For Better Science is where even Nobel Prize laureates are treated with disrespect. The late British pharmacologist Sir John Vane was a researcher of aspirin and was, together with two other researchers, awarded in 1982 the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for “for their discoveries concerning prostaglandins and related biologically active substances”. He died in 2004, leaving behind him… a fraudulent swamp of an institute full of cheaters he personally raised and installed, who immediately progressed to raising the next generation of cheaters. With that legacy, I am not sure if Sir John Vane was really such a great scientist after all, and I do wonder on whose credit he got his Nobel really.
This London institute, which Sir John Vane founded in 1985 with the pharma money from Glaxo, was named the William Harvey Research Institute (WHRI), after an English Renaissance physician. In 1996, the Institute became part of Barts and the Royal London School of Medicine and Dentistry at the Queen Mary University of London (QMUL). Vane retired as WHRI full-time director in 1995 but remained in charge as Honorary Chairman of the charitable William Harvey Research Foundation. Of course WHRI is not entirely non-profit, it has a business end called William Harvey Research Ltd, and this is where Sir John installed the most toxic of his proteges as directors: the German Chris Thiemermann and the Italian Mauro Perretti.
Something is off with London biomedical institutes. I previously wrote about the Institute for Cancer Research (ICR) London, where one dishonest president (Paul Workman) followed a dishonest predecessor (Alan Ashworth), and after that they recruited a third cheater president from abroad (Kristian Helin):
Kristian Helin gets the perfect job
ICR London has a new director. The Great Dane Kristian Helin is the perfect successor to continue the ideological line of fictional cancer research.
As it happens, one of the worst ICR London cheaters, Ashworth’s mentee Sarah Martin (PubPeer record here), moved to QMUL and is presently Deputy Centre Lead at Barts Cancer Institute. Not only because of her Barts is a complete and utter fraud swamp, read here:
The English science supremacy
England leads the world in science, any fule kno. Meet some more of the star jesters: Nick Lemoine, Peter St George-Hyslop and Xin Lu. They are curing cancer and Alzheimer with Photoshop.
But who would’ve thought something like this was possible: WHRI is apparently even worse than ICR London or Barts, and we can thank the late Nobelist Sir John Vane for training and appointing the crooks now responsible for this sorry state.
In 2016, WHRI was celebrating its 30th anniversary, the British Pharmacological Society reported:
“Professor Chris Thiemermann (who gave a fond and humorous history of his time with John Vane, and discussed how the antimalarial drug artesunate showed promising efficacy in reducing organ failure following experimental haemorrhagic shock).
This first session was closed by Professor Charles Serhan from Harvard University, who is a long-time collaborator and mentor to several WHRI researchers and who is widely regarded as the “father of pro-resolving lipid mediators” and the newly coined pharmacological sub discipline called ‘resolution pharmacology’. Professor Serhan shared an exciting storyline of data, demonstrating the structural elucidation of lipid mediators which stimulate bacterial clearance and tissue repair.”
Below, you will read about these men and their own mentees. I hope this fraudulent claptrap named WHRI will shut its doors for good before its 40th anniversary, in 2026 the latest.
The situation is much, much worse than this recent article about the WHRI professor Ken Suzuki suggests:
Ken Suzuki: The King of Hearts at QMUL
“The only difficult part might be deciding whether Ken has been intentionally deceptive or wildly incompetent, although the difference in practice doesn’t seem so important.” – Sholto David
Chris Thiemermann
I already wrote about the German-born PhD student of John Vane and the CEO of the William Harvey Research Ltd, Christoph Thiemermann, in earlier Friday Shorts. And Aneurus Inconstans wrote about Thiemermann’s star postdoc, Salvatore Cuzzocrea, who is now Rector Magnificus of the University of Messina in Italy:
Uni Messina, money for nothing & brothers in arms
“The University of Messina was, in short, a good business that appealed to many, including organized crime on both sides of the Strait of Messina.” – Aneurus Inconstans
I won’t repeat here the already presented outrageous forgeries by Cuzzocrea and Thiemermann, and neither the forgeries Thiemermann published with his other former postdocs, Prabal “Charlie” Chatterjee (now principal lecturer in Pharmacology at University of Brighton, UK) and Nimesh Patel (now reader in medical education at QMUL), and even with the William Harvey Research Ltd co-director Muhammad Magdi Yaqoob (who in turn mentored Ken Suzuki). I also won’t repeat myself here about Thiemermann’s fake papers with David Latchman, the whitewashed Master of Birkbeck.
David Latchman, uncensored
I publish exclusively two uncensored UCL screening panel reports into the David Latchman and Anastasis Stephanou affair. Now we know which papers were investigated and which requested retractions didn’t happen.
You’ll have to read the Friday Shorts for that stuff. That is because thanks to Aneurus and helpful sleuths like Clare Francis and Sholto David, even more fraud in Thiemermann’s papers was found since! So I will show you that new material.
Thiemermann’s PubPeer record stands currently at over 40 fraudulent papers. He never replied to my email, and neither did QMUL. In any case, the university did not sound towards my anonymous colleague like they were keen to investigate anything, except the identity of the PubPeer commenters.
Let’s start with a Cuzzocrea-Thiemermann classic of recycled immunohistochemistry:
Michelle McDonald , Maha Abdelrahman , Salvatore Cuzzocrea , Christoph Thiemermann Tyrphostin reduces the organ injury in haemorrhagic shock: role of inducible nitric oxide synthase Resuscitation (2003) doi: 10.1016/s0300-9572(03)00156-4
Now look at this beauty, it seems someone stole the figures from other people’s papers but needed to edit out the original labellings, which led to pattern duplications:
Salvatore Cuzzocrea , Barbara Pisano , Laura Dugo , Angela Ianaro , Nimesh S A Patel , Rosanna Di Paola , Tiziana Genovese , Prabal K Chatterjee , Massimo Di Rosa , Achille P Caputi, Christoph Thiemermann Rosiglitazone and 15-deoxy-Δ12,14-prostaglandin J2, ligands of the peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-γ(PPAR-γ), reduce ischaemia/reperfusion injury of the gut British Journal of Pharmacology (2003) doi: 10.1038/sj.bjp.0705419
The Editor-in-Chief of the society-run British Journal of Pharmacology is the WHRI professor Amrita Ahluwalia, of whom you will hear again below.
