Schneider Shorts 21.07.2023 – I write and revise every single paper myself

Schneider Shorts of 21 July 2023 – Stanford President resigns in whitewashed innocence, Smut in Le Monde, Harvard’s monumental study pooh-poohed, with a German botanist’s success story, Proofig at work, crooks stealing from crooks, an extortionist reviewer, and finally, Spain’s dental prodigy and his parents.

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Science Elites

Dr. Tessier-Lavigne will relinquish the presidency

The scandal of Stanford University’s President and cheating neuroscientist Marc Tessier-Lavigne reached its predictable and logical conclusion. His resignation was perfectly expected. Also expected was his whitewashing, the Stanford President was indeed declared innocent of all research misconduct. But because of public exposure and media coverage, the fraudulent papers will be finally retracted, at least this. The only unexpected part is that the Tessier-Lavigne won’t quit completely, he remains a greedy sod who would rather sustain constant humiliation than let go of his hefty Stanford professor’s salary.

New York Times reported on 19 July 2023:

“Following months of intense scrutiny of his scientific work, Marc Tessier-Lavigne announced Wednesday that he would resign as president of Stanford University after an independent review of his research found significant flaws in studies he supervised going back decades.

The review, conducted by an outside panel of scientists, refuted the most serious claim involving Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s work — that an important 2009 Alzheimer’s study was the subject of an investigation that found falsified data and that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had covered it up.

The panel concluded that the claims “appear to be mistaken” and that there was no evidence of falsified data or that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had otherwise engaged in fraud.

But the review also stated that the 2009 study, conducted while he was an executive at the biotech company Genentech, had “multiple problems” and “fell below customary standards of scientific rigor and process,” especially for such a potentially important paper.

As a result of the review, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne was expected to request substantial corrections in the 2009 paper, published in Nature, as well as another Nature study. He also said he would request retraction of a 1999 paper that appeared in the journal Cell and two others that appeared in Science in 2001.”

The almost 100-page long report by the law firm Kirkland & Ellis LLP is publicly available here.

Click to access Scientific-Panel-Final-Report.pdf

Science Editor-in-Chief Holden Thorp now pretends to be the champion of research integrity and has announced to retract Tessier-Lavigne’s two fraudulent papers in his journal. Thorp tweeted on 19 July 2023:

“MTL informed us this morning that he is retracting both (which we would have done on our own based on the report), so all are aligned and we’re prepping. EEOCs still there in the meantime.”

The funny thing is that Science allowed Tessier-Lavigne in 2015 to drop the already prepared corrections. To be fair, the Editor-in-Chief back then was Marcia McNutt who was at the time busy preventing retractions for Olivier Voinnet and who knows for whom else. McNutt is now the president of US National Academy of Sciences. And Thorp now described Tessier-Lavigne’s forged science as “technically correct” in a blog post on Science.

NYT also informs us about the 64-year-old Stanford rector:

“Dr. Tessier-Lavigne will relinquish the presidency at the end of August but remain at the university as a tenured professor of biology.”

There may be still running grants, I guess? Anyway, Tessier-Lavigne’s fraudulent papers are on PubPeer. NYT sums up the report:

“The Stanford panel’s 89-page report, based on more than 50 interviews and a review of more than 50,000 documents, concluded that members of Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s labs engaged in inappropriate manipulation of research data or deficient scientific practices, resulting in significant flaws in five papers that listed Dr. Tessier-Lavigne as the principal author.

In several instances, the panel found, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne took insufficient steps to correct mistakes, and it questioned his decision not to seek a correction in the 2009 paper after follow-up studies revealed that its key finding was wrong.”

The naughty lab members are not named in the report though. I trust that Tessier-Lavigne’s cheating lady friend Elke Stein will remain at Stanford to keep him company. Unlike with Tessier-Lavigne’s russian mentee, the cheater Anatoly Nikolaev, Stein’s name was always kept out of the media, despite there being enough outrageous stuff about her to report.

