Schneider Shorts 10.03.2023 – An internet troll trying to waste other peoples time

Schneider Shorts of 10 March 2023 – two science bigwigs caught with unaffected conclusions, return of superconductive fraud in Nature, other examples of who’s trustworthy and who isn’t, what Stanford president knew, some retractions, MDPI fighting papermills, a German journal can’t stop papermilling, and finally, who blew up Nord Stream pipelines?

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Russia’s War on Ukraine

Nord Stream OSINT

In September 2022, the russian underwater gas pipeline to Germany called Nord Stream mysteriously blew up. Both strands of the older Nord Stream 2 (NS2) pipeline, and one of the two strands of the newly built (but never activated) Nord Steam 2 (NS2) suddenly exploded. There have been investigations shrouded in secrecy, russia was swift to accuse USA of blowing the pipelines and western media were not entirely opposed to this theory. After all, USA had a motive: to prevent Germany from starting up NS2!

But then, Germany (thanks to the Green minister for economy) rapidly divested from russian gas, despite an existing and functioning land pipeline. The US culprit theory quietly fizzled out, then a senile old man in USA revived it, only to be debunked again.

Now the media, especially New York Times and the German Tagesschau (public TV) and Zeit (newspaper) run with an even better story: the Ukrainians did it! This is based on unnamed sources as well as extremely shaky circumstantial evidence which might just as well has been planted by russians, as the journalists admit somewhere in their text. But then again, why would russians send western journalists on false trails to discredit Ukraine, right? Perish the thought. NYT writes gleefully:

“Any suggestion of Ukrainian involvement, whether direct or indirect, could upset the delicate relationship between Ukraine and Germany, souring support among a German public that has swallowed high energy prices in the name of solidarity. […] Any findings that put blame on Kyiv or Ukrainian proxies could prompt a backlash in Europe and make it harder for the West to maintain a united front in support of Ukraine.”

These pathologically russophobic Ukrainians, as we keep learning from western media, are obsessed with committing heinous crimes to frame russians! I recall Tagesschau articles which toyed with the version of Ukrainians blowing up the birth clinic and the drama theatre in Mariupol, bombing the Kramatorsk train station and the POW barrack in Olenivka, basically mass-murdering own people for no other reason but to blame russia, and the sole evidence for these versions was: russian TV says so. I also recall NYT editorials demanding that Ukraine unconditionally surrenders, and failing that, to stop giving arms to Ukraine.

So why not trying to undermine the support for Ukraine by claiming without any actual proof that Ukrainians blew up the Nord Stream pipeline in order to leave the totally dependent Germany without russian gas in winter? Biting the hand that feeds them, see what rotten criminal Nazi bunch these Ukrainians are?

Smut Clyde pointed me to an alternative investigation of Nord Stream explosions, by Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) analyst Oliver Alexander. Key quote:

“It was in no party’s interests to destroy 3 of the 4 Nord Stream lines. It can be argued that the US/NATO had motivation to destroy all 4 lines. At the same time it can be argued that Russia had motivation to blow NS1, but not NS2. The destruction of 3 was always a mystery.

I believe explosives were planted on the two lines of Nord Stream 1, possibly by the Minerva Julie or while the ship was providing cover for the operation. This ship had a very strange track directly above the location of the NS1 explosions from the 5th September to 13th September while on route to Saint Petersburg. […]

I theorize that the initial Nord Stream 2 rupture was an accident, potentially the result poor workmanship by the Akademik Cherskiy [russian ship which laid NS2, -LS] due to an inadequate vessel and inexperienced crew.

Once this pipe had ruptured, the remaining pipes would probably be inspected to ensure that there was no risk of further leaks. This process would have revealed the explosives planted on the Nord Stream 1 pipes. Due to this the plan to potentially destroy Nord Stream 1 in the future was accelerated and the explosives were detonated 17 hours after the initial rupture at 19:03 local time.

Destroying Nord Stream 1 would allow Russia to increase pressure on Germany, while at the same time not being a massive loss, as they stated that it was “out of commission”. Russia had stated that the decreased flow and eventual shutdown of Nord Stream 1 was caused by European Union sanctions against Russia, which had resulted in technical problems they could not remedy.

This would leave the operational, but never opened Nord Stream 2 available to supply Germany with natural gas immediately after the shock of the destruction of Nord Stream 1. This is something Putin still offered Germany through the one remaining Nord Stream 2 line. Germany turned down the offer.

I believe that the charges were in place on Nord Stream 1, hoping for Germany and Europe to be in a more dire situation during the winter. They would then be blown in an attempt to pressure Europe to give up on Ukraine.”

Additional research over the past 3 days has made me change my initial hypothesis and point my finger at the Akademik Chernskiy as the cause of the Southern Nord Stream 2 rupture. A vessel ill-equipped for the task that ran into many problems.https://t.co/3rgh2hW4d0

— Oliver Alexander (@OAlexanderDK) February 26, 2023

Of course it’s a theory, one among many, even if russian propensity both for shoddy work and for terrorism are facts of life. Alexander’s version is possibly just as circumstantial as shaky as the “Ukrainians did it!” one pushed by NYT and the German media. But at least it isn’t designed to do damage to the efforts to end human suffering in Ukraine. The blog post ends with:

“This scenario also can help to explain why both sides of the conflict are relatively quite regarding the release of information on the investigation to the public. It is in Russia’s best interest to not mention that the NS2 leak may have been the result of poor workmanship, as this helps not leave Nord Stream AG and the operator of the Akademik Cherskiy open to liability. At the same time the West and NATO are happy continuing to state that all of the Nord Stream leaks are the result of direct sabotage.”