And here we have Thiemermann as first author, in a rare constellation, probably meant to help his postdoc Chatterjee with last authorship to get a faculty appointment:
Christoph Thiemermann , Nimesh S.A. Patel , Espen O. Kvale , Gillian W. Cockerill , Paul A.J. Brown , Keith N. Stewart , Salvatore Cuzzocrea , Domenico Britti , Helder Mota-Filipe , Prabal K. Chatterjee High Density Lipoprotein (HDL) Reduces Renal Ischemia/Reperfusion Injury Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (2003) doi: 10.1097/01.asn.0000075552.97794.8c
A Shocking case, in a journal where Cuzzocrea and his Messina colleagues published a lot of bad stuff, and where the Editor-in-Chief and Thiemermann’s past collaborator Daniel Remick currently plays silly games denying obvious fraud:
Salvatore Cuzzocrea , Prabal K. Chatterjee , Emanuela Mazzon , Laura Dugo , Angela De Sarro , Fons A. J. Van De Loo , Achille P. Caputi , Christoph Thiemermann Role of Induced Nitric Oxide in the Initiation of the Inflammatory Response After Postischemic Injury Shock (2002) doi: 10.1097/00024382-200208000-00014
These people, eh? But here is the loveliest study, among the recent finds at least:
Ahila Sivarajah , Prabal K. Chatterjee , Nimesh S.A. Patel , Zoran Todorovic , Yoshiyuki Hattori , Paul A.J. Brown , Keith N. Stewart , Helder Mota-Filipe , Salvatore Cuzzocrea, Christoph Thiemermann Agonists of Peroxisome-Proliferator Activated Receptor-Gamma Reduce Renal Ischemia/Reperfusion Injury American Journal of Nephrology (2003) doi: 10.1159/000072088
With time, the quality of image manipulation improved greatly in Thiemermann’s lab. Now it is much more subtle but just as fraudulent:
But then again, the Thiemermann lab felt that safe that they started to troll. Here, from last year, they simply copy-paste entire gel figures under different labels:
Shireen Mohammad , Caroline E O’Riordan , Chiara Verra , Eleonora Aimaretti , Gustavo Ferreira Alves , Klaus Dreisch , Johan Evenäs , Patrizia Gena , Angela Tesse , Michael Rützler , Massimo Collino , Giuseppe Calamita , Christoph Thiemermann RG100204, A Novel Aquaporin-9 Inhibitor, Reduces Septic Cardiomyopathy and Multiple Organ Failure in Murine Sepsis Frontiers in Immunology (2022) doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2022.900906
Thiemermann was most likely John Vane’s favourite postdoc. He was installed as CEO of William Harvey Research Ltd in 2003, shortly before Vane’s death. Here is Thiemermann with Vane’s widow, you can see she always liked him also:
The screen of Thiemermann’s papers continues. But rest assured, QMUL is also working behind the scenes, on a massive whitewashing. They just had another major research misocnduct scandal, at the same WHRI. And they dealt with that one also. Read the next chapter.
Dalli & Perretti
Here you will meet another one of John Vane’s proteges, Mauro Perretti, and Perretti’s own PhD student, Jesmond Dalli. Both Perretti and Dalli are WHRI-affiliated professors at QMUL. Also you need to recall Dalli’s postdoc supervisor, the Harvard professor Charles Serhan, whom WHRI so proudly celebrated at its 30th anniversary in 2016. SEVENTY of their papers are being questioned, with fraud allegations in the room.
Perretti is, next to the CEO of William Harvey Research Ltd Thiemermann, one of the directors of this WHRI business arm. He arrived to WHRI in 1991 to do PhD with its co-founder Roderick Flower (who was in turn a PhD student and protege of John Vane). Here is a paper co-authored by Rod:
Egle Solito, Abeda Mulla , John F. Morris , Helen C. Christian , Roderick J. Flower , Julia C. Buckingham Dexamethasone Induces Rapid Serine-Phosphorylation and Membrane Translocation of Annexin 1 in a Human Folliculostellate Cell Line via a Novel Nongenomic Mechanism Involving the Glucocorticoid Receptor, Protein Kinase C, Phosphatidylinositol 3-Kinase, and Mitogen-Activated Protein Kinase Endocrinology (2003) doi: 10.1210/en.2002-220592
As aside, the last author Julia Buckingham is President of Brunel University London and since last year Chair of ICR London. She brings the right qualifications to ICR, you see. Less funny is that she also used to be Chair of Athena SWAN Review Steering Group, deciding on careers of women in science. But I digress.
Thanks to the support of Vane and Flower, Perretti became in 2000 Joint Head of the Centre for Biochemical Pharmacology. In 2015, he became Dean for Research and Research Impact of the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry at QMUL. Meaning, Perretti, a man with a very questionable attitude to research ethics, was evaluating everyone’s science and performance there. And handling whistleblower complaints. Perretti for sure used his massive power to install his PhD student Dalli as QMUL professor and WHRI group leader.
Before we proceed to the main story (which is mostly about Dalli), it is worth mentioning that also Perretti of course has his own PubPeer record, including with the Nobelist Louis Ignarro. Fiorucci et al 2002 even received an editorial expression of concern in 2008 due to “the apparent duplication in the use of certain figures in the foregoing articles“. Another one of its coauthors was Rod Flower.