There was also this in the report:

“The Scientific Panel has concluded that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne created a laboratory culture with many positive attributes, but the unusual frequency of manipulation of research data and/or substandard scientific practices from different people, at different times, and in labs at different institutions, suggests that there may have been opportunities to improve laboratory oversight and management.”

But how else does one publish in Science, Nature and Cell? Earnest question.

By the way, in UK David Latchman, the rector of the Birkbeck College in London, was in a somewhat similar situation as Tessier-Lavigne. Latchman’s subordinates also published massive fraud and Latchman also covered it up. And yet, because of the pressure from London academics, the billionaire heir and his own university’s donor at least got charged with research misconduct by “recklessness”.

And the Stanford president?

“The Scientific Panel has concluded that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne did not personally engage in research misconduct for any of the twelve papers about which allegations have been raised, based on the evidence currently available to the Scientific Panel. However, several of these papers do exhibit manipulation of research data.”

An angel of innocence.

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I write and revise every single paper myself

Meet the greatest plant scientist Germany ever produced and is now tremendously lucky to finally have back. Rainer Bussmann is since late 2022 head of the botany department at the State Museum for Natural Science in Karlsruhe, Germany. Before returning to Germany, he used to be from 2007 till 2017 director of the William L. Brown Center at Missouri Botanical Garden, but in October 2017 he decided to leave USA for the Caucasus, to become professor at the Ilia State University in Tbilisi, Georgia.

I don’t know how many German-American professors opt for such career moves, maybe Bussmann thought he was signing a contract for the US southern state. In any case, Georgia may offer only very limited research funding, yet a truly unlimited supply of strong red wine. Maybe this is why Bussmann now proudly informed me that indeed he writes one paper each week. With authors from all over the Global South, it seems. Except Georgia, apparently Bussmann couldn’t find anyone worth collaborating with there, except for 3 papers in the last 3 years. Out of 118.

Well, one of those numerous papers was just retracted. All authors except Bussmann were from Pakistan. And Bussmann’s affiliation was provided as “Department of Ethnobotany, Institute of Botany, Ilia State University, La Paz, Bolivia“. Instead of Tbilisi, Georgia. Red wine or maybe even chacha was involved, I guess.

Muhammad Sajjad Iqbal , Khawaja Shafique Ahmad , Muhammad Azhar Ali , Muhammad Akbar , Ansar Mehmood , Fahim Nawaz , Syed Atiq Hussain , Noshia Arshad , Saba Munir , Hamna Arshad , Khizra Shahbaz , Rainer W. Bussmann An ethnobotanical study of wetland flora of Head Maralla Punjab Pakistan PLoS ONE (2021) doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0258167 

The retraction notice from 14 June 2023 stated:

The PLOS ONE Editors retract this article [1] because it was identified as one of a series of submissions for which we have concerns about authorship, competing interests, and peer review. We regret that the issues were not addressed prior to the article’s publication.

KSA, MAA, FN, and RWB did not agree with the retraction. MSI, MA, AM, SAH, NA, SM, HA, and KS either did not respond directly or could not be reached.

On PubPeer, Bussmann commented:

“This is one of the absurd examples of how PlosOne treats authors. According to the message the authors received, the academic editor assigned by PlosOne to handle this paper seems to have had a possible conflict of interest, possibly having published in the past with one of the authors. Of course the authors had no idea who was assigned as academic editor, nor who the reviewers were. For this reason the authors who replied to PlosOne regard this as a rather arbitrary decision by PlosOne, where the selection of the academic editor seemed to have lacked proper diligence.“

To me, Bussmann explained he was involved in “drafting and revision” and that the paper was retracted because his co-authors and the editor were all from Pakistan. I asked him how does he know for sure if his Pakistani, Indian, Chinese, Latin American and other international coauthors did not get all those works off a papermill. Bussmann said (translated from German):

“How do I know that my papers don’t come from a papermill? Because I write and revise every single paper myself.“

He also explained that he had and still has projects all over the world, that his regular coauthor Narel Paniagua-Zambrana is his wife, and other recurring names are his colleagues from Pakistan, Nepal or Peru. He also gave me a long list of his international PhD students whom he supervised as guest professor at Universidad Nacional Trujillo, Peru. Bussmann stated:

“I believe that modern science is based on cooperation and this is therefore how I act, which explains the number of authors. […] I am currently writing a lot together with my colleagues – about one publication per week.”