If our investigators admit russia blew up NS1, Germany and the NATO must retaliate. If we blame Ukrainians, we must do nothing, just sit back and watch them die. Until putin’s murderous ruscism comes for us.

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Science Elites

The exemplificative panel

Meet an Italian star of biomedical research: Luca Scorrano, professor of the University of Padua and the former Scientific Director of the Veneto Institute of Molecular Medicine (VIMM) in Italy.

Before we look at what his lab published on the topic of mitochondria biology, a brief reminder. In 2020, the research cheater Pier Paolo Pandolfi, freshly sacked in Harvard of sexual harassment (as revealed by Michael Balter), was about to be appointed as the new scientific director of VIMM, to succeed Scorrano. But because of my reporting (read below), the affair was picked up by Italian media, Italian women scientists protested, the international advisory board of VIMM put its foot down (also because of Pandolfi’s fake science), so this dirty old man did not come to VIMM at all, despite his loud protests and the unwavering support of the foundation which sponsors VIMM.

Pandolfi threatened to sue me and Balter, but didn’t, and is now hiding in some trash institute in Nevada. It is unclear from the VIMM website if the institute has a scientific director at all.

And now, a paper by Scorrano’s lab. It was cited over 1000 times, which probably means it is THAT reproducible. Stop sniggering, you all.

These microscopy images are very, very fake. But the significant coauthor is the Alzheimer’s researcher Bart De Strooper, professor at KU Leuven in Belgium and director of the UK Dementia Research Institute at UCL, disagrees. He wrote to me in an email that he solicited an expert opinion by his institute’s (UCL? KU Leuven?) research integrity manager:

“Here is his first analysis which minimally indicate that your accusations are less obvious than you seem to think.  

“Frezza et al 2006:  I see the similarities that have been highlighted at PubPeer too, but when I blow up the pictures I do not immediately see sharp edges or other clear signs of copy-paste of cells into those pictures. I am not an expert on the contents of this paper, but when I look at these pictures the things that are highlighted with arrows in the original picture, then these are not the structures that are now highlighted in pubpeer as possibly duplicated. I have difficulties to see what one would gain in these pictures by adding in some duplications. Would it be because some intact structures should be visible too? And in terms of the biology of what one is looking at in these pictures; does one expect that the structures are very similar to each other? Or is there normally a much higher variability in these structures?”“

De Strooper refused to tell me which of his two institutions issued such verdict. But KU Leuven assured me it wasn’t them. Which leaves UCL, well-experienced in such things. UCL didn’t reply to me.

The first author, Christian Frezza, is now the DFG-funded Alexander von Humboldt Professor at the University of Cologne in Germany. He told me he and Scorrano are “locating the files“, and announced on PubPeer:

“We appreciate your comments and we thank you for pointing this out. We are actively looking to find the original data and the intermediate figure assemblies. As you might imagine this will take considerable time because the paper is 17 years old and data were acquired 18-20 years ago.“

The problem is even bigger. This collaborative study was published in the same Cell issue back-to-back with another collaborative study by the same set of key authors. And that one also has a fake figure!

If you think this image reuse (after rotation and massive signal adjustment!) may have happened by an inadvertent honest mistake, then you probably also believe in Babbo Natale.

De Strooper however was convinced that also this duplication doesn’t affect any of the conclusions at all, which he explained on PubPeer:

“Our intention as authors is to verify that if a mistake was made, it was limited to the cells shown in the exemplificative panel and not to the actual data used for the quantification related to this particular panel.“

The problem is even bigger. Scorrano’s papers in top journals have problems even without Frezza. This Nature paper was corrected in 2014:

Olga Martins De Brito , Luca Scorrano Mitofusin 2 tethers endoplasmic reticulum to mitochondria Nature (2008) doi: 10.1038/nature07534 

However, Nature decided to correct only Figure 1a, because otherwise they would have to retract this paper for fraud, not a good look for everyone involved. So this is what we were told in the 2014 Corrigendum:

“In Fig. 1a of this Article, the representative image of a volume-rendered three-dimensional reconstruction of a z-stack of confocal images of endoplasmic-reticulum-targeted yellow fluorescent protein (ER-YFP) in a Mfn2^−/− cell expressing MFN2^IYFFT and that of a Mfn1^−/− cell appear to be duplicated. Because the original raw data could not be located, we were unable to verify definitively whether the data in the original figure were indeed inadvertently duplicated. We therefore obtained new images under the same experimental conditions. […] This does not affect any of our results.”

This 2008 Nature paper was only 6 years old in 2014 and raw data was already unavailable. Trust them to find anything for the two 2006 Cell papers now. Luckily for the authors, this journal is a huge fraud factory which just doesn’t care.

I exchanged several emails with Scorrano, and suggested he shares the original high-resolution figures he sent to Nature and Cell. These are surely still easy to find on his office computer and institute’s servers, the files stored in neat digital folders or attached to emails. This was Scorrano’s reply:

“We recall (but we are not sure) that at that time we had to submit the final figures by mail, and they were scanned at the journal to prepare the printed version of the journal. We are looking for the file used to print the figures out for mailing them.“

Nice try. In the 1980ies people used to mail their figures as hard copies in envelopes to editorial offices in USA, but by the turn of the century everyone, all over the world, was uploading figures digitally. Scorrano apologised and announced to keep looking for the files. While at it, he can fix this Science paper as well:

It was just a few months old when flagged on PubPeer in 2014. The first author, now assistant professor at Kanazawa University in Japan, immediately admitted a duplication which according to her “inadvertently” got flipped and rotated. However, no correction was issued almost a decade later. Also in the case of a duplicated image in Pernas et al Cell Metabolism 2018, a correction was announced on PubPeer (in 2020) but never materialised. I know, I know: Scorrano must have mailed the printouts of the corrected figures to the editors in USA in an envelope, and those unfortunately got lost on their way!