Fake data and real pomegranate juice in Nobelist Louis Ignarro’s papers
Louis J. Ignarro knew how to monetize his 1998 Nobel Prize for discovery of nitric oxide as molecular cell signalling agent. He made many millions selling dietary supplement for Herbalife and pomegranate juice for POM Wonderful Company. Some of that found its way (without proper conflict of interest declaration) into Ignarro’s peer reviewed papers. Those,…
Here is Perretti on one of his several fake papers with the Italian cheater Antonello Petrella, professor at the University of Salerno. It was flagged by Elisabeth Bik:
Emanuela Pessolano, Raffaella Belvedere , Valentina Bizzarro, Paola Franco, Iolanda De Marco, Amalia Porta, Alessandra Tosco, Luca Parente, Mauro Perretti, Antonello Petrella Annexin A1 May Induce Pancreatic Cancer Progression as a Key Player of Extracellular Vesicles Effects as Evidenced in the In Vitro MIA PaCa-2 Model System International Journal of Molecular Sciences (2018) doi: 10.3390/ijms19123878
Petrella, intent to dismiss the allegations of data forgery, replied on PubPeer by providing raw data images. Which turned out to be forged as well. Another recent paper by Petrella and Perretti:
Raffaella Belvedere , Elva Morretta , Emanuela Pessolano , Nunzia Novizio , Alessandra Tosco , Amalia Porta , James Whiteford , Mauro Perretti , Amelia Filippelli , Maria Chiara Monti , Antonello Petrella Mesoglycan exerts its fibrinolytic effect through the activation of annexin A2 Journal of Cellular Physiology (2021) doi: 10.1002/jcp.30207
And yes, also here the Patrella team provided hilariously fake raw data:
Perretti remained quiet. Which is probably because he is recovering from extracting himself from a major fraud affair which was supposed to make him and his mentee Dalli very, very rich. The Resolomics scam.
This is where Dalli’s postdoctoral advisor Charles Serhan comes in. On 4 May 2022 Science reported about what could have exploded into a major research fraud affair, but it seems the big men at QMUL and Harvard swiftly brought things under control:
The occasion for Science reporting was this publication critical of Serhan’s and Dalli’s findings:
Nils Helge Schebb , Hartmut Kühn , Astrid S. Kahnt , Katharina M. Rund , Valerie B. O’Donnell , Nicolas Flamand , Marc Peters-Golden , Per-Johan Jakobsson , Karsten H. Weylandt , Nadine Rohwer , Robert C. Murphy , Gerd Geisslinger , Garret A. FitzGerald , Julien Hanson , Claes Dahlgren , Mohamad Wessam Alnouri , Stefan Offermanns , Dieter Steinhilber Formation, Signaling and Occurrence of Specialized Pro-Resolving Lipid Mediators-What is the Evidence so far? Frontiers in Pharmacology (2022) doi: 10.3389/fphar.2022.838782
According to Science,
“an international group of 18 scientists including specialists in lipid analysis argued that the studies identifying these molecules in people typically detect them at levels so low they are unlikely to play a major role in resolving inflammation. The critics also found that most studies of human samples merely correlate SPM levels with a phase during the arclike time course of inflammation; data proving SPMs actually resolve it are weak to nonexistent, the authors argue.
The paper’s authors offered an even more damning critique: Protocols developed by Serhan and his collaborators to detect SPMs in body fluids or tissue samples don’t conform to accepted standards, they say. What is provided as proof of SPMs in many papers should actually be interpreted as mere “noise,” they argue.”
The affair began with an earlier criticism by same critics led by the cardiff University professor Valerie O’Donnell, directed at Dalli’s paper Gomez et al Nature Comms 2020 (here its PubPeer thread). The comment was originally submitted two years ago as Matters Arising, but Nature Communications editors rejected it after peer review, and despite recent developments, still refuse to print it. So the critics had to post the letter on the preprint server Zenodo:
Valerie O’Donnell , Nils H Schebb , Ginger L Milne , Michael P Murphy , Christopher P Thomas , Dieter Steinhilber , Stacy G Wendell , Hartmut Kühn , Ian Blair , Robert C Murphy , Bruce A Freeman , Alan R Brash , Garret FitzGerald Failure to apply standard limit-of-detection or limit-of-quantitation criteria to specialized pro-resolving mediator analysis incorrectly characterizes their presence in biological samples Zenodo (2021) doi: 10.5281/zenodo.5766267
Science summed up:
“…the same group together with other specialists in lipid analysis highlighted a paper published by Dalli’s group in 2020 that identified a lipoxin, a resolvin, and a maresin in the serum of people with early rheumatoid arthritis. The paper went on to suggest the SPMs could be used as biomarkers to assess patients’ response to medications. But the critics said Dalli was not setting a limit of detection—a value representing the lowest measurable concentration that provides high confidence a molecule exists. Instead, they say, he used a different method that did not comply with accepted standards for detecting biomolecules. When O’Donnell and colleagues applied the criteria described in the paper to inert methanol and buffer fluid, they found it indicated the presence of lipids where clearly none existed.”
Dalli and his partners were measuring nothing but noise. Of course Serhan and Dalli defended their work, insisting that they were perfectly able to reproduce their results, and even issued a preprint (Dalli et al 2022) to prove it. Not just that: Dalli even found out how to treat COVID-19 with SPMs (Palmas et al, Plos One 2021)! Back then in July 2021, QMUL was so excited, they even issued a press release where Dalli and Perretti were quoted advocating for Resolomics’ fictional “specialised pro-resolving mediators (SPM)” as a cure for COVID-19. The press release was soon after quietly deleted.
Extinguish COVID-19 with hair loss stem cell nano exosomes!
“As pioneers in the field of regenerative medical therapies, we at Direct Biologics are changing the future of medicine.”
Science also mentioned that even Dalli’s collaborators took issue:
Later on, in March 2023, Gilroy published a preprint debunking his own paper with Dalli (Motwani et al Plos One 2017) as partially unreliable:
Natalie ZM Homer, Ruth Andrew, Derek W Gilroy Re-analysis of lipidomic data reveals Specialised Pro-Resolution Lipid Mediators (SPMs) to be lower than quantifiable limits of assay in a human model of resolving inflammation bioRxiv (2023) doi: 10.1101/2023.03.06.530669
Dalli did his own re-analysis, all by himself apparently, and published his own preprint (Dalli 2023) where he accused his critics of “blatant mistakes”.