I have no idea how Bussmann finds time to run Karlsruhe Museum’s botany department, supervise PhD students in Georgia and Peru, and write a research paper each week. Other scientists would spectacularly fail already at the last task.

Actually there aren’t that many PhD students. In his 5 years in Georgia, Bussmann supervised exactly one, who followed him from Florida. And two more based in Peru, whom he says he distance-supervised as Affiliated Faculty of Universidad Nacional Trujillo from Georgia. A strange mentorship arrangement, with 9 hours time zone difference.

Bussmann also suggested I publish an article on For Better Science about the discrimination of authors from “third world countries” by established journals. But I already did!

Update: the section above has been edited after further communication with Bussmann. He also told me this (translated):

“I agree with a sentence from my boss at the Missouri Botanical Garden, Peter Raven: “There are 24 hours in the day, and if that’s not enough, you work at night”. But no joke – for me, science is my purpose in life. Incidentally, it’s easier to mentor students who work in different time zones because you can then do it outside of regular working hours.”

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An excellent CV and some parents

The Spanish newspaper El Mundo reports (corrected Google-translation):

“Manuel Toledano Osorio is 26 years old, has an excellent CV and some parents, renowned professors at the University of Granada, who supported his rise to success. Despite his youth, the name of this doctor in Dentistry appears on 73 scientific articles, most of them published in impact journals. This number probably makes him one of the most scientifically productive Spanish researchers of his age. The difference to his colleagues is that he started as co-author of investigations promoted by his parents when he was still in Baccalaureate.

His name appears on nine papers published by four Journal Citation Reports (ICR) index journals in 2014 and 2015, when he had not yet gone to university. He was 17 years old and hasn’t started his career yet, but in the publications he declared an affiliation to the University of Granada that was non-existent.”

By the time young Manuel graduated as dentist aged 23, he already published 44 papers, thanks to Mommy and Daddy.

“The parents, Manuel Toledano and Raquel Osorio, are professors at the Faculty of Dentistry of the same university and appear in the Ranking of the World ‘s Top 2% Scientists by the Stanford University […] Of the 73 articles where Manuel Toledano Osorio features, his father also appears in 69 of them, his mother also appears in 68 and in 56 his aunt, Estrella Osorio, also a professor at the same faculty. In 71 of 73 he features with his family. The little sisters of the investigated person, who just finished the second year of Dentistry on the same campus, they already have a dozen published papers each, always co-signing with their relatives. Like his brother, they started publishing from the Baccalaureate (seven articles between the two).”

This bright young lad could never have enough papers and titles:

“After finishing his degree, in 2020, he began the doctoral courses. In October 2021, he was awarded a FPU scholarship from the Ministry of Education he enjoyed until last February, when he started his doctoral thesis directed by his father.”

In total, there were “at least four master’s or public expert courses“, some located 400 km away in Madrid, all were in theory bound to daily physical attendance. Everyone knew, nobody stepped in to stop this circus. I am quite sure all these papers by the Osorio family (mostly published in MDPI) are fraudulent as well. Feel free to go through them.

Sure, Spanish academia is nepotistic, but there must be limits, people…

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Scholarly Publishing

Evidence of falsification, fabrication, and plagiarism of data

After some deliberation, Elsevier magnanimously agreed to retract two papers by a certain Douglas Taylor. He already retracted a paper in 2015 (Taylor et al 2006), where the retraction notice stated:

“An institutional research misconduct investigation committee determined multiple figures in the following paper were falsified..”

