Schneider Shorts of 30 December 2022 – A lazy end-of-the year holidays Shorts with 11 most read articles on For Better Science of 2022, plus some tweets, and musings on war and climate change. See you next year! Слава Україні! Героям слава!

Most-Read of 2022

1. Academia in upheaval: what’s the point of being a professor if you can’t exploit your female subordinates for sex? Case of David Sabatini:

2. The Lizard People behind the Great Replacement conspiracy who released COVID-19 in order to neuter and microchip you with vaccines, have been denying you the REAL pandemic cures all this time. Only prophets like Dr Robert Malone know what really is going on.

3. There doesn’t seem to be many countries where people care about research fraud. Chile was one of them in 2021, with the Claudio Hetz affair. This article by Aneurus Inconstans became a surprise hit with readers in Argentina:

4. The first ever article which started For Better Science in 2015. An evergreen about world’s bestest Open Access publisher, Frontiers:

5. It seems, greedy academics with their biotech spin-offs agreed to use research fraud to keep the debunked amyloid plaque origin theory of Alzheimer’s alive. Case of Sylvain Lesne:

6. When mTORman David Sabatini was sacked for sexual harassment, academics and journalists cried out that the greatest science genius of our times has been cancelled and we won’t ever find a cure for cancer now. Yeah right.

7. And suddenly the world was shocked to discover that even Nobel Prize winners are not above such pedestrian things as research fraud. When Gregg Semenza‘s papers in PNAS got retracted in September 2022, this older article suddenly was-re-discovered.

8. Alzheimer’s fraud again, but this time at the cartoonishly bad level of a clown-slapstick variety. Maybe this is why people refuse to believe that the billion dollar heavy biotech scam Cassava Sciences is nothing but totally criminal.

9. Elsevier is a very successful scholarly publisher not because they publish good quality science, but because they publish every fraud, quackery and pseudoscience trash and don’t retract it unless they really have to. Behold, some COVID-19 antivaxxery:

10. The research community of plant scientists is much less tolerant towards research fraud than biomedicine. It seems this article about the alleged good guy in the plant field, Rick Vierstra, made many upset:

11. This one became quite popular with psychologists. A story about the convicted research cheater Lorenza Colzato and her husband, PhD mentor, and then institute director and co-author on fake papers, Bernhard Hommel.

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Russia’s War on Ukraine

Outside of the academic ivory tower, there is a genocidal war of aggression going on. I blogged about russia’s war on Ukraine several times. Much changed since: Ukraine is winning, and russia sends its zombies to die in masses as cannon fodder. The discussion moved from being ready to sacrifice 40 million Ukrainians to russia’s imperial plans of slavery and genocide onto a new understanding that russia is nothing but a fascist shithole which entire cultural heritage consists these days of racism, thievery, rape and drunk violence. Many dear-held beliefs about russia and Ukraine have been abandoned, even putler’s threats of a nuclear war seem no more credible than his other drivel.

And yet one understanding still has not fully come through. This is a war entirely financed and made possible by fossil fuels. And the climate change did not take a leave of absence just because there is a war on. But how did the states react? We build liquefied gas terminals to become independent from russia, we place embargoes on russia oil (but even then we keep buying russian oil and gas via grey market). We now revive nuclear energy because the impending disaster of the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant doesn’t scare us. After all, we just assume our enemies won’t go for OUR nuclear power plants.

Why aren’t we building masses of windmills and solar modules? Why don’t we switch from cars to public transport, at least to conserve fossil fuels? And speaking of climate change and global food security: How did this happen that the bulk of Ukrainian grain exports are being shipped straight for meat industry as livestock fodder?

We are very slow learners it seems. But climate disaster isn’t waiting.

PS: Russia’s science is mostly papermill trash anyway. It is best to be boycotted.

PPS: Слава Україні! Героям слава!

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News in Tweets

• Stanford Daily : “Prominent Stanford geneticist Stan Cohen has paid $29.2 million in damages after losing a lengthy court battle. Cohen was found to have committed “a species of actual fraud and…deceit” in misleading investors into a biotechnology company he founded in 2016. […] The award-winning scientist claimed to have found a cure for the neurodegenerative and ultimately fatal Huntington’s disease. He also claimed the treatment he’d discovered had already been approved by the FDA for use in unrelated treatments. […] the drug had been withdrawn by the FDA in 1976 for its “potentially deadly side effects” and placed on the “DO NOT COMPOUND” list after causing the loss of limbs and death.” All aside, anyone else wondering why it is normal that an academic can repay $30 million debt out of his private pocket?