What happened next was not nice. Professor Sir Mark Caulfield, former WHRI director (for 18 years!) and current Vice Principal for Health for QMUL Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, decided to step in. Allegedly, he wrote to Gilroy’s employer UCL, asking for Gilroy to be disciplined over his public criticism of Dalli and demands to see the raw data of his own paper. Caulfield didn’t reply to me when asked to deny the allegation.
UCL trachea transplant inquiry: scapegoating, obfuscation and a lost nose
In 2017, UCL invited an external expert commission to investigate the deadly trachea transplants performed by the former UCL honorary professor Paolo Macchiarini. An already sacked UCL nanotechnology professor, Alexander Seifalian, whose lab made the two UCL plastic POSS-PCU tracheas in 2011, was announced as the main culprit on UCL side. All this despite Seifalian’s…
Caulfield’s intervention was required because this all was not some academic dispute – there was serious money involved. Dalli and Perretti (the latter was at that time Dean for Research at the medical school) founded on 11 September 2017 the QMUL spin-off company Resolomics, to exploit their research on so-called resolvins.
In spring of 2022 the Resolomics website went offline, the company itself was recorded as “Dissolved” on 17 January 2023. All that’s left is its archived website. Dalli was listed as “Founder, Director, and Chief Scientific Officer”, Perretti, who insisted in Science that “SPMs exist, they have been characterized in multiple ways, they have been synthesized, and they are active” was listed as “Founder, Director, and Chairman of Scientific Advisory Board” until he resigned on 30 July 2019.
The university varyingly held 25-50% of the shares and voting rights, Perretti held the same, and Dalli had 50-75% of shares and voting rights. Resolomics used to advertise:
And they used this to sell a therapy:
Thing is, there is no record of “Resocell” at the UK Intellectual Property Office. Still, Dalli has 15 other patents on resolvins from his time as a PhD student at QMUL, during his post-doc at Harvard and since 2014 when he returned to QMUL.
The Crooks of CRUK
Cancer Research UK is a charity which relies on donations, volunteer work and fundraising. What if these citizens knew their money goes to fund bad science?
In December 2021, Dalli sounded convinced that he will prove all his critics wrong. He wrote in an email which was shared with me:
“The technology we are proposing as part of ResoCell will be an autologous cell therapy whereby we are aiming to reprogram the patient’s own cells by leveraging the biology of endogenous molecules. The technology will not involve genetic manipulation. This is a novel approach which has not yet been employed elsewhere and the manuscript detailing the pre-clinical proof of concept studies we have performed is currently in review and we are presently addressing reviewers comments. Therefore I am afraid I am not in a position to share this with you at this stage. We are aiming to resubmit by mid/end of January and we hope that the manuscript will be accepted soon after since the comments we received were positive. At that stage I would be delighted to share the publication with you if it would still be of interest.
I am sorry I cannot provide any further detail at this stage. We are still in the process of developing this technology and we are hoping to be able to reach clinical trial stage in the next 2-3 years.”
It is not clear where that paper ended up, maybe where Dalli’s company is now. Instead, the WHRI professor had to issue embarrassing corrections, replacing data of which he openly admitted that it was completely made-up.
Imperial Adcock – from Barnes to Iran!
“the College would have been well within its rights to reject all of your allegations…”
On several PubPeer threads, the user Trifurcula sanctibenedicti wrote in July 2022:
Here is one which was corrected:
Mai NTH, Dobbs N, Phu NH, Colas RA, Thao LTP, Thuong NTT, Nghia HDT, Hanh NHH, Hang NT, Heemskerk AD, Day JN, Ly L, Thu DDA, Merson L, Kestelyn E, Wolbers M, Geskus R, Summers D, Chau NVV, Dalli J, Thwaites GE. A randomised double blind placebo controlled phase 2 trial of adjunctive aspirin for tuberculous meningitis in HIV-uninfected adults. eLife (2018). doi: 10.7554/eLife.33478.
The Correction from 21 March 2023 stated:
You see, the peer-reviewed original research figures were nothing but “illustrations“. If you don’t like those pictures, Dalli has many more. The Correction also repeated the warning from the original paper that the raw data will only be shared with Dalli’s trusted friends:
Rather sad that eLife reneged on its own policy of open data and research ethics.
Also this paper, with same recycled “illustrations”, got corrected (worth noting that its last author Costantino Pitzalis is WHRI’s Deputy Director):
Magdalena B. Flak , Romain A. Colas , Estefanía Muñoz-Atienza , Michael A. Curtis , Jesmond Dalli, Costantino Pitzalis Inflammatory arthritis disrupts gut resolution mechanisms, promoting barrier breakdown by Porphyromonas gingivalis JCI Insight (2019) doi: 10.1172/jci.insight.125191
The Corrigendum from 24 October 2022 declared:
Requiem for Celixir
How the Nobel Prize winner Sir Martin Evans and the lying crook Ajan Reginald almost succeeded, were it not for Patricia Murray.
Dalli is very slowly correcting his 70 papers at glacial pace, always admitting that the data was indeed made-up. I guess the idea is to dely the resolution of the affair by issuing corrections until his retirement. For perspective: Dalli is born 1980, aged merely 42.
Jose Luis Ramirez , Giselle De Almeida Oliveira , Eric Calvo , Jesmond Dalli , Romain A. Colas , Charles N. Serhan, Jose M. Ribeiro , Carolina Barillas-Mury A mosquito lipoxin/lipocalin complex mediates innate immune priming in Anopheles gambiae Nature Communications (2015) doi: 10.1038/ncomms8403
The Correction, issued on 18 July 2023, stated:
Allegedly, as a source informed me, after several internal investigations at QMUL with eminent external advisors, the allegations of scientific misconduct were upheld. But not against Dalli! He was apparently exonerated by the disciplinary panel. I am sure they found some scapegoats, whistleblowers probably. In any case, Dalli is recruiting postdocs right now for his SPM research. Never mind that he, according to my information, has been banned by the Wellcome Trust from applying for grants for 3 years.