Retraction Watch described Taylor back then as “a pioneer in exosome biology, having discovered the release of exosomes from tumor cells in the 1970s.“

In November 2022, a HHR-ORI report was released:

“Douglas D. Taylor, Ph.D., University of Louisville School of Medicine: Based on the evidence and findings of an investigation conducted by the University of Louisville School of Medicine (UL), the Office of Research Integrity’s (ORI’s) oversight review of UL’s investigation, and additional evidence obtained and analysis conducted by ORI during its oversight review,

ORI found that Douglas D. Taylor, Ph.D. (Respondent), former Professor and Vice Chair for Research, Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology, UL, engaged in research misconduct […] ORI found based on a preponderance of the evidence that Respondent intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly used falsely labeled images to falsely report data in figures, and in one finding, intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly plagiarized, reused, and falsely labeled an image to falsely report data in a figure. Respondent’s research misconduct occurred in one (1) funded PHS grant application, twelve (12) unfunded PHS grant applications, and two (2) PHS-supported published papers.”

The ORI report ended with:

“The following administrative actions have been implemented:

1. For a period of three (3) years, beginning on October 17, 2022, Respondent is debarred from participating in “covered transactions” as defined in 42 C.F.R. § 180.200 and procurement transactions covered under the Federal Acquisition Regulation (48 C.F.R. chapter 1).

2. Respondent is prohibited from serving in any advisory capacity to PHS including, but not limited to, service on any PHS advisory committee, board, and/or peer review committee, or as a consultant for a period of three (3) years, beginning on October 17, 2022.
    
3. In accordance with 42 C.F.R. §§ 93.407(a)(1) and 93.411(b), HHS will send to the pertinent journal a notice of ORI’s findings and the need for retraction or correction of: 

• Gynecol. Oncol. 2009 Oct;115(1):112-20; doi: 10.1016/j.ygyno.2009.06.031
• Gynecol. Oncol. 2008 Jul;110(1):13-21; doi: 10.1016/j.ygyno.2008.04.033

Thing is, after the Taylor affair the University of Louisville was so traumatised that they decided to defend and support all their cheaters ever since. Like the stem cell quack Mariusz Ratajczak, his wife, and his academic “daughter”:

But now, back to the two fresh retractions. The first paper was the only one discussed on PubPeer:

Douglas D. Taylor, Cicek Gercel-Taylor MicroRNA signatures of tumor-derived exosomes as diagnostic biomarkers of ovarian cancer Gynecologic Oncology (2008) doi: 10.1016/j.ygyno.2008.04.033

The retraction notice dated August 2023 went:

“The article is retracted following an internal investigation by the University of Louisville and an investigation by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) which found evidence of falsification, fabrication, and plagiarism of data.

All authors have been notified of the retraction. As such this article represents a severe abuse of the scientific publishing system. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter and apologies are offered to readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process.”

Here is the other retracted paper:

Douglas D. Taylor , Cicek Gercel-Taylor , Lynn P. Parker Patient-derived tumor-reactive antibodies as diagnostic markers for ovarian cancer Gynecologic Oncology (2009) doi: 10.1016/j.ygyno.2009.06.031

It was pulled simultaneously, with the same retraction notice. If you wonder who Cicek Gercel-Taylor is: yes, she is Doug Taylor’s wife. In September 2013, both of them were recruited by an exosome-focussed biotech Aethlon Medical: he as Chief Scientific Officer and she as Clinical Research Director. They didn’t stay long: by September 2015 the couple was gone, as archived records show.