The problem is even bigger. De Strooper told me:

“My concern is indeed in the first place whether your remarks are pertinent and affect the resulting scientific conclusions. A more fair attitude would be to give us and the colleagues who assembled these figures the time to respond to the criticism and to wait with accusations until the investigation has been finished.“

You should see his own PubPeer record and who he published with.

• His KU Leuven colleague Catherine Verfaille, when she was long since known to be a cheating zombie scientist. García-León et al 2018 was fixed with a correction: “The modifications performed or the previous insertion of two consecutive pictures with partial overlap does not change the outcome or any of the conclusions of the study.“

• German nightmare ophthalmologist Antonia Joussen (Cai et al 2012)
• Claudia Bagni of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland (PubPeer record here).
• French fraud-peddler Frédéric Checler (huge PubPeer record), example:

Bruno Vincent , Erwan Paitel , Paul Saftig , Yveline Frobert , Dieter Hartmann , Bart De Strooper, Jacques Grassi , Elvira Lopez-Perez , Frédéric Checler The disintegrins ADAM10 and TACE contribute to the constitutive and phorbol ester-regulated normal cleavage of the cellular prion protein Journal of Biological Chemistry (2001) doi: 10.1074/jbc.m105677200

But this badly fake Figure 5B is from De Strooper’s own lab, flagged in 2019:

Leen Bammens , Lucía Chávez-Gutiérrez , Alexandra Tolia , An Zwijsen , Bart De Strooper Functional and Topological Analysis of Pen-2, the Fourth Subunit of the γ-Secretase Complex Journal of Biological Chemistry (2011) doi: 10.1074/jbc.m110.216978 

You probably can imagine that De Strooper, who only replied on PubPeer 3 years later, in December 2022, saw no conclusions affected by that fraud:

“Although no alterations to the conclusions of the paper have to be made, we consider it important to correct Figure 5 as a matter of principle. We have contacted the journal and are awaiting further instructions.”

Same arrogant reply here:

Sébastien S Hébert , Lutgarde Serneels , Alexandra Tolia , Katleen Craessaerts , Carmen Derks , Mikhail A Filippov , Ulrike Müller , Bart De Strooper Regulated intramembrane proteolysis of amyloid precursor protein and regulation of expression of putative target genes EMBO reports (2006) doi: 10.1038/sj.embor.7400704 

“While we have therefore no reason to doubt the data, it remains, in the absence of the original data difficult to definitively rule out any errors made when these figures were assembled. They remain minor and do not affect the scientific conclusions of the paper at all, and importantly, the conclusions have been confirmed over the years“

Are you surprised that De Strooper’s raw data also disappeared, leaving behind only unaffected conclusions?

This De Stropper paper is about very stealthily spliced gels (meaning at best that there is no proper loading control), his PubPeer reaction is brilliant.

Ready for De Strooper?

“How do I know that you are not an internet troll trying to waste other peoples time? Are you a scientist? Did you read the paper? […] no scientist in the world who would raise questions about that. […] In conclusion you point correctly out that this is an assembled blot. There is nothing wrong with it.“

Returning to the two Cell papers from 2006 one can safely say it doesn’t matter anymore who faked which figure. Elites like Scorrano, De Strooper and the rest are the reason why fraud flourishes and science is full of irreproducible trash. At least Scorrano seems afraid, but De Strooper appears sure that he can bully his way out. He told me:

“Most is about assembly of gels and the way we used to present those. I realize that criteria have changed and we have accordingly adapted, but I have not found any indications that the conclusions of my papers should be changed or that we need to retract our studies. We are still dealing with one paper in JBC where mistakes were made”

Mistakes, like getting caught?

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The known unknowns

New developments in the case of Stanford’s cheater president Marc Tessier-Lavigne.

The student newspaper Stanford Daily and its young journalist Theo Baker brought on 6 March 2023 new revelations:

“The Daily has obtained an email from a Stanford professor to Jerry Yang, the chair of the Board of Trustees, corroborating and expanding upon a Feb. 17 Daily article in which four high-level Genentech scientists alleged that an internal review of Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s groundbreaking Alzheimer’s research uncovered fabrication and that Tessier-Lavigne, when confronted with the findings of the review, declined to retract his paper. […] The email expanded on what The Daily reported. “Apparently, they then asked Anatoly [Nikolaev, the first author on the paper,] to repeat a key experiment from the paper himself, but when he did his data seemed too perfect to be true. They then switched the reagents they were giving him to use in the experiment but didn’t tell him — when he came back with the same result again, they knew he was falsifying the data.””

Clare Francis pointed out another paper by Nikolaev:

Jianyuan Luo , Anatoly Y. Nikolaev , Shin-ichiro Imai , Delin Chen , Fei Su , Ariel Shiloh , Leonard Guarente , Wei Gu Negative control of p53 by Sir2alpha promotes cell survival under stress Cell (2001) doi: 10.1016/s0092-8674(01)00524-4 

Nikolaev’s coauthors are Columbia University professor Wei Gu and MIT professor Leonard Guarente, the latter got obscenely rich with anti-aging supplements. Both are research cheaters, read here:

The Stanford Daily mentions the support Tessier-Lavigne continues to enjoy:

“Richard Scheller, a former top Genentech executive whom colleagues describe as a close friend of Tessier-Lavigne, emailed the next day that he did “not recall any discussion at the RRC, or anywhere else at Genentech, that Dr. Nikolaev, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne, or anyone associated with the APP/DR6 study falsified data that were reported in the 2009 Nature paper, or that they behaved improperly in any way.” Scheller sat on the research review committee, and two Genentech scientists told The Daily that they’d had conversations with Scheller about the 2011 review and its alleged finding of data falsification.