Imperial Piss-Take
“Having reviewed the Conflict of Interest disclosures made by Professor Frost, Professor Holmes and Dr Garcia-Perez, and having also reviewed additional information concerning their company, Melico, […] the College is satisfied that they have no undisclosed or unmanageable conflicts of interests” – Arts Bachelor (Honours)
Perretti’s recently appointed successor as medical faculty’s Dean for Research is the former Co-Director of WHRI (2016-2020), Amrita Ahluwalia. She is also a collaborator of Dalli. Quite a number of their common papers are discussed on PubPeer, and she is even the last author there. Poor Professor Ahluwalia, she always choses the wrong collaborators.
Dakshina M. Jandhyala, Amrita Ahluwalia , Jennifer J. Schimmel , Arlin B. Rogers , John M. Leong , Cheleste M. Thorpe Activation of the Classical Mitogen-Activated Protein Kinases Is Part of the Shiga Toxin-Induced Ribotoxic Stress Response and May Contribute to Shiga Toxin-Induced Inflammation Infection and Immunity (2016) doi: 10.1128/iai.00977-15
QMUL’s new Dean of Research Ahluwalia is now investigating Thiemermann’s papers, which she said “will take some considerable time“. Expect the same outcome as with Dalli. Here is her paper with Dalli and Thiemermann, with same made-up resolvin peaks:
Jianmin Chen , Alexander J. P. Hamers , Michaela Finsterbusch , Gianmichele Massimo , Maleeha Zafar , Roger Corder , Romain A. Colas , Jesmond Dalli , Christoph Thiemermann , Amrita Ahluwalia Endogenously generated arachidonate-derived ligands for TRPV1 induce cardiac protection in sepsis The FASEB Journal (2018) doi: 10.1096/fj.201701303r
FASEB is a learned society which never learned that fraud is wrong. So don’t expect them to even issue a correction despite Dalli’s admission, for that paper and all others:
There is no data in Dalli’s papers, just noise and illustrations. But QMUL keeps making sure none of them will be retracted.
O du lieber Augustine MK Choi
Augustine Choi is Dean of Weill Cornell and a misunderstood genius. He discovered that carbon monoxide is a cure for all possible diseases, just add a bit of Photoshop.
Oh, and one of Dalli’s and Serhan’s collaborators was Augustin MK Choi, who recently resigned as dean of Weill Cornell over fraud in his papers. The team worked both on the resolvin scam and Choi’s carbon monoxide bullshit. Dalli and Serhan also collaborated with Catherine Godson of University College Dublin, protege of its former president (and current Imperial College London president) Hugh Brady. Because cheaters are always attracted to each other.
Imperial Irishman Hugh Brady (and his Dublin leprechauns)
When your Irish past catches up with your English future.
Epilogue
The expectations for QMUL and WHRI to do anything at all about their own fraud are less than nil. Former WHRI director and current QMUL Vice Principal for Health Mark Caulfield is now the boss of all biomedicine at QMUL, including of all the fraud-peddling institutes like WHRI, Barts, Blizard etc. Caulfield’s successor as WHRI director, Panos Deloukas, is unconditionally loyal to the big Englishman who recruited him to WHRI in 2013. WHRI’s deputy director Costantino Pitzalis is coauthor on Dalli’s fraudulent papers. Perretti’s successor as QMUL medicine’s Dean for Research, Amrita Ahluwalia, is the last author on several of Dalli’s fraudulent papers.
Thiemermann carries out contract animal research for pharma industry and the big pharma money flows into Thiemermann and Perretti’s labs at WHRI. Money makes you untouchable.
Nothing at all will happen. Nobody will lose their jobs, except for the whistleblowers and other “troublemakers”. There probably won’t even be a single retraction.
Gosh, what shall one do with WHRI….
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“As it happens, one of the worst ICR London cheaters, Ashworth’s mentee Sarah Martin, moved to QMUL and is presently Deputy Centre Lead at Barts Cancer Institute.”
The hyper link from Sarah Martin, only leads to 4 problematic papers with Alan Ashworth, there are also problematic Sarah Martin papers with Toru Ouchi in the U.S..
https://pubpeer.com/search?q=sarah+martin+ouchi
Form before moving to Alan Ashworth’s lab.
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Thanks, changed link!
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If Alan Ashworth had any sense he would point to Sarah Martin’s problematic data before she went to his lab.
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Alan Ashworth has changed jurisdictions, presently in the U.S.A., where they won’t investigate his Pubpeer record. Useful that, changing jurisdictions.
https://cancer.ucsf.edu/people/profiles/ashworth.alan
Alan Ashworth, PhD, FRS
E. Dixon Heise Distinguished Professor in Oncology, UCSF
President, UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center; Senior Vice President for Cancer Services, UCSF Health; Professor of Medicine, Division of Hematology/Oncology, Department of Medicine, UCSF
https://pubpeer.com/search?q=alan+ashworth
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“But who would’ve thought something like this was possible: WHRI is apparently even worse than ICR London or Barts, and we can thank the late Nobelist Sir John Vane for training and appointing the crooks now responsible for this sorry state.”
What a laugh!
It’s never as bad as you think, but worse!
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The amount of cheaters at QMUL resambles the standards of places like Uni Messina et similia. Truly surprising… or maybe not.
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You are being racist against the English now???
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Uhmm, I think I’m becoming racist towards scientists, I’m afraid.
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Christoph Thiemermann is a German.