The Taylors reused data from their earlier paper:

Abby C Eblen , Cicek Gercel-Taylor , Lisa B.E Shields , Joseph S Sanfilippo , Steven T Nakajima , Douglas D Taylor Alterations in humoral immune responses associated with recurrent pregnancy loss Fertility and Sterility (2000) doi: 10.1016/s0015-0282(99)00505-1

“falsifying and/or fabricating research results by reusing a single image from a non-PHS-supported paper that claimed to demonstrate the presence of antibodies that recognize normal endometrium and endometrial tumors, from the sera of women with recurrent pregnancy loss (Figure 2A and 2B in a paper published in Fertil Steril. 2000^[1]), to represent the presence of antibodies that recognize antigens from normal epithelium and ovarian tumor cell lines from patients with:
  stage II or IV ovarian cancer in Figure 4 of R41 CA130498-01 stage I and stage IIIc ovarian cancer in Figure 1 of Gynecol. Oncol. 2009″

I suppose the original 2000 paper was fraudulent as well. But nothing will happen. Fertility and Sterility also published a disgusting “Miss Endometriosis” study by dirty old men, two Italian gynaecology professors. It was initially defended but eventually retracted, probably because of my article:

It gets even weirder. The first retracted Gynecologic Oncology paper stole data from this one in The Lancet:

Fabrice Andre , Noel EC Schartz , Mojgan Movassagh , Caroline Flament , Patricia Pautier , Philippe Morice, Christophe Pomel , Catherine Lhomme , Bernard Escudier , Thierry Le Chevalier, Thomas Tursz , Sebastian Amigorena, Graca Raposo , Eric Angevin, Laurence Zitvogel Malignant effusions and immunogenic tumour-derived exosomes The Lancet (2002) doi: 10.1016/s0140-6736(02)09552-1 

“….plagiarizing, reusing, and relabeling an electron micrograph of melanoma derived exosomes created by a scientist and published in Lancet^[2] in 2002 to falsely represent exosomes from patients with:
  ovarian cancer in Figure 4B of R41 CA135853-01, Figure 1B of Gynecol. Oncol. 2008, Figure 1B of R21 CA135269-01A1, Figure 4B of R41 CA139802-01, and Figure 2B of R41 CA144598-01
  NSCLC (lung cancer) in Figure 11B of R01 CA132886-01A1, R01 CA132886-01A2, P50 CA142508-01, and R01 CA152218-01″

Did you see from whom Taylor stole? Laurence Zitvogel, the wife and partner in data-fudging-crime of none other but Guido Kroemer.

Crooks stealing from crooks.

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Analyzed with proofig AI software

Remember Francesco Squadrito and his Messina gang of fraudsters?

Remember the academic Editor-in-Chief Daniel Remick, professor of pathology at the Boston University, USA, who ordered Aneurus Inconstans to reveal his full identity or else the evidence against Messina fraudsters won’t be admissible because COPE allegedly says so? In was in earlier Friday Shorts.

Well, Remick investigated anyway because I advised him to stop making up fake COPE guidelines and to adhere to the real ones. And he sent Aneurus and me an email, informing us that “Shock has investigated your allegation of scientific misconduct in the following paper:”

Letteria Minutoli , Domenica Altavilla , Alessandra Bitto, Francesca Polito, Ersilia Bellocco, Giuseppina Laganà, Daniela Giuliani, Tiziana Fiumara , Salvatore Magazù , Pietro Ruggeri , Salvatore Guarini, Francesco Squadrito THE DISACCHARIDE TREHALOSE INHIBITS PROINFLAMMATORY PHENOTYPE ACTIVATION IN MACROPHAGES AND PREVENTS MORTALITY IN EXPERIMENTAL SEPTIC SHOCK Shock (2007) doi: 10.1097/01.shk.0000235092.76292.bc

Seen the above? SHOCKED? Now sit down and brace yourself for what Remick decided:

“We requested clarification of these issue from the senior author Francesco Squadrito who acknowledged that image splices did occur and that loading controls for the β-actin bands may have been reused.

Our journal Shock has determined that there is no credible evidence of scientific fraud in this paper for the following reasons:

• In 2007 it was common practice to splice images from X-ray film to create publication quality figures.
• A prior manuscript that analyzed image duplication stated “The reuse of loading controls in different figures obtained from the same experiment was not considered to be a problem”. PMID: 27273827.
• The images from these three figures were analyzed with proofig AI software and no evidence of image duplication was found.”

