS investigative report was exposed as a fraudulent farce, not only by yours truly but in particular by a group of anonymous CNRS researchers.
And then CNRS and Academie des Sciences organised a signature campaign, where their employees were coerced into signing a letter of support for Jessus, while demanding the heads of a Le Monde journalist and 10 anonymous Jessus critics inside CNRS?
Eventually, Jessus resigned from her CNRS directorship and was very quietly installed as a senior manager at a governmental science funding agency.
But now the star of French science is back! She is organising scientific conferences, and, as CNRS announced on 1 April 2022 (not a joke), she is teaching school teachers how to teach science (fraud):
“To this end, a day of training in scientific culture is offered to secondary school teachers of Life and Earth Sciences, from college to BTS.
These training days will include conferences on topics and recent scientific results, including the “introductory conferences”.The introductory lectures will highlight the major discoveries in biology. They will make it possible to define the current state of knowledge in biology. Five of these ten introductory lectures are offered in Masterclass type videos. They cover a wide variety of thematic fields of biology. They are led by renowned biologists, recognized by their peers and who have left their mark on biology through the excellence of their research.”
“As part of the year of biology (2021-2022), Catherine Jessus, CNRS research director at the Developmental Biology Laboratory and former director of the CNRS Institute of Biological Sciences (2013-2019), presents the major advances and challenges in 21st century biology. From surprising microbes to the history of life, from the secrets of genomes to the interactions between living beings and the environment, passing through new techniques for exploring life, discover the extent of recent discoveries in biology as well as unknown terrains that researchers of the 21st century are exploring.”
Well, for Jessus the “new technique” Adobe Photoshop was surely one of those “major advances and challenges in 21st century biology”.
St Carlos of Oviedo, harassed
Remember Carlos Lopez-Otin? The cheating researcher of cancer and ageing, whose papers were exposed as fake by my colleagues, then retracted, together with his Nature mentoring award? Who temporarily hid in France with his best friend Guido Kroemer, after he destroyed evidence of his bad science by killing 5 thousands of transgenic mice?
You may recall that Spanish academic elites proved to be despicable fraudulent thugs we suspected them to be as they not only rallied behind their beloved St Carlos of Oviedo, but even organised a witch-hunt for his critics, with public apologies and all.
Now, two colleagues of Lopez-Otin at the University of Oviedo were charged with “harassment”. In Spain, it is a crime to criticise a national saint like St Carlos, the two men will now likely be sacked and then sued for damages. Or burned at stake, who knows.
Spanish media reports:
“The complaint filed with the authorities of the University of Oviedo by the researcher and professor in the area of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in the Department of Biochemistry of the University of Oviedo, Carlos López Otín (Sabiñánigo, Huesca, 1958), against two professors of the institution for harassment has been filed. The professors against whom Otín directed in the procedure, are the professor of Molecular Biology Pedro Sánchez Lazo and the doctor and professor of Psychobiology Antonello Novelli Ciotti. They have confirmed it to Europa Press.
At the University of Oviedo, however, they did not want to confirm or deny anything in this regard, limiting themselves to pointing out that it is an “internal, reserved and confidential” procedure and that they were not going to give information for “a matter of data protection” . The professors explained that they never harassed López Otín and that this has been confirmed by the ombudsman at the University of Oviedo. The file that was opened for harassment was been closed due to “lack of evidence”. [….]
However, the ombudsman of the University of Oviedo, in view of the procedure, suggested opening two other procedures against the professors. One refers to an alleged pressure on a university staff worker and the other has to do with a possible lack of respect between colleagues. “
Basically, Lopez-Otin is so well connected in Spain (simply because too many people owe him they cushy jobs in academia, administration and politics), that they are prepared to publicly crucify every halfway decent scientist in the country in order to show support for a rotten toxic crook whose entire scientific record has long been discredited as built on fraud and bullshit.
Which is certainly good news to all those other research fraudsters in Spain my colleagues keep exposing.
Sood Trolling
Remember Anil Sood? The gynaecological oncologist who published so much cancer research fraud that his employer MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, had to move mountains to save him?
Some years ago, MD Anderson viciously cracked down on whistleblowers in Sood’s lab, appointed a fellow cheater as research integrity ombudsman to make sure the investigation of Sood’s over 50 fraudulent papers never happens (read here), twisted arms of many editors to prevent retractions (not one single paper from his lab was retracted or will ever be), and even made sure Sood got elected to the US National Academy of Medicine last year.
If you were Sood, you would feel free to remove a patient’s organs and limbs just for fun, free to take a dump on the NIH director’s desk, and of course feel free to publish new outrageous fraud just to troll everyone.
Here it is, published just this year:
Yunfei Wen, Anca Chelariu-Raicu , Sujanitha Umamaheswaran , Alpa M. Nick , Elaine Stur , Pahul Hanjra , Dahai Jiang , Nicholas B. Jennings , Xiuhui Chen , Sara Corvigno , Deanna Glassman , Gabriel Lopez-Berestein , Jinsong Liu , Mien-Chie Hung , Anil K. Sood Endothelial p130cas confers resistance to anti-angiogenesis therapy Cell Reports (2022) doi: 10.1016/j.celrep.2022.110301
Other PubPeer users found even more in the Figure 4:
Unsurprisingly, neither the publisher Cell Press (part of Elsevier) nor MD Anderson cares. Well, they do, if you write to complain about Sood’s fraud, they will call your superiors to have you sacked.