Perhaps that’s where the rector of the University of Messina learned the tricks of the trade that passes as “pharmacology”. Did his Ph.D. at QMUL. The trail of problematic publications originate from that time
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If Kroemer can be a member of Leopoldina Academy, so must be Thiemermann.
Anyway, here is a proud university of Ulm:
https://www.uni-ulm.de/med/fakultaet/med-detailseiten/news-detail/article/kupczyk-gastprofessur-fuer-prof-christoph-thiemermann/
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A pity that Dario Fo is dead.
What a farce! At least farces make you laugh.
Sir Mark Caulfield’s the involvement is quite sinister. I don’t believe that he could have been director of the William Harvey Institute for 18 years and not know about Christoph Thiemermann’s fakery. Director for six months, a year, and not known, but not for 18 years.
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…and Unicamp in Brazil….Its not a matter of a few bad apples, but a real “culture of cheating” at those places, which is transmitted from mentor to fellows. Non-cheaters are the exception rather than the norm because they are actively forced out of academia.
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I wonder if Queen Mary, University of London, was lumbered with the same name as the ocean liner by asking King George V to name it after the greatest queen?
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When schools fall below acceptable standards in England and Wales they are put under “special measures”. I don’t know how that works for universities. It’s never happened before. QMUL is going that way.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_measures#:~:text=A%20school%20subject%20to%20special,by%20an%20appointed%20executive%20committee.
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Interesting to see what happens.
I agree that nothing will happen is the most likely outcome.
Sir Mark Caulfield has already been promoted within QMUL since his disastrous for science 18 year tenure as the Director of the William Harvey Institute. Professor Christoph Thiemermann will most likely be promoted to a better paying administrative job.
Some may worry that so many fakes in pharmacology (Christoph Thiemermann) and cardiology (Ken Suzuki) will damage the reputation of the medical school. I believe that those fears are, if not misplaced, exaggerated. So many teenagers, and people into their 30s, want to go to medical that the reputation of the Bart’s Medical School would have fall somewhat below the South Pole before it could not fill its places.
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“What happened next was not nice. Professor Sir Mark Caulfield, former WHRI director (for 18 years!) and current Vice Principal for Health for QMUL Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, decided to step in. Allegedly, he wrote to Gilroy’s employer UCL, asking for Gilroy to be disciplined over his public criticism of Dalli and demands to see the raw data of his own paper. Caulfield did reply to me when asked to deny the allegation.’
Yes, English academia is very heavy-handed. Not like the American collegiate model, where all faculty get to vote. Dictatorship, dictatorship, dictatorship is the English way.
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Did not reply to me, I have to correct a number of typos…
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“Editor-in-Chief [Shock] and Thiemermann’s past collaborator Daniel Remick currently plays silly games denying obvious fraud”.
What about renaming the journal Shock, Shit? My only reservation is that that the journal Blood is also Shit, i.e. refuses to recognise image duplications and other shenanigans.
Perhaps rename Shock, Shit, and rename, Blood, Slurry (liquid shit, the type produced by factory farming).
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What a shower of shit the journal “Shock” is!
Hats off to Aneurus inconstant for the work they have put into uncovering fraud on a decades long trail of scientific destruction!
https://pubpeer.com/publications/4DE5E79FE05A8AC807E3A4ED1D01A9#5
Queen Mary, University of London, should be deeply ashamed of itself.
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https://www.qmul.ac.uk/whri/people/academic-staff/items/perrettimauro.html
Problematic data.
https://pubpeer.com/publications/FCFA456F029A6F449113A7EFD22F5E
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Perretti with his PhD mentor Flower and his PhD student Dalli!
Vincenzo Brancaleone , Jesmond Dalli , Stefania Bena , Roderick J Flower , Giuseppe Cirino , Mauro Perretti Evidence for an anti-inflammatory loop centered on polymorphonuclear leukocyte formyl peptide receptor 2/lipoxin A4 receptor and operative in the inflamed microvasculature The Journal of Immunology (2011) doi: 10.4049/jimmunol.1003145
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That’s in the Journal of Immunology so nothing will happen.
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Another flawed lineage. Of course the underling was to blame.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Vane
“In 1973, Vane left his academic post at the Royal College of Surgeons and took up the position as Director of Research at the Wellcome Foundation, taking a number of his colleagues with him who went on to form the Prostaglandin Research department. Under the leadership of Salvador Moncada, this group continued important research that eventually led to the discovery of prostacyclin”
4 retractions.
http://retractiondatabase.org/RetractionSearch.aspx#?auth%3dMoncada%252c%2bSalvador
https://pubpeer.com/search?q=Salvador+moncada
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Salvador Mancada is John Vane’s PhD student.
“The Nobel committee has once again sparked controversy, particularly in Britain, with the award this week of the 1998 prize for physiology or medicine to pharmacologists Robert Furchgott, of the State University of New York, Louis Ignarro, of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Ferid Murad, of University of Texas Medical School in Houston.
No-one is disputing that the pioneering work of the three US researchers on nitric oxide as a signalling molecule in the cardiovascular system (see box) deserves the recognition of the committee. But many feel that a fourth name should also have been recognized — that of Salvador Moncada, currently director of the Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research at University College London.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/27019
Oh dear. The Nobel Committee probably regrets awarding Ignarro and Murad now.
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“Assegid Garedew, formerly a senior research investigator in Salvador Moncada‘s group, stepped down earlier this summer in the midst of an investigation that should be completed soon, Moncada tells Retraction Watch.
The three retraction notices for papers by Garedew and colleagues are all similar. […] Moncada tells us:
There has been an investigation at UCL which is about to be completed. It indicates that the person solely responsible for the fraud leading to the retraction of the three papers is Dr Garedew. He has admitted this and resigned as a senior research investigator in my group on the 19th June. We do not expect to retract any other paper from this laboratory since Dr Garedew was not involved in any of the other research projects.”