Scheller has denied multiple requests for interviews over the past several months, both over email and in person. Scheller’s wife, Susan McConnell, a biology professor who has co-taught a course with Tessier-Lavigne and helped recruit him to Stanford, declined a request to comment.”

“MTL knew” — a fifth source alleges that Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne refused to withdraw falsified Alzheimer’s research in private correspondence to the board chair.https://t.co/48Mwxzwp1g

— Theo Baker (@tab_delete) March 6, 2023

The investigation seems to be stuck:

“None of The Daily’s sources for its Feb. 17 article has been interviewed by the committee. And, while the committee said that it was consulting “an expert in image forensics,” some of the world’s foremost experts — including Elisabeth Bik, Mike Rossner, Jana Christopher, Matthew Schrag and [David] Vaux — have not been contacted or heard of anyone who has. Aidan Ryan, a senior vice president for crisis communications at Edelman and spokesperson for the committee, would not name the expert the committee was consulting. […]

Several senators and other faculty members with ties to the board, who requested anonymity to speak about their superior, independently told The Daily that they had expected the committee to issue a partly exculpatory report soon so that Tessier-Lavigne could claim vindication and then step down while maintaining his innocence. […]

Tessier-Lavigne’s defenders include some members of the special committee investigating his work, especially Yang, according to several faculty senators.”

Another supporter of Tessier-Lavigne, (“Seven scientists wrote a January Letter to the Editor urging “caution in rushing to judgment on MTL case.”) is the Stanford professor Aaron Gitler. He also published papers with problematic data, read here:

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Full Circle

Remember Olivier Voinnet? The biggest fraud scandal in plant sciences in the last years which I’m afraid was caused by my reporting? Starting in 2014-2015, Voinnet was exposed as research fraudster who forged papers throughout his academic career, slapped with misconduct findings in France and in Switzerland, had to retract 9 papers, stripped of EMBO Gold Medal, shunned by his peer community, disinvited from conferences, and, importantly, barred from his (later on completely dissolved) lab at the Institute of Molecular Biology of Plants (IBMP) in Strasbourg. Which is a fraudulent swamp even without Voinnet.

Voinnet remains professor at ETH Zürich in Switzerland because…. because well, he still publishes papers. Here are some:

• Jullien PE, Schröder JA, Bonnet DMV, Pumplin N, Voinnet O. Asymmetric expression of Argonautes in reproductive tissues. Plant Physiol. 2022 doi: 10.1093/plphys/kiab474.
• Devers, Emanuel A.; Brosnan, Christopher A.; Sarazin, Alexis; Albertini, Daniele; Amsler, Andrea C.; Brioudes, Florian; Jullien, Pauline E.; Lim, Peiqi; Schott, Gregory; Voinnet, Olivier Movement and differential consumption of short interfering RNA duplexes underlie mobile RNA interference. Nature plants, (2020). 10.1038/s41477-020-0687-2
• ​Jullien, P.E., Grob, S., Marchais, A., Pumplin, N., Chevalier, C., Bonnet, D.M., Otto, C., Schott, G. and Voinnet, O. Functional characterization of Arabidopsis ARGONAUTE 3 in reproductive tissues. Plant J.  (2020), doi:10.1111/tpj.14868
• Pumplin, N; Sarazin, A; Jullien, PE; Bologna, NG; Oberlin, S; Voinnet, O. DNA Methylation Influences the Expression of DICER-LIKE4 Isoforms, Which Encode Proteins of Alternative Localization and Function. The Plant Cell (2016). 10.1105/tpc.16.00554

Of course there are no photoshopped figures in those post-scandal publications, Voinnet is by far not as stupid as other cheaters. You won’t catch him ever again.

I picked those four papers because of a certain scientist on them. Pauline Jullien is since 2017 assistant professor at the University of Bern, meaning the grant for her self-funded position must have run out. Note that she started to work with Voinnet long after he was exposed and shunned as research fraudster. Jullien’s partner Stefan Grob, the second author on Jullien et al 2020, is listed as group leader in the department of Ueli Grossniklaus at the University of Zürich.

So…. Guess who is coming to set up a lab, in fact two labs, at IBMP Starsbourg?

Jullien and Grob of course, Voinnet is still banned.

As I learned, Jullien will receive a junior chair with Labex Mitocross programme, funded for 4 years, here is the opening call from 2022. The person in charge of this recruitment is the IBMP director Laurence Drouard, who was recently promoted and whitewashed of all suspicions of research misconduct by CNRS, read here:

It is a double-appointment negotiated by Jullien’s partner Grob, who received from CNRS an ATIP-Avenir research grant for young group leaders in June 2022, funded for 3 years (extendable to 5). Both positions are temporary, but Jullien and Grob are scheduled to receive tenure at University of Strasbourg and CNRS, respectively.

And why not. We need Voinnet skills back at IBMP!

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The Vickers Curse

In August 2022, the German university RWTH Aachen proudly informed:

“RWTH Water Expert Hani Sewilam Appointed as Minister in Egypt

Professor Hani Sewilam, deputy head of the Department of Engineering Hydrology at RWTH and Rector’s Delegate for African Countries, has been appointed Minister of Water Resources and Irrigation in Egypt as part of a recent cabinet reshuffle. 