Papers to get rid of
The Guardian brings you an article by Britain’s greatest scientist of all times: the eugenicist Stuart Ritchie, who also functions as the biggest anglo-saxon expert on research integrity because he wrote a book on the topic.
The Grauniad piece is called “The big idea: should we get rid of the scientific paper?”
I am not going to quote from the Guardian article or even read it, there are way too many expert opinions on how to get rid of the scientific paper as it is, and Ritchie’s expert view on scholarly publishing is probably just as original or useful as his expert writings on the Macchiarini affair. But here are some Ritchie papers which we definitely should get rid of.
Stuart J Ritchie, Simon R Cox, Xueyi Shen, Michael V Lombardo, Lianne M Reus, Clara Alloza, Mathew A Harris, Helen L Alderson, Stuart Hunter, Emma Neilson, David C M Liewald, Bonnie Auyeung, Heather C Whalley, Stephen M Lawrie, Catharine R Gale, Mark E Bastin, Andrew M McIntosh, Ian J Deary Sex Differences in the Adult Human Brain: Evidence from 5216 UK Biobank Participants Cerebral Cortex, (2018) doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhy109
TL;DR: All geniuses are male, because basic biology. Why promoting women in science then?
W. David Hill, Neil M. Davies, Stuart J. Ritchie, Nathan G. Skene, Julien Bryois, Steven Bell, Emanuele Di Angelantonio, David J. Roberts, Shen Xueyi, Gail Davies, David C. M. Liewald, David J. Porteous, Caroline Hayward, Adam S. Butterworth, Andrew M. McIntosh, Catharine R. Gale & Ian J. Deary Genome-wide analysis identifies molecular systems and 149 genetic loci associated with income Nature Communications (2019) doi: 10.1038/s41467-019-13585-5
TL;DR: wealth is inherited genetically, because money comes from education hence IQ which Ritchie says is genetically inherited also. Poor people and immigrants are genetically inferior, that’s why they don’t study at Oxbridge and come to earn less, why wasting money on their pointless education anyway.
I wrote about these two Ritchie papers here, and I am sure he wrote much more peer reviewed toss on why white male Brits like himself are genetically superior, but I can’t be arsed to look up. Ritchie was mentored by eugenicists and racists Ian Deary and Robert Plomin, who published even nastier stuff (more papers to get rid of!) on which Ritchie built his own research. Eugenics, but of course under a different name, is what this Imperial College lecturer talks about all the time, in every microphone: how IQ=degree=income are genetically coded inside a rich man’s semen. The real problem is not Ritchie with his unsavoury ideas, it’s the UK-US white academic elites who are way into “progressive” eugenics and this is why they made Ritchie their poster boy of research ethics.
Shilling for Coke
Gizmodo brings a story about “Bill Nye, the Sellout Guy“. Apparently, the TV character is some kind of scientific authority for US TV audience because he is a) male, b) white and c) wears a bow tie. So now Mr Nye The Science Guy is shilling for Coca Cola where he teaches you the decade old bullshit about plastic recycling:
“This week, Coca-Cola, one of the world’s biggest plastic polluters, teamed up with TV’s favorite scientist for a campaign to create a “world without waste,” a joke of a corporate greenwashing campaign.
In a video innocuously titled “The Coca-Cola Company and Bill Nye Demystify Recycling,” an animated version of Nye—with a head made out of a plastic bottle and his signature bow tie fashioned from a Coke label—walks viewers through the ways “the good people at the Coca-Cola company are dedicating themselves to addressing our global plastic waste problem.” Coke, Nye explains, wants to use predominantly recycled materials to create bottles for its beverages; he then describes the process of recycling a plastic bottle, from a user throwing it into a recycling bin to being sorted and shredded into new material.
“If we can recover and recycle plastic, we can not only keep it from becoming trash, but we can use that plastic again and again—it’s an amazing material,” quips Shill Nye the Plastic Guy. “What’s more, when we use recycled material, we also reduce our carbon footprint. What’s not to love?” What’s not, indeed!”
Gizmodo correctly explains what really is going on:
“Thanks to concerted lobbying efforts, the public has been led to believe that recycling is the cure for our disastrous plastic addiction. What it does in actuality is place the burden of responsibility on the consumer and allow companies like Coca-Cola to get away with no repercussions for their waste.
Most of those plastics can only be reused once or twice before ending up in a landfill. Nye, for all his talk of science on TV, should know this. Over recycling’s 60-year history, less than 10% of plastic that has been produced has ever been recycled. And while in theory, PET—the type of plastic that makes bottles—can be recycled more times than other types of plastic, that’s not usually what happens. Virgin plastic is, simply put, cheaper to make into things like bottles than recycled plastic. Less than 30% of plastic bottles are recycled in the U.S., and a lot of that stock is turned not into other bottles, but “downcycled” into other things, like filler and fabric. These products, in turn, can’t be recycled again. The plastic ends up in landfills. Even with effective recycling mechanisms, research has shown that stuff like bottles can’t be in use for long and will eventually be delegated to landfills. From there, the Coke bottles that Shill Nye so cheerily shows off in the video will last for so long that their lifecycle lasts beyond human frameworks for time.”