Fraud whereever Moncada went, no Garedew here:
https://journals.aai.org/jimmunol/article/189/6/3260/83456/Retraction-Recombinant-Migration-Inhibitory-Factor
“We wish to retract the article titled “Recombinant Migration Inhibitory Factor Induces Nitric Oxide Synthase in Murine Macrophages” by Fernando Q. Cunha, Weishui Y. Weiser, John R. David, David W. Moss, Salvador Moncada, and F. Y. Liew, The Journal of Immunology, 1993, 150: 1908–1912.
On October 19, 1995, the Office of Research Integrity at the National Institutes of Health found that Weishu Y. Weiser, Ph.D., formerly of the Harvard Medical School at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, committed scientific misconduct by falsifying data in biomedical research supported by two Public Health Service grants. As a result, she agreed to submit a letter to The Journal of Immunology to retract this article. The offices of The Journal of Immunology have no record of receiving such a letter and hence the article is now being retracted.”
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Salvador Moncada with authors in Milano.
https://pubpeer.com/publications/AE548DFA8D6D33F9C2971455B71482
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Amrita Ahluwalia lab – removed all Dali figures and resubmitted. No further contact between the 2 labs. Dalis work on those papers was insignificant to her research but was an icing on the cake – for when these lipids were considered legit.
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Hi Amrita. You have my email which you never replied to.
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I removed your rude reply Amrita. Time you learn that you can’t bully people outside of your power circle. Bye.
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I understand that because there are so many, currently 46, problematic Christoph Thiemermann papers Queen Mary, University of London (QMUL), intends to take “some considerable time” to assess them, almost as taking “some considerable time” is a badge of honour, when in fact it is another “fuck off” signal.
When there are so many problematic papers the burden of proof shifts, i.e. guilty until proven innocent. The correct and timely course of action might very well be for QMUL to retract all of Christoph Thiemermann’s papers. QMUL should use the legal standard of civil courts, the balance of probabilities, not the standard of criminal courts, beyond all reasonable doubt.
Number 46, please come in, your time is up!
https://pubpeer.com/search?q=thiemermann
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Queen Mary, University of London (QMUL), could easily request its own Pubpeer dashboard,
but will instead run a mile.
Only Queen Mary, University of London, can request its own Pubpeer dashboard, but I gather easily done.
Are all the comments on Pubpeer about QMUL simply malicious, or is there some truth to them?
QMUL has a named research integrity officer, James Patterson, and other people, who could stop writing “fuck off letters” and start looking at the claims. Better still get people who do not work for QMUL to examine the claims.
How to request institutional Pubpeer “dashboard”.
https://pubpeer.com/institutions
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Problematic paper number 47.
https://pubpeer.com/publications/9797A42B9F26A120685A5C92A6C8DF
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Aneurus on PubPeer:
“I’m asking myself the retoric question whether this inconsistency has anything to do on the long and consistent history of data reuse across papers by Dr Cuzzocrea (about 60 articles as of now) and Dr Thiemermann (about 50 articles as of now).”
Number of f***s given by QMUL or Italian academia: Zero.
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UPDATE as of now:
60 entries for Cuzzocrea, Thiemermann 49, Caputi 44, Mazzon 36, Di Paola 21, Dugo 18, Chatterjee 17, Patel 16.
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This paper has Christoph Thiemermann as senior author, yet this is not obvious at first sight.
https://pubpeer.com/publications/2AD4E2C998DE79C53CE41219D36352#2
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Nice, two German professors, one was until 2020 Dean of Medicine in Frankfurt. I wrote to them.
Chatterjee PK, Patel NS, Cuzzocrea S, Brown PA, Stewart KN, Mota-Filipe H, Britti D, Eberhardt W, Pfeilschifter J, Thiemermann C.] The cyclopentenone prostaglandin 15-deoxy-Δ12,14-prostaglandin J2 ameliorates ischemic acute renal failure Cardiovascular Research (2004) doi: 10.1016/j.cardiores.2003.10.024
“Figure 8: immunohistochemical localization of p65 upon 15d-PGJ2 treatment.
Micrographs (A) and (B) also appear in Figure 4 (rotated by 180 deg) of Chatterjee et al. 2003 EJP (despite the indicated year, the latter was submitted and accepted at the same time of the paper of this thread), where they are supposed to illustrate immunohistochemical localization of NF-nB upon pyrrolidine dithiocarbamate treament.”
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Which of the claims here are “gotcha journalism”?
https://pubpeer.com/search?q=thiemermann
Measured criticism of the data is one take on it.
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Name drops of affiliated QMUL people in the conclusion
Panos Deloukas, is unconditionally loyal to the big Englishman who recruited him to WHRI in 2013
— Not hard evidence
WHRI’s deputy director Costantino Pitzalis is coauthor on Dalli’s fraudulent papers.
Perretti’s successor as QMUL medicine’s Dean for Research, Amrita Ahluwalia, is the last author on several of Dalli’s fraudulent papers.
So this hard hitting evidence is that these people worked with others in the same institution before they were found out that they had suspect data.
But you guys do get too big of hard ons over representatative westerns 😅
I’m not doubting somethings you highlight here are real, but you also need to understand the nuisances behind collaborations.
I think you guys need to question why this is done from postdocs in these groups and not the PI’s. Some of this data is a result of the poor job security of the people below the chain of command of the named and shamed – and having good data is apparent to job security for 90% of researchers. Whislt it good to have fun and games with some of this – there is a level of trust and loyalty that is principle in any discipline.
If you guys want to hold others accountable you’ve got to appreciate its 2 way criticism.
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Amrita, go get a life or.something. You aren’t welcome here and your next trolling will be deleted like the one before.
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Reply to comment: “Name drops of affiliated…blah blah”
FYI: a gibberish like this in Italian language is called “supercazzola”.
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The nr. 50 for Thiemermann is also very nice:
https://pubpeer.com/publications/C68D9A8A432FC8E09F972B9A6F819D
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I’m in Shock. Btw, I do hope that cesspit of a journal is in trouble now.
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John Vane’s Nobel Prize does seem to be one that has done more harm than good.