In addition to his work at RWTH, Sewilam is a professor at the Institute of Global Health and Human Ecology and director of the Center for Applied Research on the Environment and Sustainability (CARES) at the American University in Cairo (AUC). He is also the director of the UNESCO Chair in Hydrological Change and Water Resources Management.”

But Alexander Magazinov found a paper by RWTH and AUC Professor Sewilam which may stem from a papermill.

Muziri Mugwanya , Mahmoud A. O. Dawood, Fahad Kimera , Hani Sewilam Updating the Role of Probiotics, Prebiotics, and Synbiotics for Tilapia Aquaculture as Leading Candidates for Food Sustainability: a Review Probiotics and Antimicrobial Proteins (2022) doi: 10.1007/s12602-021-09852-x 

How do we know about the papermill origin?

The Vickers Curse! A certain inappropriate citation to an editorial on moths’ pheromones which in almost all cases happens when papermillers add references sloppily.

As Magazinov commented on PubPeer:

Reference [42] is a misrepresentation. It is not about probiotics adhesion, and certainly not in the context of aquaculture. Rather, it is about moths and their pheromones.

It has been previously reported that electrostatic interactions, lipoteichoic acids, passive, hydrophobic, and steric forces were among the factors that influence adhesion for probiotics to adhesion sites [39–42].

[42] Vickers NJ (2017) Animal communication: when I’m calling you, will you answer too? Curr Biol 27(14):R713-R715. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1016/j.​cub.​2017.​05.​064

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Science Breakthroughs

Superconductive fraud rehabilitated!

Maarten van Kampen wrote a great article a few months ago ago, about a high-profile Nature retraction by the US-based businessmen Ranga Dias and Ashkan Salamat.

In short, sleuths exposed elaborate data forgery in these much celebrated groundbreaking discovery of a room temperature superconductor, Snider et al 2020 (and in other studies by the duo). The Nature paper was retracted in September 2022, but the notice pretended it was due to authors concerned about reproducibility.

Guess how this affair was now resolved. No, nobody was sacked. Nobody was found guilty of fraud. Salamat is still assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Dias is still assistant professor at the University of Rochester sitting on huge grants.

And nobody was blacklisted. In fact, what do you do if you lose a Nature paper for fraud? You publish another one, again about room-temperature superconductor! Freshly out on 8 March 2023:

Nathan Dasenbrock-Gammon , Elliot Snider , Raymond McBride , Hiranya Pasan , Dylan Durkee , Nugzari Khalvashi-Sutter , Sasanka Munasinghe , Sachith E. Dissanayake , Keith V. Lawler , Ashkan Salamat , Ranga P. Dias Evidence of near-ambient superconductivity in a N-doped lutetium hydride Nature (2023) doi: 10.1038/s41586-023-05742-0

Whoa this is awesome news! Superconductivity at ambient temperature and pressure would change the world in countless ways. The boon to MRI would be somewhere on that list https://t.co/0fS5suQgbZ

— Michael Oumano, PhD, DABR, DABSNM, MRSE, CHP (@MichaelOumano) March 9, 2023

News and science Twitter were of course excited about a game-changing groundbreaking discovery by science geniuses. Good thing not all journalists fell for this new fairy tale. Here good reporting in Quanta magazine:

“To demonstrate superconductivity, the team hit three textbook benchmarks. At the critical temperature, they showed a drop in resistance and a peak in a property related to how readily a material warms up. The team also managed to directly measure the expulsion of a magnetic field from the samples — an unambiguous signature for superconductivity called the Meissner effect that has never before been convincingly demonstrated in a superhydride. Curiously, the sample also shifted in color from blue to pink to red in sync with its phase changes.”

The article quotes peers:

““If it turns out to be correct, it’s possibly the biggest breakthrough in the history of superconductivity,” said James Hamlin, a physicist at the University of Florida who was not involved in the work. If it’s true, he said, “it’s an earth-shattering, groundbreaking, very exciting discovery.” […] To allow other labs to faithfully reproduce the results, the group must be willing to share their entire raw data set along with detailed sample-preparation methods, or to send samples of their material to other labs to test, said Hamlin.”

Hamlin was one of the sleuths who helped expose fabrications in Dias’ and Salamat’s previous and now retracted Nature paper. The lead sleuths were however Jorge Hirsch and Dirk van der Marel, and they are quoted:

““There is a lot of evidence for superconductivity here if you take it at face value,” said Jorge Hirsch, a physicist at the University of California, San Diego. “But I do not believe any of what these authors say. I am not sold at all.” […] “I don’t know anymore what I can believe,” van der Marel said. “That’s the whole problem.””

Hirsch, who was threatened by Dias’ and Salamat’s lawyers, told me: “The story is far from over.”

Thing is, Dias and Salamat refuse to share their samples or their raw data. Predictably.

“However, outside access may fall short of the community’s hopes. Dias and Salamat have founded a startup, Unearthly Materials, which, Dias said, has already raised over $20 million in funding from investors including the CEOs of Spotify and OpenAI.* They’ve also recently applied for a patent on the lutetium hydride material, which would deter them from mailing out samples. “We have clear, detailed instructions on how to make our samples,” Dias said. “We are not going to distribute this material, considering the proprietary nature of our processes and the intellectual property rights that exist.” He suggested that “certain methodologies and processes” are also off the table.”

Now, you might wonder: why did Nature accept another fake garbage from the same crooked duo, after a retraction no less?

