Schneider Shorts 1.07.2022 – Old men, new scams

Schneider Shorts 1 July 2022 – with a Welsh Nobelist’s new scam, fraudster’s German husband and his fountain of youth, a surprise retraction, an unsurprising correction, Cheshire and his fraudsters, and a dirty old man succeeding a dirty old man in Marseille.

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Table of Discontent

Science Elites

• Raoult’s worthy successor – his IHU colleague Pierre-Edouard Fournier to continue the tradition of fraud, patient abuse and sexual harassment
• Sir Martin’s new scam – look what Nobelist Martin Evans and his young fellow Ajan are up to now!
• Dr Paus’ Fountain of Youth – a German celebrity scientist irons all wrinkles

Scholarly Publishing

• Surprise retraction – Alexander Magazinov scores at Nature Publishing Group
• Our sincerest apologies – Oncogene corrects a paper

News in Tweets

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Science Elites

Raoult’s worthy successor

As you all know, the chloroquine guru Didier Raoult has been forced to retired from all his positions, he will be relinquishing his directorship of IHU Marseille by the end of summer and go into well-deserved retirement.

So whom did the head of recruitment committee Louis Schweitzer, former CEO of Renault, investigator of paedophilia scandal at the Paris university Sciences Po and wiretapper of journalists (read here), recruit as Raoult’s successor?

Did you really expect someone external, someone honest, someone who is not a toxic covidiot quack and who was not actively involved in patient abuse? Come one, this is France!

The winner is of course another IHU crook: Pierre-Edouard Fournier

The dude who issued ethics approvals for Raoult’s illegal human experiments with chloroquine, who is the direct boss of Raoult’s chloroquine pusher Philippe Gautret, and who managed COVID-19 PCR tests for their clinical trials and who provided a pseudo-peer-reviewed journal platform for Raoult’s publishing scams.

Here is IHU’s official announcement from 29 June 2022.

Fabrice Frank told me Fournier’s story:

“Risky positions taken during the Covid-19 pandemic

Less publicized than some of these colleagues, Professor Pierre-Edouard Fournier nevertheless took some clear-cut positions during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Thus, as early as March 2020 he declared, regarding the hydroxychloroquine-azithromycin treatment, that “Preliminary tests show rapid eradication of the virus thanks to this therapeutic combination”. […] Incredulous at the arrival of a second wave to which epidemiologists were already warning, he declared in May 2020 that “the risk of a ‘rebound’ is less and less likely” and that “Yes, in my opinion it is possible today to ‘breathe’ and resume a life as normal as possible.” […]

Scientific publications and editorial conflicts of interest

Professor Pierre-Edouard Fournier is a central element of the system set up by Professor Didier Raoult to ensure a maximum of publications, citations and ultimately SIGAPS points and therefore public funding, without valuable scientific compensation. The example of the [journal] “New Microbes New Infections” (NMNI) is particularly explicit in this respect. 

Indeed, it was found that this journal published an abnormally high number of publications from the IHU Méditerranée Infection [Locher et al 2021]. Its editorial board also includes an abnormally high number of members of the IHU, despite recent replacements likely put in place by the publishing company Elsevier.

Indeed, when in October 2021, the Express reveals that the same authorization number from the IHU ethics committee was used to publish 247 articles relating to various types of samples on different continents, the name of Professor Pierre-Edouard Fournier appears prominently in the list of beneficiaries of this system which raises serious questions of editorial conflicts of interest. 

It is also present in many recent studies which do not seem to meet the legal requirements governing clinical research on the human person [Ayona et al 2021, Cassir et al 2021]. There is also a comparative study of Covid-19 antigen tests dating from 2021 clearly mentioned as prospective and not having CPP authorization and whose last author is Professor Pierre-Edouard Fournier [Fenollar et al 2021].

The lightness with which the peer review of this journal treats the ethical aspect of its publications also meets other concerns.

On ethical and regulatory issues concerning clinical trials, including on vulnerable people

Indeed, a comment posted on PubPeer shows that a prospective study on healthy volunteers would have been conducted by members of the IHU on the homeless, i.e. vulnerable populations . The corresponding study [Ly et al 2021] counts Professor Pierre-Edouard Fournier among its authors. The comment posted on PubPeer also refers us to a copy of the authorization from the ethics committee internal to the IHU Méditerranée Infection on which we discover that he is also the secretary of this ethics committee which gave its agreement for this study which was not the subject of a CPP authorization.