Proofig again. Dror Kolodkin-Gal‘s blockbuster software which main selling point is to tell editors that all is well.

Now, I know from a first-hand source that Proofig can’t detect internal image pattern duplications at all. Or any other digital manipulations inside an image. Instead it merely seeks to compare the whole image with images in a database. And I am quite sure Proofig can’t finding duplicate western blot bands across papers or figures either. Basically, Proofig is not suitable for this case at all. Basically, it works on the principle of Who Are You Going to Believe, Me or Your Own Lying Eyes?

And did you notice that Remick cites Bik et al 2016, Elisabeth Bik of all people, to declare Squadrito’s fake data as “not considered to be a problem“?

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MDPI’s Added Value

Peer review is why we pay good money to scholarly publishers. Well, here is how peer review at MDPI works.

Alexander Magazinov found out that a certain Moustafa Mahmoud Zaghloul, an Iranian postdoc at the University of Queensland in Australia, practices citation extortion in his capacity as MDPI peer reviewer. In at least 35 papers it was proven because the reviewer reports were published. Which is just a tip of his citation extortion iceberg with many, many more hidden cases, because for most journals, including in MDPI, the reviewer reports are not available to public. Magazinov contacted MDPI and Zaghloul’s superiors in Australia with this information:

“Overall, Zaghloul is successful in extorting the desired citations, however, in some cases the authors pointed out that Zaghloul’s request is unreasonable. See, for example, https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4360/14/16/3240/review_report, where the authors explicitly state,

“We are disappointed that the reviewer continues to try making us cite papers of Zaghloul and coworkers – despite obviously poor relevance to the present work. We alert the reviewer to not try taking personal benefit from what should be an independent peer-review.”

Magazinov also noted:

“As a brief look at citations of one Zaghloul’s paper, https://doi.org/10.1002/app.46770, reveals, it has around 79 citations, of which 61 are concentrated in 4 MDPI journals, Polymers (34), Journal of Composites Science (14), Coatings (9) and Materials (4). Hence there might be more instances of coercive citation manipulation, nonetheless, mostly concentrated in MDPI venues.  “

Here is the list of published peer-review reports with citation coercion:

• https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1944/15/14/4936/review_report
• https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1944/15/19/6840/review_report
• https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1944/15/19/6992/review_report
• https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1944/15/20/7346/review_report
• https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4360/14/13/2734/review_report
• https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4360/14/14/2769/review_report
• https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4360/14/15/3009/review_report
• https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4360/14/15/3032/review_report
• https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4360/14/15/3175/review_report
• https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4360/14/16/3240/review_report
• https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4360/14/16/3250/review_report
• https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4360/14/16/3251/review_report
• https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4360/14/17/3531/review_report
• https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4360/14/19/4134/review_report
• https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4360/14/19/4230/review_report
• https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4360/14/20/4418/review_report
• https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4360/14/23/5133/review_report
• https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4360/14/23/5205/review_report
• https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4360/15/1/235/review_report
• https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4360/15/1/49/review_report
• https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4442/10/12/353/review_report
• https://www.mdpi.com/2079-4991/13/6/1056/review_report
• https://www.mdpi.com/2079-6412/12/10/1517/review_report
• https://www.mdpi.com/2079-6412/12/11/1611/review_report
• https://www.mdpi.com/2079-6412/12/12/1953/review_report
• https://www.mdpi.com/2079-6412/12/12/1977/review_report
• https://www.mdpi.com/2079-6412/12/7/937/review_report
• https://www.mdpi.com/2079-6412/12/8/1068/review_report
• https://www.mdpi.com/2504-477X/6/10/310/review_report
• https://www.mdpi.com/2504-477X/6/11/329/review_report
• https://www.mdpi.com/2504-477X/6/11/333/review_report
• https://www.mdpi.com/2504-477X/6/11/341/review_report
• https://www.mdpi.com/2504-477X/6/12/370/review_report
• https://www.mdpi.com/2504-477X/6/6/157/review_report
• https://www.mdpi.com/2504-477X/6/8/225/review_report
• https://www.mdpi.com/2504-477X/7/1/9/review_report