Simple. Up there, they don’t believe in research fraud as a character trait. It’s the “each paper on its own merit” attitude which basically means they scrutinise all new submissions from exposed fraudsters for same types of forgeries they were originally caught on. If they find nothing, the new submission is deemed trustworthy.

Sure there will be many of those refusing to give thumbs-up to a serial fraudster. But: as a peer reviewer you can’t reject a manuscript just because you mistrust the author, such are the rules. So Nature has been probably going through several potential reviewers until they found someone who will agree. In fact, it seems even those who agreed were not sure, their reports aren’t published, and this editorial by ChangQing Jin and David Ceperley sceptically suggests: “Hopes raised for room-temperature superconductivity, but doubts remain“. Usually such accompanying editorials are written by the peer reviewers of the original paper.

In any case, I fully agree with this statement in Quanta:

““For me, it is difficult to imagine a second retraction,” said Mikhail Eremets, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany who led the discovery of hydride superconductors. “We should consider it seriously in spite of the prehistory.”

Nature never retracted a paper just because it was irreproducible. And even when new kinds of fraud were to be found: the elite journal won’t retract to save face.

Ranga Dias, the American physicist who discovered the new room-temperature superconductor, said in response to wide skepticism that the experiment had been repeated several times and that he was confident that it would go through the scrutiny of the Nature. pic.twitter.com/bLbtfQE4Z9

— ATP_Asian Tech Press (@AsianTechPress) March 9, 2023

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Unnecessary side effects

A press release from Imperial College London:

“A genetic test already used routinely in the NHS can guide the use of chemotherapy in people with bowel cancer, new research has shown.

Researchers from Imperial College London, the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) and the Netherlands Cancer Institute, found that the test can predict whether a bowel cancer patient will benefit from chemotherapy. It is thought that this could spare patients who will not benefit from treatment from unnecessary toxicity and debilitating side effects.  […]

The researchers found that a specific mutation in the KRAS gene called KRASG12 was linked to poor survival in treated patients. Conversely another mutation was linked to a three-fold increase in survival. 

Professor Nicola Valeri, Honorary Professor of Gastrointestinal Oncology at Imperial College London and the ICR, said: […]

“It will be difficult for some patients to find out that this last-line drug will not benefit them, but this test will mean they are able to avoid unnecessary side effects and have a better quality of life with advanced cancer. Fortunately, our findings also reveal a group of patients who see substantial benefits from taking this type of chemotherapy.””

This is the paper, in Nature Medicine:

Joris Van De Haar , Xuhui Ma , Salo N. Ooft , Pim W. Van Der Helm , Louisa R. Hoes , Sara Mainardi , David J. Pinato , Kristi Sun , Lisa Salvatore , Giampaolo Tortora , Ina Valeria Zurlo , Silvana Leo , Riccardo Giampieri , Rossana Berardi , Fabio Gelsomino , Valeria Merz , Federica Mazzuca , Lorenzo Antonuzzo , Gerardo Rosati , Chara Stavraka , Paul Ross, Maria Grazia Rodriquenz, Michele Pavarana, Carlo Messina, Timothy Iveson, Federica Zoratto, Anne Thomas, Elisabetta Fenocchio, Margherita Ratti, Ilaria Depetris, Massimiliano Cergnul, Cristina Morelli, Michela Libertini, Alessandro Parisi, Michele De Tursi, Nicoletta Zanaletti, Ornella Garrone, Janet Graham, Raffaella Longarini, Stefania Maria Gobba, Angelica Petrillo, Emiliano Tamburini, Nicla La Verde, Fausto Petrelli, Vincenzo Ricci, Lodewyk F. A. Wessels, Michele Ghidini, Alessio Cortellini, Emile E. Voest, Nicola Valeri Codon-specific KRAS mutations predict survival benefit of trifluridine/tipiracil in metastatic colorectal cancer Nature Medicine (2023)
doi: 10.1038/s41591-023-02240-8 

Now imagine a theoretical possibility that this test, like everything made by the fraud factory ICR London, isn’t working. False hope to one group of patients, while another group won’t even try the last resort medicine which might have helped them after all.

Coincidence or not, the ICR London researcher Nicola Valeri used to be a collaborator of such massive fraudsters like Carlo Croce, George Calin and Giorgio Zauli, here:

In fact, Valeri’s CV states that he spent 5 years “in Professor Croce’s Lab investigating the role of non-coding RNAs in gastrointestinal cancers.” Now, anyone staying 5 years with that mega-fraudster Croce and coming out as professor is suspect already by affiliation.

The press release also quotes the new ICR London president, Kristian Helin:

“Professor Kristian Helin, Chief Executive of The Institute of Cancer Research, London, said, “Treating cancer well is not just about allowing people to live for longer, but also about giving them the best possible quality of life.”

How many lives do you think Helin’s own fake cancer research has saved so far?

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Scholarly Publishing

Blame distributed

You may remember the whistleblower Matthew Schrag, researcher at Vanderbilt University, who exposed massive fraud in the Alzheimer’s research field, especially the cases of Sylvain Lesne and Cassava Sciences.

I previously wrote how Schrag investigated his own old paper, found it to be even more fraudulent then flagged by PubPeer sleuths, and asked for retraction of this and another publication. First author on both and likely personally responsible for the problematic data is Othman Ghribi, former associate professor at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine who retired in 2020 for obscure reasons, but definitely not due to age or health.

Now the paper was retracted.