However, this article only mentions the IFR 48 authorization number 2020-01 signed by its secretary, Pierre-Edouard Fournier, soon to be appointed to succeed Didier Raoult: pic.twitter.com/nAZwoawfEE

— Fabrice FRANK (@fabrice_frank) June 29, 2022

There is another mention of his function in this ethics committee in a thesis [p54 here]. This second opinion bears the reference 2020-001. It is mentioned in several comments on PubPeer [Francis et al 2021, Haddad et al 2020, La Scola et a 2020]. It actually appears in 5 studies, but in the case of three of them, patients from the prospective hydroxychloroquine study were recruited. This leaves no doubt about the prospective nature of these 5 studies. However, they have not been the subject of a request for authorization before a CPP as the law provides, and the secretary of this internal ethics committee at the IHU Méditerranée Infection who grants authorization in order to be able to publish these articles is Professor Pierre-Edouard Fournier.

As such, he would have been a signatory of the authorizations of this internal ethics committee which allowed all the publications on the studies pinpointed by the ANSM in its report of April 27, 2022, including several transmitted by the ANSM to the prosecutor.

Involvement in excesses of governance

As reported in a document from the registry of the Court of Marseille, Professor Pierre-Edouard Fournier is one of the founders of the start-up Technojouvence. The secretary of the meeting reported in this document is provided by Eric Ghigo. However, it is this researcher who was dismissed from the CNRS and removed from the IHU for acts of sexual and moral harassment, and it is thanks to this startup and the collaboration of Professor Pierre-Edouard Fournier that he was able to find a place in the premises from which he had been removed.“

Après que Éric Ghigo a été évincé de l’IHU pour harcèlement sexuel présumé, il y a eu tentative de le réintégrer dans l’équipe du Pr Fournier (univamu s’y est opposé). Il y est finalement revenu via technojouvence. pic.twitter.com/P52cRHh8hG

— Lolipop – Sommité mondiale – Troll sans âme (@lolilapopa) June 23, 2022

You can read about Eric Ghigo’s sexual harassment and racism, and how Raoult protected him here:

So now, under the new leadership, IHU will continue with criminal patient abuse, research fraud, sexual harassment, racism and antisemitism as before. In fact, strike that, they won’t just continue. I was informed that IHU will be promoted from being some state-money-abandoned backwater institute to the nation’s central epidemiological reference authority. Which means not only that all IHU crooks are exonerated, they are actually promoted, and will now, led by Raoult’s buddy Fourier, get to have their revenge on all their critical peers in the country.

Some critics are already being sued, some will be sacked, others will be silenced.

C’est la France.

Maybe it is France and not Ukraine whose corruption problem should preclude it from being a member of the EU?

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Sir Martin’s new scam

My regular readers might wonder what Britain’s most beloved Nobel Prize laureate, Sir Martin Evans, is up to these days. Is he still doing business with Ajan Reginald, the struck-off dentist, pathological liar and professional crook?

Of course he does!

Their stem cell scam Celixir went defunct after Professor Patricia Murray exposed the many lies and massive fraud behind the company’s magic cell therapy for heart attack sufferers. A clinical trial in London was cancelled based on the evidence she submitted to authorities. Even The Telegraph reported.

Read the interview from our very own Trevor (Ajan) Reginald carried out by @OpenAccessGov explaining how #Novacyt is leading the way in the innovation of #clinical #diagnostics through discovery, design, and innovation: https://t.co/6FXAIerb1e pic.twitter.com/Nrv4I4ytcA

— Novacyt (@NovacytGroup) September 24, 2021

Ajan was in need of a new income source and soon found work with another biotech, Novacyt, which sought to defraud the UK public with phony COVID-19 tests. Private Eye reported about it, and Ajan abruptly left the company in January 2022.

Where will our heroes earn money now to escape abject poverty?

After their Cell Therapy Ltd/Celixir (which claimed to cure heart attack with magic iMP cells), Ajan and Sir Martin founded Oncogeni, a company which claims to cure cancer with magic MK cells.

They partnered with a certain Darrin Disley, a very questionable biotech entrepreneur who owns the regenerative medicine scam business Mogrify, and “developed a proprietary direct cellular conversion technology, which makes it possible to transform (transmogrify) any mature human cell type into any other without going through a pluripotent stem cell- or progenitor cell-state“. You laugh, but Disley’s Mogrify quackery raised many millions and is even funded with public tax money. And Mogrify used to have another British star scientist on board, Stephen P Jackson (and now he is one of Mogrify’s investors!).