The extra joke is that some of these authors who agreed to Zaghloul’s extortion, are papermillers themselves. Like Roman Fediuk, papermilling fraudster and lieutenant colonel of the mass-murdering russian army (read the article above). He is the “author” of the last entry, Loganina et al 2023, a papermill fabrication “authored” by paying customers from russia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iraq and Malaysia. Zaghloul ordered the “authors” in his peer review report to add his own papers as references:

“The introduction needs to be improved by relating to the mechanics of the studied materials and their mechanical characteristics. The references to be included are: 10.1016/j.jiec.2022.06.023, 10.1016/j.polymertesting.2017.09.009, 10.1016/j.compstruct.2021.114698, 10.1002/app.46770, 10.3390/polym14132662, 10.1016/j.porgcoat.2022.107015.”

The raschists did as told and referenced all these Zaghloul papers. Here is another set of russians who did exactly the same. Tough and fearless, these people.

In any case, here you have MDPI’s added value of peer review.

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Science Breakthroughs

A monumental study

The anti-aging scammer David Sinclair published another trash study and gets celebrated in the media, again. All because he is professor in Harvard, which some idiot journalists take as a quality sign instead as a red flag.

The paper was published on 12 July 2023 in the papermill-infested trash-bin Aging, where Sinclair is one of co-Editors-in-Chief. Also the penultimate author, the Harvard russian Vadim Gladyshev, is member of the editorial board which is full of infamous bullshitters and fraudsters. Basically, the paper ended in Aging after it was rejected by more serious journals despite the Harvard credentials.

Jae-Hyun Yang, Christopher A. Petty, Thomas Dixon-McDougall, Maria Vina Lopez, Alexander Tyshkovskiy, Sun Maybury-Lewis, Xiao Tian, Nabilah Ibrahim, Zhili Chen, Patrick T. Griffin, Matthew Arnold, Jien Li, Oswaldo A. Martinez, Alexander Behn, Ryan Rogers-Hammond, Suzanne Angeli, Vadim N. Gladyshev and David A. Sinclair, “Chemically induced reprogramming to reverse cellular aging” Aging-US (2023) DOI: 10.18632/aging.204896

The publisher Impact Journals (owned by Mikhail Blagosklonny and his ex-student / coauthor of fudged data/ life partner Zoya Demidenko) issued a slightly unhinged press release which Zoya presumably wrote herself to save money:

“In a monumental study, a team of researchers has revealed a novel approach to combating aging and age-related diseases. This work, undertaken by scientists at Harvard Medical School, introduces the first chemical method to rejuvenate cells, bringing them to a more youthful state. Prior to this, only powerful gene therapy could achieve this feat. […]

This discovery builds on the finding that the expression of specific genes, known as Yamanaka factors, can transform adult cells into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). This breakthrough, which earned a Nobel Prize, prompted scientists to question if cellular aging could be reversed without pushing cells to become too young and potentially cancerous.”

Sinclair and his team of greedy crooks “identified six chemical combinations” which can “reverse age in less than a week.” He was quoted:

“Until recently, the best we could do was slow aging. New discoveries suggest we can now reverse it […] “This new discovery offers the potential to reverse aging with a single pill, with applications ranging from improving eyesight to effectively treating numerous age-related diseases”

I would suggest Sinclair tries all this potentially dangerous crap on himself, but he is too clever for that. Because in popular media Sinclair declares to have successfully reversed his own biological age not with teratogenic oncogenes but with “a plant-based diet, forgoing alcohol, and following a strict morning routine that he said involved “nontoxic” toothpaste, coconut oil pulling, and intermittent fasting.”