Othman Ghribi , Mikhail Y. Golovko , Brian Larsen , Matthew Schrag , Eric J. Murphy Deposition of iron and beta-amyloid plaques is associated with cortical cellular damage in rabbits fed with long-term cholesterol-enriched diets Journal of Neurochemistry (2006) doi: 10.1111/j.1471-4159.2006.04079.x 

The retraction notice from 8 March 2023 stated:

“The above article, published online on 28th July 2006 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com), is retracted by agreement between the authors (with the exception of Brian T. Larsen who could not be reached), the journal’s Editor in Chief, Andrew Lawrence, and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. The retraction has been agreed due to concerns raised regarding possible image manipulation of Figure 1c and e, Figure 3c, Figure 4c (i), Figure 4c (iii), Figure 5a-b and 5c. The authors were unable to provide the original datasets upon request. Therefore, the data and the conclusions of the manuscript can no longer be considered reliable. The authors acknowledge and regret these mistakes.”

@JNeurochem retract this. pic.twitter.com/9dizNDkzLb

— Matthew Schrag (@schrag_matthew) October 29, 2022

Basically the notice says that all authors are guilty. Schrag just as much as Ghribi. And much more than the last author and “Handling Editor” of Journal of Neurochemistry, the University of North Dakota emeritus professor Eric Murphy, who recently won the North Dakota House of Representatives elections for the Republican Party.

Now Schrag will face consequences for fake figures and lost raw data in that paper. Ghirbi and Murphy won’t. Welcome to academia.

What makes Othman Ghribi, PhD, proud to work at UND? "Students!" said the longtime professor of biomedical sciences at the SMHS. Ghribi received B.C. Gamble Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching, Research or Creative Activity, and Service at Founders Day 2019. #UNDproud pic.twitter.com/jOIQRvqOtB

— UND School of Medicine & Health Sciences (@UNDSMHS) March 11, 2019

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Unintended mistake

An elite nanotechnology journal, Small, published by Wiley, impact factor 15, corrected a paper in December 2021.

Ruoling Dai , Weiwei Sun , Li-Ping Lv , Minghong Wu , Hao Liu , Guoxiu Wang , Yong Wang Bimetal-Organic-Framework Derivation of Ball-Cactus-Like Ni-Sn-P@C-CNT as Long-Cycle Anode for Lithium Ion Battery Small (2017) doi: 10.1002/smll.201700521 

The Correction stated:

“In this manuscript, several SEM/EDS measurements were performed. A silicon wafer substrate was used to support samples for EDS measurements which results in a high-density peak for Si centered at ≈1.8 keV. The authors removed this peak in all EDS-spectra to ensure clear presentation of the results but failed to inform readers about this image processing step. Figures 2, 5, and S1 containing unaltered EDS-spectra are found below. […] The conclusions of this article remain unchanged by this processing step. The authors apologize for this unintended mistake.”

These were the figures before replacement.

However, the highly professional experts at Wiley couldn’t be arsed to correct other fake figures, namely the Figure 1.

Of course the fake paper should have been retracted right away. But the Chairman of the Editorial Advisory Board is Chad Mirkin. A fox guarding a hen house:

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Natural target

The German journal Naunyn-Schmiedeberg’s Archives of Pharmacology (NSAP) and its editor, the Hannover Medical School professor Roland Seifert, really wanted to crack down on papermills. When in early 2020 Smut Clyde and Tiger BB8 found masses of Chinese papermill fraud in NSAP, Chinese submissions were banned in that journal. There were thundering editorials, with rules and guidelines, experts referenced and credited (but not Smut Clyde and Tiger BB8). Everyone stood in awe.

But with the Chinese papermill fraud gone, NSAP still had to publish something. And they did, mostly Egyptian papermill fraud, interspersed with Iranian and Pakistani papermill fraud. When the PubPeer user Dysdera arabisenen warned Seifert about this, the chief editor announced to investigate. Read here:

Maybe NSAP editors were so busy investigating the Egyptian papermill fraud which they already published they had no time to review the Egyptian papermill fraud in their editorial pipeline?

Accepted 23 February 2023, published on 3 March:

Mohamed M Elseweidy, Mohamed Mahrous , Sousou I Ali , Mohamed A Shaheen , Nahla N Younis Vitamin D alleviates cognitive dysfunction and brain damage induced by copper sulfate intake in experimental rats: focus on its combination with donepezil Naunyn-Schmiedeberg s Archives of Pharmacology (2023) doi: 10.1007/s00210-023-02449-x 

One could say: oh well, this kind of image duplication is difficult to spot. True that.

The paper should have been rejected because it is idiotic. Vitamin D as a cure against Alzheimer! The abstract alone is stupid enough:

“This study aimed to demonstrate the potential benefits of donepezil (DPZ) and vitamin D (Vit D) in combination to counteract the neurodegenerative disorders induced by CuSO₄ intake in experimental rats. Neurodegeneration (Alzheimer-like) was induced in twenty-four male Wistar albino rats by CuSO₄ supplement to drinking water […] The effects attained by Vit D treatment were better than those attained by DPZ. Furthermore, Vit D boosted the therapeutic potential of DPZ in almost all AD associated behavioral and pathological changes. Vit D is suggested as a potential therapy to retard neurodegeneration.”

Hopefully this is indeed a made-up papermill study and they didn’t really torture rats for fake science. But that idiocy passed peer review by (mostly German) professors of medicine and pharmacology.

Just like this silly review by an all-Indian team (except an odd Pole!) of the “antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anti-cancer, anti-diabetic, and anti-microbial” qualities of Aloe vera, indictaing that also Indian papermills have discovered NSAP:

Shreya Sikdar Mitra , Mimosa Ghorai , Samapika Nandy , Nobendu Mukherjee , Manoj Kumar , Radha , Arabinda Ghosh , Niraj Kumar Jha , Jarosław Proćków, Abhijit Dey Barbaloin: an amazing chemical from the ‘wonder plant’ with multidimensional pharmacological attributes Naunyn-Schmiedeberg s Archives of Pharmacology (2022) doi: 10.1007/s00210-022-02294-4

Alexander Magazinov commented:

“Dimensions recognizes 77 items on the reference list of this paper. Of those, 18 are co-authored by a certain U Anand (Uttpal Anand, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel).