And now Ajan and Sir Martin, together with Disley, sold their Oncogeni right before anyone exposes the quackery: take the money and run.

Here the biotech news:

“Medical biotechnology company, Roquefort Therapeutics, has conditionally agreed to buy UK biotech Oncogeni Ltd in return for shares.

Oncogeni develops novel patented cancer medicines, and will receive 50 million shares, worth just under £4 million ($4.9 million).

In light of the acquisition, Oncogeni co-founder Ajan Reginald will become chief executive of the group, and co-founder Martin Evans will be appointed as chief scientific officer.”

As reminder, Sir Martin won the Nobel Prize in 2007 for the discovery of embryonic stem cells, and he has been monetising his Nobel since day 1, especially by founding Cell Therapy Ltd/Celixir. Despite his old age, Evan’s greed obviously knows no limits, so here is what he and Ajan invented now:

“Oncogeni is focused on two areas of cancer research: small interfering RNA (gene silencing) and mesodermal killer (MK) cells.

MK cells research is a relatively new area where cellular medicine is engineered to kill cancer cells and enhance the effect of natural killer cells that also target the disease.

Roquefort is also acquiring lab and manufacturing facilities as part of the deal and the placing will introduce new shareholders, including the Japanese drug developer Daiichi Sankyo and CH Health, a specialist biotech venture capital investor.”

Wait what? Daiichi Sankyo? This company gave in 2016 Ajan and Sir Martin for the iMP cell licence an upfront fee of £12.5 million, you can imagine what Ajan did with the cash, in any case, it’s gone. Presumably, the Japanese wanted their money back after Celixir went tits up, but Ajan offered them something much better: shares in Oncogeni!

#ROQ is pleased to announce that it has published a corporate presentation with respect to the proposed acquisition of Oncogeni Limited and the proposed Placing, as announced by the Company on 22 June 2022.https://t.co/V25OxnVSqD#ROQ #Cancer pic.twitter.com/hHNKPzaXyt

— Roquefort Therapeutics (@RoquefortTherap) June 23, 2022

There is even a company presentation:

The MK cells of Oncogeni are at least as magical as the iMP cells of Celixir:

• “Novel engineered anti-cancer cell type invented by Nobel Laureate, Prof. Sir Martin Evans
• Engineered to kill cancer directly, attract NK cells and to activate (prime) NKs to kill cancer
• Designed to be well tolerated with a low risk of serious side effects associated with CAR-T“

Click to access ROQ-Acquisition-of-Oncogeni_June2022-FINAL-1.pdf

For those among you still hoping that Britain’s beloved Nobelist must be senile and demented, locked up in his bedroom by the all-controlling Ajan, crying into his pillow while helpless to protest about his involuntary involvement in Ajan’s scams: Sir Martin is very active in fact, travelling to cash-in on yet another speaker’s fee.

Here he just issued some awards in Wales, on 2 June 2022:

And afterwards, on 19 June 2022, he even travelled to Cyprus to give an opening lecture at the local trash university:

Btw, University of Cyprus and its School of Medicine is where the UCL fraudster Anastasis Stephanou is now employed as professor, and the dean and Evan’s host Elizabeth Johnson is another special case. Read here:

All you have to do to find research fraudsters is to follow one of them around.

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Dr Paus’ Fountain of Youth

Israeli Scientists teaming up with German private clinic entrepreneurs are an unstoppable force. Jerusalem Post excitedly reports:

“Have scientists at Haifa’s Rambam Health Care Campus and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and colleagues abroad – after two decades of research – discovered the fountain of youth? This omnipresent human desire seems closer to fulfillment, at least in laboratory mice, on whom the researchers discovered a mechanism for rejuvenating human organs. […]

Using an old skin graft on young mice, they proved that it is possible to make skin and other organs young again via a change in molecular structure through all the layers of the skin.”