SCOOP: Stanford professor paid $29m to investors today after a court found he misled them about a drug that killed people and led to loss of limbs. Stan Cohen, the award winning geneticist, claimed he had cured Huntington’s disease.https://t.co/A6pxKVPmVq

— The Stanford Daily (@StanfordDaily) December 22, 2022

• The sacked sexual harasser David Sabatini (see above) trolls on Twitter using various sockpuppet accounts (including female). Now he shared the full investigative report by his former employer, the Whitehead Institute. Enjoy his inane and dumb comments. To think that people used to consider Sabatini a genius…

David Sabatini (or an associate) has shared the Whitehead investigation report somehow thinking things like this exonerate him. It's the Bill Clinton defense.https://t.co/pjiH3AJkLD pic.twitter.com/4GEWyMSqRh

— Cheshire (@Thatsregrettab1) December 21, 2022

• Now David Sabatini’s equally intelligent professorial brother Bernardo decided, hey, our names sounds vaguely Italian, let’s threaten women mafia-style! What a family.

@pearlf is spreading lies about my brother. She is committing libel and should be careful. @mTOR_Leaks

— Bernardo Sabatini (@blsabatini) December 22, 2022

• Herbert Gleiter, German octogenarian emeritus professor of nanotechnology, academician and best friend of scamference fraudster Ashutosh Tiwari, started anew in China, with an institute named after himself: “The Herbert Gleiter Institute of Nanoscience” at the Nanjing University of Science and Technology. It seems the institute’s “research” consists of publishing data stolen elsewhere, and not answering emails when caught. Hence, retraction for Gleiter et al 2022: “The Editor in Chief has retracted this article because the authors did not have the ownership of the data reported. Japan Synchrotron Radiation Research Institute confirmed that the authors of this article were not on the team that collected the data on Spring8 equipment.”

Straying on @RetractionWatch's turf, because I cannot help wondering what happened here.https://t.co/HPlsq5bXhF
Someone seems to have written a paper based on stolen data. Authors Leitner & Hahn signed the paper, then ignored emails from the editor. pic.twitter.com/U7BsBGTU8G

— Smut Clyde, X-Ray Haruspex (@SmutClyde) December 27, 2022

• The new Alzheimer’s drug by Eisai and Biogen is working like a charm. Already third death in the clinical trial: “Science has obtained medical records showing a 79-year-old Florida woman participating in an ongoing trial of the antibody died in mid-September after experiencing extensive brain swelling and bleeding, as well as seizures. Multiple neuroscientists who reviewed the records at Science’s request believe her death was likely caused by the antibody, lecanemab.” On the other head, dead people don’t suffer from Alzheimer’s!

my latest: Scientists tie third clinical trial death to experimental Alzheimer’s drug lecanemab – Amid lobbying for its approval by FDA, newly revealed death adds to doubts about safety of antiamyloid antibody https://t.co/u3ZRiJupQM

— Charles Piller (@cpiller) December 21, 2022

• Mark Lowdell‘s and Linda Powers’ biotech business with DCVax once again denounced as dangerous scam. By Preusser & van den Bent 2022: “In summary, despite this report on a research program spanning 15 years, clear conclusions on the activity of DCVax-L in glioblastoma cannot be drawn – the major methodological limitations of the recent publication with clear confounding factors simply do not allow that. Moreover, while the investigators describe their approach as innovative with wider general applicability, the mutation of a negative randomized clinical trial with replacement of primary and secondary endpoints as well post-hoc introduction of ‘control patients’ by pooled and inferred external control data requires validation by prospective studies before it is considered for implementation as high-level evidence.”

It's encouraging to see the publication of peer-reviewed critiques of $NWBO 's DCVax Phase 3 study, like this, today, in Neuro-Onchttps://t.co/omoaPpLr18

The authors explain clearly why the study was negative, and from this, it's clear DCVax won't be approved anywhere.

— Adam Feuerstein (@adamfeuerstein) December 23, 2022

• Smut Clyde on how publishers deal with papermill fraud: “TBF the original References list was garbage: a string of irrelevant citations, boosting the metrics of a cabal of Highly Cited Researchers (G. Manogaran and his mates). How TF was this paper ever accepted, with none of the claims in the text supported by relevant citations? And how TF could the editors of ‘Multimedia Tools and Applications’ accept the total excision of this garbage, and its replacement with a sparkling new References List? This is a rhetorical question; the equally rhetorical answer is “MTAP”.“

@RetractionWatch
A groundbreaking correction: https://t.co/dn4Ztt8YGM
"The reference list in the original publication of this article contains errors. The correct references are given below."
Rather than just removing Ref [9], the authors replaced the *entire Reference list*. pic.twitter.com/OM3dFQLLPc

— Smut Clyde, X-Ray Haruspex (@SmutClyde) December 22, 2022

• Tiger BB8 a funny paper, titled: “Faith in Marxism is our inner power winning the war over covid pandemic Guess that’s the neat justification why we Chinese do not need Westerners’ mRNA vaccines nor Paxlovid“

Paper title: Title: Faith in Marxism is our inner power winning the war over covid pandemic
Guess that's the neat justification why we Chinese do no need Westerners' mRNA vaccines nor Paxlovid pic.twitter.com/LByGzDKKAB

— 虎仔 🇺🇦 (@TigerBB8) December 24, 2022

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