Citations to U Anand either follow generic statements that are not specific to the core topic of this paper, or are plainly out-of-context […]. This aggravates the concern about the apparent citation bias.”

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Learn from MDPI

From the department of foxes in charge of henhouses and goats in charge of gardening. MDPI, probably the biggest papermill outlet on the planet, is now in charge of papermill solutions.

There was an announcement for an online workshop, to take place on 14 December 2022:

The speakers scheduled were Adam Day, data scientist at SAGE Publishing and inventor of the Clear Skies Papermill Alarm software, accompanied by Savvas Chamezopoulos, data scientist at Elsevier, and Davide Fiocco, data scientist at Frontiers. Both Elsevier and Frontiers are badly infested with masses of papermill forgeries and just like MDPI they need to convince you that they have things under control having retracted a couple of papermill papers.

However, the workshop was postponed to 6 March 2023, see this announcement.

The Frontiers dropped out in between, and was replaced by a guy from Wiley (unhappy owners of Hindawi): Hong Zhou. But now also this March 2023 webinar was cancelled, as I learned, without plans to reschedule.

Meanwhile, at MDPI:

The guest editor of an open special issue in @Symmetry_MDPI on e-learning openly selling authorship of papers on e-learning https://t.co/26bsYZQcsA pic.twitter.com/OpQ3BvjmjM

— Nick Wise (@nickwizzo) March 4, 2023

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News in Tweets

• Another retraction for the disgraced Spiderman Jonathan Pruitt, this time in Nature: “The Editors have retracted this article. Concerns were raised regarding potential anomalies in the census and experimental data on the aggressiveness and docility of the spiders and the experimental data on prey availability. Post-publication review concluded that the data are not reliable. The Editors therefore no longer have confidence in the results and conclusions of this article. Jonathan N. Pruitt disagrees with this retraction. Charles J. Goodnight is deceased.”

Jonathan Pruitt paper retracted March 6, 2023https://t.co/BM29ArTHVK#pruittdata #spidergate pic.twitter.com/nATEZVBBQ1

— Cheshire (@Thatsregrettab1) March 7, 2023

• Sheshanath Bhosale, once professor in Australia whose papers officially faked themselves, had to swallow these retractions of Yeluri et al 2015 and Bhosale et al 2011: “When approached for an explanation, the corresponding author did not provide the requested supporting information. RMIT University, where research had been conducted, confirm they are investigating issues related to the integrity of the published work. As verifying the validity of published work is core to the integrity of the scholarly record, we are therefore retracting the article. The institution and the corresponding author have been informed.“

Bhosale retraction. Nice to see @tandfonline taking action despite @RMIT not yet reaching a verdict. Paper retracted 3 years after I first flagged @PubPeer. https://t.co/gcSwz8fVIF h/t @SmutClyde for noting the retraction. pic.twitter.com/fiVppxzlhH

— Cheshire (@Thatsregrettab1) March 8, 2023

Bhosale retraction. Nice to see @tandfonline taking action despite @MonashUni not yet reaching a verdict. Paper retracted 3 years after I first flagged @PubPeer. https://t.co/tsgyc5wE9q pic.twitter.com/zopLJc8rji

— Cheshire (@Thatsregrettab1) March 8, 2023

• Zero tolerance for non-white fraud at Oncogene! EiC Justin Stebbing want you to think good things of him. Retraction notice for Yang et al 2018: “The authors have provided the full raw Transwell assay data to address these concerns. However, these data contained further cases of image overlap. Additionally, the SMMC-7721 cell line used by the authors has been reported to be contaminated with HeLa cells, making it an unsuitable model for liver cancer. The editors-in-chief therefore no longer have confidence in the presented data.”

Another @oncogenejournal retraction… perhaps Justin Stebbing (@imperialfraudstr123 jk) is on holiday?

Flagged @pubpeer only last August, so pretty rapid response. h/t @SmutClyde for noting the retraction.https://t.co/2PINoJXrCD pic.twitter.com/uvcqH1JFMM

— Cheshire (@Thatsregrettab1) March 8, 2023

• Withdrawn Ludwig et al 2020: “The above article, published online on 11 March 2020 in Wiley Online Library as an Accepted Article, has been withdrawn by agreement between the authors, journal Editor-in-Chief Louis Bernatchez and John Wiley and Sons Ltd. The withdrawal has been agreed because the authors are unable to finalize the APC payment for their article for publication in the journal as the Version of Record.”

Posted without comment

A published paper withdrawn because the authors couldn’t pay the Article Processing Charge #AcademicChatter pic.twitter.com/RdptJaFzLH

— Prof Sarah Baker (@sarahRbakerDPH) March 2, 2023

• Frontiers in Climate Change Denialism, Patrik Frank 2019: “The unavoidable conclusion is that an anthropogenic air temperature signal cannot have been, nor presently can be, evidenced in climate observables.“

Climate models are just linear extrapolations of fractional GHG forcing.
The unavoidable conclusion is that a temperature signal from anthropogenic CO2 emissions (if any) cannot have been, nor presently can be, evidenced in climate observables.https://t.co/Da9JC9m0Up

— Ronald Hayek (@HayekRonald) March 6, 2023

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