Have scientists discovered the fountain of youth?
An international team of researchers led by Prof. Amos Gilhar of the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine is paving the way for skin rejuvenation. 👶https://t.co/QyhfuQloH4

— Technion Israel (@TechnionLive) June 28, 2022

The modest “fountain of youth” formulation is not even journalists’ own, but from Rambam’s press release. This is their paper:

Aviad Keren , Marta Bertolini , Yaniv Keren , Yehuda Ullmann , Ralf Paus , Amos Gilhar Human organ rejuvenation by VEGF-A: Lessons from the skin. Science Advances (2022). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abm6756

The abstract declares:

“Transplanting aged human skin onto young SCID/beige mice morphologically rejuvenates the xenotransplants. […] While intradermally injected VEGF-loaded nanoparticles suffice to induce a molecular rejuvenation signature in aged human skin on old mice, VEGF-A treatment improves key aging parameters also in isolated, organ-cultured aged human skin, i.e., in the absence of functional skin vasculature, neural, or murine host inputs. This identifies VEGF-A as the first pharmacologically pliable master pathway for human organ rejuvenation in vivo and demonstrates the potential of our humanized mouse model for clinically relevant aging research.”

The conflicts of interests are:

“M.B. and R.P. are employees of, and A.G. is a consultant for, Monasterium Laboratory GmbH, Münster, which performs dermatological contract research for the industry (www.monasteriumlab.com) but has no commercial interest in VEGF-related research or products. R.P. is the CEO of CUTANEON GmbH, Hamburg, which has an interest in the development of skin aging–related products, but holds no VEGF-related patents.”

The German dermatologist and paper’s co-author Ralf Paus owns as founder and CEO both companies, Monasterium Laboratory and CUTANEON, which is “dedicated to the development of ground-breaking cosmeceuticals, nutraceuticals, and dermatological drugs“. It is also absolutely not true that Paus has no interest in VEGF-related therapies: in 2021, he announced VEGF inhibitors to be “a novel personalized treatment approach for psoriasis” in a peer reviewed paper where we are assured that “The authors have no conflicts of interests to declare.” In that paper, Paus mentioned:

“Transgenic expression of VEGF-A in experimental models led to the development of skin lesions that share many psoriasis features.”

Right…

Personally, I fully endorse VEGF therapies, preferably with nanoparticles, for rich old gits seeking to smooth their wrinkles in private clinics in Germany and in Israel. Let them get psoriasis, cancer and whatever else those VEGF treatment may result in (but certainly not rejuvenation).

Professor Ralf Paus: “This is actually a rather amazing finding”. Hope for baldness cure as scientists trigger hair growth with chemical used in perfumes https://t.co/rG0NTFlzB8 pic.twitter.com/vTnDYzJcCm

— UoM Biology, Medicine and Health (@FBMH_UoM) September 19, 2018

Btw, Professor Paus retired at several universities, probably to focus on his business? University of Lübeck: retired. University of Münster: retired. University of Manchester: retired. University of Miami: not sure, but looks like it.

But maybe these retirements are somehow connected to Ralf Paus being the husband of Silvana Bulfone-Paus? Yes, hers was Germany’s biggest research fraud scandal a decade ago, which went through all the national news. There were 12 retractions and research misconduct findings by DFG (read here). Der Spiegel mentioned in 2012:

“Ralf Paus, husband of Bulfone-Paus, is also under suspicion of manipulation. Disciplinary proceedings are underway against him and his wife at the University of Lübeck, where both hold professorships. The scientists deny the allegations and have taken legal action, says university press spokesman Rüdiger Labahn. Neither the results of the commission of inquiry nor details of the disciplinary proceedings are known.”

The zombie scientist Silvana Bulfone-Paus however remains professor at University of Manchester where she still leads a lab and publishes papers, in MDPI and Frontiers. And her husband makes some serious money back in Germany by providing perfectly reliably and scientifically impeccable preclinical dermatology research services to paying clients in academia and industry. Even training PhD students in process.

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Scholarly Publishing

Surprise Retraction

Alexander Magazinov once tried to get a fraudulent paper retracted. It was this one:

Rady E. El-Araby, Mahmoud A. Khalifa , Mona M. Zoheiry , Manal Y. Zahran , Mohamed I. Rady , Raafat A. Ibrahim , Mohamed D. El-Talkawy , Faiza M. Essawy The interaction between microRNA-152 and DNA methyltransferase-1 as an epigenetic prognostic biomarker in HCV-induced liver cirrhosis and HCC patients Cancer Gene Therapy (2020) doi: 10.1038/s41417-019-0123-9

For the standards of this Nature Publishing Group journal, which is full of Chinese papermill fabrications, the Egyptian paper didn’t even look that obviously fake.