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UPDATE as of now:
Salvatore Cuzzocrea 71, Christoph Thiemermann 53, Achille Caputi 46, Emanuela Mazzon 41, Rosanna Di Paola 26, Laura Dugo 19, Prabal K Chatterjee 19, Nimesh Patel 18, Tiziana Genovese 15.
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UPDATE as of now: someone, who is likely to be Prof Amrita Ahluwalia, Dean of Research at Queen Maty University of London faculty of medicine, tried to place twice a comment ordering me “head out of your own bum or stop suckong yourself off”.
Ending with a threat:
“And your science Gulag isn’t the end all be all – you have to be held accountable too.”
That’s the level QMUL operates on.
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https://www.qmul.ac.uk/about/whoswho/
Professor Colin Bailey CBE, President and Principal of Queen Mary University of London
does not have a background in biology, but in engineering.
The problematic data come under physics. Engineers should understand physics.
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Reply to
Disgruntled PhD student
August 2, 2023
“overly aggressive gotcha narrative”
Professors Christoph Thiemerman, Mauro Perretti and Ken Szuki have been caught.
“Gotcha” seems appropriate.
If you don’t like the narrative make up your own narrative after looking at these Pubpeer lists.
https://pubpeer.com/search?q=thiemermann
https://pubpeer.com/search?q=perretti
https://pubpeer.com/search?q=ken+suzuki
A reasonable person changes their opinion based on the evidence.
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I deleted the comment which I suspect was again placed by Amrita Ahluwalia (I send her all these comments, she never protests if wasn’t her). She should try and get a life instead of blathering about “you are not entirely judge, jury and executioner” and “you’re just a McCarthy in a red scare situation”
And this:
” Again not a threat – but if you’re not going to post my comments and control your own nartiave you can say that. “
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“The late British pharmacologist Sir John Vane was a researcher of aspirin and was, together with two other researchers, awarded in 1982 the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for “for their discoveries concerning prostaglandins and related biologically active substances”. ”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostaglandin
“The first total syntheses of prostaglandin F2α and prostaglandin E2 were reported by E. J. Corey in 1969,[9] an achievement for which he was awarded the Japan Prize in 1989.
In 1971, it was determined that aspirin-like drugs could inhibit the synthesis of prostaglandins. The biochemists Sune K. Bergström, Bengt I. Samuelsson and John R. Vane jointly received the 1982 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their research on prostaglandins.”
Twiddling the knob merited a Nobel Prize, whereas making the knob didn’t.
Bit like the Nobel Prize for Hypoxia inducible factors, twiddling the erythropoietin knob, but no Nobel Prize for the isolation and purification of erythropoietin.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2019/summary/
E. J. Corey did get his own Nobel Prize.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/1990/corey/facts/
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Quite possibly the problematic data of Professor’s Christoph Thiemermann, Mauro Perretti, and Ken Suzuki are too many for Queen Mary University of London to keep a lid on them.
I imagine that Professors Christoph Thiemermann, Mauro Perretti, and Ken Suzuki will be quite angry that journal editors are writing to them during their summer holidays. The Professors might even let the journal editors know in no uncertain terms that they should not write letters about the problematic data while the Professors are on holiday.
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The University of Ulm medical faculty indicated to me that they are happy to host Thiemermann as guest professor and disregard all the PubPeer evidence.
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Good for the University of Ulm! It has given Christoph Thiemermann honours. It obviously can see the real quality.
Problematic data University of Ulm. Could all be slips of the pen.
https://www.uniklinik-ulm.de/allgemein-und-viszeralchirurgie/team/prof-dr-biolhum-knippschild.html
Problematic data.
https://pubpeer.com/search?q=Uwe+Knippschild+
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Ah, Uwe Knippschild, who trained Georgios Giamas.
And then defended fake crap like this:
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University of Ulm gave Christoph Thiemermann a guest professorship in 2022. The judgement of the University of Ulm, home, as in the case of Professor Uwe Knippschild, and abroad, as in the case of Professor Christoph Thiemermann, is impeccable.
https://www.uni-ulm.de/med/fakultaet/med-detailseiten/news-detail/article/kupczyk-gastprofessur-fuer-prof-christoph-thiemermann/
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Thiemermann’s host Marcus Huber-Lang is his fellow board member and co-self-plagiarist at Shock. He refused communication with me. The press officer hinted on the phone they see me as a nuisance and never wrote back.
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Let’s not forget that QMUL hosts also the infamous papermiller Nader Karimi, about whom Alexander Magazinov wrote on several occasions:
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I suspect that behind the scenes there may be some argy- bargy.
argy-bargy
A noisy disagreement, often with some fighting
There was a bit of an argy-bargy over the matter
The Principal of Queen Mary University of London needs to know that scientific misconduct counts as gross misconduct. No need to pay salaries, or pensions, if people are fired for gross misconduct. A finding of scientific misconduct would cut the legs from under them.
That is a decision for the Principal of Queen Mary University of London, and the other high-ups at the University of London, to make.
History teaches us what can happen. It has happened in London before.
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“Something is off with London biomedical institutes”.
I tend to agree. University College London, Imperial, King’s College London, St George’s Medical School all have more than their fair share of problematic data. Something about the capital city. Pushing and shoving, the number one address, many isolated dictatorships (institutes) scattered across the city.
The Principal of Queen Mary College University of London could do a lot worse than giving the Principal of the University of Glasgow a telephone call and find out a university upholds scientific integrity.
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“Dalli & Perretti
Here you will meet another one of John Vane’s proteges, Mauro Perretti, and Perretti’s own PhD student, Jesmond Dalli. Both Perretti and Dalli are WHRI-affiliated professors at QMUL. Also you need to recall Dalli’s postdoc supervisor, the Harvard professor Charles Serhan”
QMUL denies all of it (officially).
https://www.science.org/content/article/university-found-no-misconduct-anti-inflammatory-research-critics-unconvinced
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