Michael Mann discussed this recycling lie in his recent book:
News in Tweets
- OK, who is surprised that the Zürich-based Italian diva, publisher of fake science, wearer of a fake PhD degree Adriano Aguzzi was accused of running a sock-puppet account to defend the sexual harasser David Sabatini? Nobody surprised, right?
- The Greek antivaxxer and research troll Aristidis Tsatsakis became too toxic even for Elsevier, imagine that. He was previously removed as Editor-in-Chief of the antivax fraud factory Toxicology Reports, and now other Elsevier journals expunge his records as their editor.
- As a reminder, that toxic Greek crook Tsatsakis is a professor in various Russian universities, so maybe Smut Clyde has a point here.
- Cheshire found yet another Chinese papermill.
- Those papermills, eh?
- Until now, journal editors issuing retractions never specified which reader informed them of the data fraud (if they did mention a reader, too often the editors credit themselves). Now at least Elisabeth Bik gets recognised.
- But of course, a research fraudster and mouse torturer who still brings in money is more important than anything. Case at hand: Erle Robertson and Penn State.
- Even I didn’t expect the lab-grown meat bullshit to reach this level of stupidity: “‘Cultivated’ lion burgers, tiger steaks and zebra sushi rolls are among the products being pitched by a food-tech startup […] Once the products have passed regulatory approvals, Primeval Foods said Michelin-starred restaurants in London will be among the first to sample its dishes, with further plans to expand on a larger scale, even to local supermarkets.” (The Independent). Spoiler: the promo images show real meat from a dead animal (supermarket beef probably). They all do that when fundraising, because what all these lab-grown meat companies sell is wishful thinking.
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For Better Science 
Ha! I have read (yet) another book by someone you hate: “intelligence”, by Stuart Richie. I don’t think you can call him a eugenicist, as I have not (yet) read him saying that dumb people should not procreate. He is a very good writer, and I think he is just delivering facts (trying to be a good scientist) , even if the implication of the facts are socially destructive ones.
LIsten, I’m just a dumb American incel, yet I can enjoy books (authored by Peterson and, Ritchie) that reaffirm this idea on me. Self-flagellation? I think not. Just a curiosity to learn what everybody thinks.
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Progressive eugenics is very inclusive! The idea is that even the poor, the non-white and the immigrant should have their chance! Screen their kids for IQ genes we discovered, then educate only those who pass, instead of wasting money on educating the whole lot! Of course you don’t do gene tests on the upper classes, they passed already, see Ritchie et al.
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Pingback: Nucleare? Dipende, cont. – ocasapiens
In Spain, public universities are regulated by their Statutes and our constitutional principle of autonomy.
In reality, everything is a lie because public universities depend on public money channeled to them by the Spanish State.
University community elects its representative staff members and Rector.
The rector and governing board of hers/his are accountable to this representative staff.
In the last staff meeting at the University of Oviedo,
blood was requested in response to alleged campaign of harassment against Asturian researcher,
chair professor and swan
with a honorable professor standing while shouting “call the Police” in the room
as could be deduced from article at La Nueva España.
By the way, I don’t know if Ana is related to Pilar Rubiera,
an op-ed writer and former journalist for La Nueva España.
In the recent op-ed of La Nueva España that starred Giordano Bruno as guest actor,columnist exclaimed
“¡Vetusta, apestosa Universidad, chapoteando como patos en su propia mierda!”
Picturing Vetusta university as a stinking pond where ducks splash in their own shit
flown by a lonely swan, flow so high that dirty spills cannot reach him,
if we substitute swan for eagle of San Juan and enclosure for Iberian Peninsula,
is one of the wet dreams of Francoists
perhaps because dreaming of flying is related to sexual repression and male impotence.
Beyond naive Freudian interpretation, reality is that they will not mind destroying something like University
as long as they continue to bark about their misconceptions in media outlets.
By the way, “Vetusta”, in addition to being a Spanish adjective, as a proper name is a satirical utopia.
Inhabitants of Vetusta are lampooned as vicious, hypocritical and falsely devout in “La Regenta”,
a novel by the writer Leopoldo Alas “Clarín” inspired by the way he saw Oviedo society in the 19th century.
Some fifty years later,Decades later, the fascist sons of Vetusta shot dead the son of “Clarín”
for being rector of the University of Oviedo during the Spanish Second Republic.
What a pity!
Nothing changes, everything is the same over and over.
“Reclaman al Rector que “sin tibieza” se dé a Otín y a su equipo el apoyo “que les faltó”
by A. Rubiera pub at La Nueva España 2022 April, 23
https://www.lne.es/sociedad/2022/04/23/reclaman-rector-tibieza-otin-equipo-65291914.html
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