In October 2021, Magazinov posted his concerns on PubPeer and shared them with the publisher Springer Nature and COPE:

“I found a series of 4 papers.

(A) DOI 10.1186/s43042-020-0048-8, in Egyptian Journal of Medical Human Genetics.

(B) no DOI immediately available, https link, in Al-Azhar Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences.

(C) DOI 10.1038/s41417-019-0123-9, in Cancer Gene Therapy.

(D) DOI 10.1016/j.genrep.2019.100452 in Gene Reports.

(A) and (B) cite the same approval document, (C) and (D) also cite the same approval document, different from (A) and (B).

The authors listed for (C) and (D) are the same. For (A) and (B) the author lists are slightly different, and different from (C) and (D), but have a large overlap.

Of interest are socdem + lab analyses + ultrasound result tables. The N values are different between (A) and (B) / (C) and (D). Moreover, the numbers for cirrhosis / splenomegaly / ascites patients are different across all tables, suggesting that these studies deal with 4 different samples. However, despite differences, there are many unnaturally repeated values across the tables, which the reader will easily spot.[…]

For (C) numbers of male / female members in groups 1a and 2 do not add up to respective N. The same numbers and the same inconsistency are in (D), too.”

On 8 November 2021, COPE asked the journal’s academic editor Georgios Giamas and the publishes Springer Nature to investigate. Now, Giamas, professor at the University of Sussex, is a protege of the infamous research cheater, quack healer, patient scammer, Imperial College professor and Oncogene editor Justin Stebbing. Giamas has with and without Stebbing an impressive record of forged data on PubPeer, one particularity fraudulent paper (Giamas et al NAR 2009) was eventually retracted.

So you can’t expect much from Giamas. But Virginia Mercer, Senior Editor for Medicine and Life Sciences at Springer Nature, announced to investigate. On 28 February 2022, she informed Magazinov:

“I have discussed your comment with the Editor-in-Chief and the authors and we don’t agree there is an issue here or that anything else needs to be done.

The ROC curve is correct and the settings that were made are correct. The only difference was in the gender column, where there were unwritten cases, but they were modified in the correction, the rest of the parameters in the study were prepared correctly.

Here we are talking about the number of the samples not the interpretation/validity of the data.

The authors provided all the raw data so we don’t think there is anything of concern.“

A correction was issued in parallel. But on 22 June 2022, Mercer informed COPE:

“For your information, this paper has now been retracted.“

That was because Magazinov found more issues with that paper, namely in Figures 3, 4, 5 and 6.

The retraction notice from 22 June 2022 went:

“The Editor-in-Chief has retracted this Article. After publication, concerns were raised regarding the numbers of patients in various groups in Table 3, which the Authors addressed via Correction [1]. However, further similar issues have been identified in Figs. 3–6, which affect the results and conclusions of this study. The numbers of data points in these figures do not match the group descriptions in the Materials and methods. Additionally, the Authors’ subsequent study [2] appears to report the same patient recruitment period from the same institution as well as the same inclusion and exclusion criteria, but contains a higher number of patients than this Article. The Authors have been unable to sufficiently explain these discrepancies.”

As you can read, the credit for Magazinov’s investigation went entirely to the Editor-in-Chief Georgios Giamas. Maybe Springer Nature find it funny. But then again, they also find it funny to keep Giamas and Stebbing as editors. At least there was a retraction, because at Wiley Magazinov was much less successful.

Here is a paper from Giamas PhD period in Germany:

Georgios Giamas, Heidrun Hirner , Levani Shoshiashvili , Arnhild Grothey , Susanne Gessert , Michael Kühl , Doris Henne-Bruns , Constantinos E. Vorgias , Uwe Knippschild Phosphorylation of CK1δ: identification of Ser370 as the major phosphorylation site targeted by PKA in vitro and in vivo Biochemical Journal (2007) doi: 10.1042/bj20070091

This was also fixed with a correction.

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Our sincerest apologies

Speaking of Stebbing and his Nature publishing group journal Oncogene.