Anyway, good to see that not every news outlet fell for Sinclair’s recent Aging trash. Daily Mail didn’t! The British tabloid reports massive criticism:

“Matt Kaeberlein, a biogerontologist, told DailyMail.com: ‘The screening method here is innovative and could lead to important discoveries one day, which is why I say the study is preliminary. 

‘These cocktails they describe here might even have useful therapeutic properties.  But there is no direct data in this paper providing evidence for such. 

‘They should have validated at least one of these cocktails in an animal and shown improvements in age-related health metrics or lifespan before making these claims about effects on biological aging.'”

Thing is, Matt Kaeberlein has his own rapamycin anti-aging scam running with his startup Optispan Ventures, which is about to open a “wellness clinic“. Daily Mail had another expert:

“Dr Charles Brenner, a metabolism researcher, told DailyMail.com three compounds stood out to him in the latest study. CHIR99021 blocks glycogen formation, which is activated during sleep to store energy – this is why we do not need to eat for hours at night.

Brenner also highlighted tranylcypromine, which is an antidepressant, and valproic acid that is used to treat bipolar disorder and can harm the liver. The paper does not highlight these risks. 

‘These are generally not safe alone or in a combination,’ Brenner said.”

Now, what went unmentioned is that Brenner works for the company ChromaDex which aggressively competes against Elysium Health, Sinclair’s own business with his MIT mentor Leonard Guarente (another cheater scientist). Both companies sell NAD+ supplements for anti-aging, and they constantly sue each other. Here is an interview Brenner gave CTECH to smash Sinclair’s recent paper, there the conflict of interests was at least hinted.

Even the former dean of Harvard Medical School Jeffrey Flier chimed in with criticism and got quoted by Daily Mail:

“Many reasons to be concerned about these claims by a certain scientist @harvardmed, as reported here by @CharlesMBrenner“

However, Flier was never concerned about the massive record of fake science authored by a certain scientist at Harvard Medical School, his dearest bosom friend Carl Ronald Kahn.

Uh-uh, now it looks like I am defending Sinclair here. No, the message is: they all are dishonest, the system is rotten, kick them all out and put proper honest scientists in charge.

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News in Brief

• The New Zealand sleuth Smut Clyde, also known to some people as David Bimler, has been portrayed by Le Monde about his papermill investigations. Google-translated: ““A lot of Chinese researchers find themselves stuck in the paper mills, but I have nothing against them. I myself am also taken to other nationalities”, jokes Smut Clyde, in the humorous style that one finds in his posts narrating his discoveries, hosted on Leonid Schneider’s blog, “For Better Scienre” [sic!], often illustrated with images of Mont y Python. [sic!] He has joined other specialists from all over the world, with complementary qualities, with whom he organizes daily thanks to Slack messaging to attack the “paper mills”. One of the last has even been “discovered twice independently, specifies Smut Clyde. it is gratifying”. In his group, Elisabeth Bik, a specialist in the detection of hacked images, and the anonymous Morty and Tiger 8B8.“

• Belated retraction for Richard Hill, former faculty at University of Portsmouth in UK, who already retracted two papers. His recent (Hill, Madureira, Ferreira, Baptista, Machado, Colaço, Dos Santos, Liu, Dopazo, Ugurel, Adrienn, Kiss-Toth, Isbilen, Gure, Link TRIB2 confers resistance to anti-cancer therapy by activating the serine/threonine protein kinase AKT Nature Communications, 2017) was retracted on 19 July 2023: “The authors have retracted this article as it has come to their attention that several images were inappropriately processed and duplicated in multiple figures. In particular, the data were duplicated, and in some cases inverted, across several panels in Figures 2c, 2b, 3d and Supplementary Figure 5. Erroneous data were also included in Figure 2e, Supplementary Figure 1 and Supplementary Figure 8. We apologize to the scientific community for any confusion this article may have caused.”

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