Look what they corrected:

Jie Zheng , Hui Zhang, Ranran Ma , Haiting Liu , Peng Gao Long non-coding RNA KRT19P3 suppresses proliferation and metastasis through COPS7A-mediated NF-κB pathway in gastric cancer Oncogene (2019) doi: 10.1038/s41388-019-0934-z 

The lead author Jie Zheng (or maybe actually the papermill manager impersonating his distraught customer) commented on PubPeer in April 2022 and soon after, on 12 May 2022 a Correction was published with an almost identical text:

“The authors mistakenly uploaded the representative images of the si-KRT19P3-1 group (Fig. 3B SGC7901 migration and invasion). The authors have restored the correct Transwell images in Fig. 3B as below. This correction does not influence the results of our study’s conclusion. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused.”

But of course there was more, as Hoya Camphorofolia found out:

Appreciate the overlay:

Jie Zheng again replied:

“We select one of the representative images for publication and save the other images. all the experiments have been repeated at least 3 times, there is no effect on the interpretation or conclusion of this article.The unintentional errors might cause misunderstand to the editor, reviewers and readers. The authors take full responsibility for this unintentional error. To better reduce the effect of these mistakes, The corrections were made as above.Most importantly, we regret the mistake, we offer our sincerest apologies for our mistakes and oversight as it was never our intention to mislead any readers. We ensure that something like never happens again. Best wished to you!“

And reminded everyone that the paper has already been corrected, case clsoed.

Now you tell me: why is Springer Nature keeping such characters like Stebbing and Giamas as their Editors-in-Chief? Is it despite or because of their own fraud records? Is it despite of their tolerance for Chinese papermill fraud, or exactly because of it?

Are these publishers really sad about the papermill infestations, or angry about my sleuths colleagues finding them out?

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News in Tweets

• Springer Nature corrects another utterly fake paper (Thenmozhi et al 2015). Why such tolerance for fraud? Well, an associate editor of Neurochemical Research is antivaxxer and covidiot Michael Aschner (on board of various pseudoscience quackery journals of Elsevier).

I just added an additional (likely) problem. Maybe the journal will make a better decision when they look at this again. pic.twitter.com/UJ5s7cSiPe

— Cheshire (@Thatsregrettab1) June 26, 2022

• Rule Number One in Scholarly Publishing: Proclaim loudly (chest beating, legs spread, etc) that nobody cares more about research integrity than you. Then publish all the fraud you get your hands on, earn good solid cash in the process. As this little Italian papermill journal, European Review for Medical and Pharmacological Sciences, does.

In a 2020 Editorial, the editors of ERMPS appeared to take a strong stance against science misconduct.
"We firmly disapprove any kind of data manipulation", they wrote.https://t.co/XUwbeCZLk0 pic.twitter.com/gl6CYzZAG9

— Elisabeth Bik (@MicrobiomDigest) June 25, 2022

• The lab of Abdellah Mansouri at UMR 1149 Inserm – Université Paris Diderot has been naughty. Cheshire’s PubPeer findings here.

Oopsies.

Courtesy of our friends @inserm and @LiebertPub journal Antioxidants & Redox Signaling. Fortunately, @LiebertPub cares about research integrity.https://t.co/VfAE5NGPgH (there's more in this paper if you want to try your hand). pic.twitter.com/CjToxMemCY

— Cheshire (@Thatsregrettab1) June 25, 2022

Oopsies.

Courtesy of our friends @inserm and @JPET_Journal.https://t.co/ZTtcFb3dlO 🪱🪱🪱 pic.twitter.com/KTLoo2IrJl

— Cheshire (@Thatsregrettab1) June 25, 2022

• Elsewhere in France, the lab of Pascale Jeannin at University of Angers has been naughty, too. Cheshire’s PubPeer findings here.

Oopsies.

Courtesy of @BloodJournal and again our friends @inserm and elsewhere. This looks deliberate to me.https://t.co/kp1cZXHpYI pic.twitter.com/Hsw4rpRDyk

— Cheshire (@Thatsregrettab1) June 23, 2022

Oopsies.

Courtesy of @Gut_BMJ and researchers @inserm and elsewhere.https://t.co/DLqIEPEsGd pic.twitter.com/OkfHdNDjEK

— Cheshire (@Thatsregrettab1) June 23, 2022

• Konrad Hochedinger, hailing from Germany, trained by Rudolph Jaenisch and now professor at Broad Institute in Harvard, is one of the biggest stem cell research bigwigs. Here likely a clue to his success. Btw, this fake paperwas also published in Oncogene: Hochedinger et al 2022.

Science isn't broken. Science is a joke.

Why expect newer researchers to respect the supposed integrity of #Science when senior researchers won't fix their own ugly history? 20-year old @oncogenejournal paper by Hochedlinger et al @MassGeneralNews.https://t.co/06gNmFoNAj pic.twitter.com/aCsdEydQ6F

— Cheshire (@Thatsregrettab1) June 22, 2022

• Smut Clyde plagiarised by Chinese authorities: “Concerns regarding data integrity were raised by the National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which were based on a PubPeer thread showing potentially hand-drawn flow cytometry histograms and western blots devoid of background with sausage-shaped bands (https://pubpeer.com/publications/E73F538F46E201FF3575C965B5147E)“. (Retraction notice for Wang et al 2019)

Research methods of Chinese science-integrity agencies:
1. Drink tea.
2. Check what people have posted on @Pubpeer.https://t.co/KQ4KBgkBGehttps://t.co/9AiA7gwUOq pic.twitter.com/OFhLqhybJ0

— Smut Clyde, X-Ray Haruspex (@SmutClyde) June 25, 2022

• Steve Kirsch made billions in IT, but as a covid expert he is an utter failure. Ivermectin, fluvoxamine, now look at this list:

Anti-vax lunatic Steve Kirsch spent a year claiming Covid is "just a cold."

So what is he doing now that he HAS Covid? pic.twitter.com/GDbOjvZ1Cf

— The Real Truther (@thereal_truther) June 27, 2022

• Spiegel reports that Charité Berlin distances itself from their professor Harald Matthes, because of the “methodological weaknesses” in his ImpfSurv study about COVID-19 vaccinations where he claimed to have found massively under-reported side effects and accused Paul-Ehrlich-Institue of a cover-up (here is his ImpfSurv report). That is all very decent from Charité, but thing is, Matthes is president of the German Academy for Homeopathy and Naturopathic Treatment and board member of the Hufeland Society (for alternative medicine). His employment at Charité is financed since 2017 by an “Endowed professorship for integrative and anthroposophic medicine“, and yet, and yet the venerated science-devoted elite medical school doesn’t seem to be distancing themselves from the quack money Matthes brings.

Spannend: Es geht um Die Thesen von Harald Matthes, Stiftungsprofessor für Integrative und Anthroposophische Medizin an der Charité. Who would have thought. https://t.co/14QK4g2IYz

— Carsten Spille 🇺🇦 (@CarstenSpille) June 25, 2022

• How the much-celebrated xeno-transplant of a gene-engineered pig heart to a human patient fared: “A week later, a second biopsy indicated that about 40 percent of the heart muscle cells in the transplant were dead or dying, even though there were still no indications of rejection in the tissue. That level of damage brought an end to things: “We concluded that an irreversible injury to the xenograft was present and, with the patient’s family at the bedside, compassionately withdrew life support on day 60 after transplantation.” (Ars Technica) Paper: Griffith et al NEJM (2022)

While the team behind the xenotransplantation of a pig heart into a human has elaborated on how they prepared for the procedure, it'll still take some time to fully understand what went wrong.https://t.co/sOM09wV4Qo

— Ars Technica (@arstechnica) June 27, 2022

• Stephen Buranyi‘s long read in The Guardian about Darwinian evolution, modern synthesis theory and what the alternatives are: “There are certain core evolutionary principles that no scientist seriously questions. Everyone agrees that natural selection plays a role, as does mutation and random chance. But how exactly these processes interact – and whether other forces might also be at work – has become the subject of bitter dispute.“

Do we need a new theory of evolution? by @stephenburanyi https://t.co/rtJTLruJ3z

— The Guardian Long Read (@gdnlongread) June 28, 2022

• Swedish state prosecutor announced to appeal the Stockholm’s court decision to let the deadly trachea transplant surgeon Paolo Macchiarini walk out free with a suspended sentence (Independent).

Chief Prosecutor in Macchiarini case appeals against suspended sentence: “In all cases, the interventions were contrary to science and best practice," Mikael Björk said in a statement Wednesday announcing the appeal to the Svea Court of Appeal.

https://t.co/H4XkhPos0E

— Patricia Murray (@PMurray_65) June 29, 2022

• In memoriam. Although one does wonder if Dr Vovka Zelenko tried to cure his cancer with chloroquine, azithromycin and zinc. He was 49 and leaves behind 8 children, a wife, and a distraught community of antivaxxer covidiots.

A notice in the presshttps://t.co/Ev63x0eD0q

— Laura Clemens (@LauraCIemens) June 30, 2022

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