Schneider Shorts 4.08.2023 – Validated and supported by numerous other publications

Schneider Shorts 4 August 2023 – Royal Academy terrorizing critic of St Carlos of Oviedo, litigious honesty experts proven as total frauds, brain disorders and bodybuilding, with spaghetti tumours, bullying and harassment, several retractions (one 22 years delayed), and finally, an Italian mentee of US bigwig informs about correct thinking.

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Science Elites

15 days to apologise

Remember Spain’s greatest martyr saint, St Carlos of Oviedo? To sum up: the great cancer and aging researcher Carlos Lopez-Otin proved to have published massive fraud, which led to 9 retractions, 8 in JBC and 1 in Nature Cell Biology. He also lost his Nature Mentoring Award. All because of the investigation by my sleuthing colleagues, and my reporting.

Lopez-Otin also killed all of his 5000 transgenic mice (possibly to hide evidence of his bad science) and hid in France with Guido Kroemer for a year or so. Before their martyr’s return to University of Oviedo (supported by Opus Dei!), Spanish academic elites threatened JBC with war, led a massive campaign in media and elsewhere, and the Royal Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences of Spain (RAC) issued statements of public support to St Carlos. We don’t know which torture instruments were deployed, but two Spanish journalists were forced to publicly recant and apologise for writing about St Carlos’ retractions, and two Oviedo professors who uttered criticism were found guilty of blasphemy misconduct. I don’t know if anyone was burned at stake, but I am sure there were plans.

And here is a third scientist whom the Holy Inquisition, pardon, the Royal Academy has persecuted, thereatening lawsuits even. The astrophysicist Hector Socas-Navarro wrote on his blog on 19 July 2023 (Google-translated):

“The RAC has been used as an intimidation tool to try to force me to make a public statement contrary to my real opinions. Specifically, an attempt has been made to extract a statement of repentance from me for statements I made years ago, statements that were (and continue to be) fully truthful, legitimate and documented, in relation to the malpractice case of the prestigious and influential researcher Carlos López-Otín. In addition, I have documentary evidence that these actions have been personally promoted by the current President of the RAC, Prof. Jesús María Sanz Serna, without having submitted them for debate and approval by the governing body of said Royal Academy, which is its Board. Directive.”

Socas’ crime was a podcast about the Lopez-Otin affair from February 2019, on the online platform he hosts, called Coffee Break: Señal y Ruido (Signal and Noise, you can listen to it here).

“In 2022, two years after my last statements on the subject (in the aforementioned podcast), I began to receive a series of pressures and attempts to intimidate me to get a public apology, despite the fact that there was no objective basis to justify such a show of contrition. The events begin in my work environment and end with pressure from the RAC itself, which is why I expose them here. In time they roughly coincide with statements of public apology by two other disseminators [30,31], which were collected by some media in articles that conveyed the impression that the criticisms that had been leveled regarding the actions of Prof. López-Otín were unjustified and that in reality this researcher would not have incurred in any action that could be considered reprehensible [32,33]. From the beginning it seemed obvious to me that what was intended was to add my voice to a media campaign that was taking place to create a certain public image of Prof. López-Otín, something in which I did not wish to participate.

The relevant events begin in February 2022, when I receive a WhatsApp from a hierarchical superior in my work environment…”

Socas’ boss at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in Canary Islands told him Lopez-Otin wanted to meet him and that IAC therefore invited St Carlos for a lecture. The meeting took place on 7 April 2022:

“He demanded from me a public declaration of repentance for my statements about his case. The second thing I can say is that in that meeting he threatened to file a complaint against me if he did not agree to make that public statement. To anyone who may think that all this is not much, I would like to remind you that the University of Oviedo opened a file on the professors confronting Prof. López-Otín for holding a private meeting with a colleague, presumably in order to try to condition his statement [28]”.

Socas had to seek legal advice while his IAC superior (abbreviated as MS) kept pressuring him to “accept Prof. López-Otín’s conditions to avoid, as I was told, unpleasant situation to see me before a trial.”

“On May 11, 2022, I received the last message from MS on this matter, warning me that Prof. López-Otín was determined to initiate legal action imminently and that, thanks to his mediation, he had agreed to grant me a period of one day. […]The announced demand was still not filed and, after a week, on May 18, 2022, I receive, for the first time, an email directly from Prof. López-Otín in which he asks me again, this time in good manners, to reconsider my decision. I reply the next day, reiterating my availability to help him defend his point of view on the podcast, in the terms described above, but refusing to issue an apology request or retract my words without there being a basis for it.”

And then the Royal Academy of Sciences stepped in:

“Less than two weeks after this last refusal to comply with Prof. López-Otín’s demands, I received, to my great surprise, a letter from the RAC signed by its president, Prof. Jesús María Sanz Serna, on June 1 of 2022. In this letter he repeats some of the arguments put forward by Prof. López-Otín and demands a public declaration of apology within a period of fifteen days or otherwise expose me to the adoption of legal actions against me by the RAC. […]

I am responding to the aforementioned communication from the RAC in the same terms that I had proposed to Prof. López-Otín, offering to rectify any incorrectness that they might have made me see or giving him the opportunity to tell his version of the story on the podcast. The correspondence continues with another letter sent to me by the RAC, also signed by its president, dated June 29, 2022. Finally, I reply to this letter on July 26, presenting a summary of the documented facts that are in the public domain and stating that, there being no basis to retract my words, I maintain everything said in the aforementioned podcast.”

So far, Socas kept silent about all this on advice of his lawyer. He also suffered psychological damage while his tormentor St Carlos enjoyed having his wrinkly arse publicly kissed.

“In April 2023, having already recovered from a mental point of view, I sent a fax addressed to the board of directors of the RAC formally requesting that they notify me of any decision that had been made by that board of directors regarding me, including the resolution to demand a public apology under threat of taking legal action against me within a period of fifteen days. I specifically request that they let me know if such decisions were adopted unanimously or if there were dissenting votes, particular votes or abstentions among the members of the board of directors of the RAC.

After a brief correspondence with the General Secretariat of the RAC, on June 20 I was informed in writing that the minutes of the board of directors do not show that any matter that affects me directly or indirectly has been dealt with.”

One doesn’t need to be a mathematician to calculate what a despicable lying bullying git this RAC president Jesús María Sanz Serna is. Actually, a typical Spanish professor. The irony is that Lopez-Otin was in his before-hair-dye-youth considered to be the liberal reformer of Spanish science, brought back from USA to drag it out from the dark swamp of Franco fascism.

Well, look how well St Carlos succeeded.

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Validated and supported by numerous other publications

In earlier Friday Shorts, I wrote about the society-published FASEB Journal being a fake science dump run by fraud-abetting failed scientists, who issue fraudulent corrections and even actively cover up fraud. The dishonest authors who had enjoyed such privileged editorial whitewashing service (probably on their account of being white) are the US bigwig Nadia Rosenthal, scientific director of The Jackson Laboratory in Maine, and her Italian mentee Antonio Musarò, now professor at the Sapienza University in Rome. Now, one could easily ignore or laugh at that Italian barone Musaro, but Rosenthal‘s power reaches internationally:

“…she later directed a biomedical research laboratory, then established and headed the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) campus in Rome. She was Founding Director of the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute at Monash University and founded EMBL Australia as its Scientific Head. Rosenthal is an EMBO member, Fellow of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences and the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Science, is an NH&MRC Australia Fellow, and is the Maxine Groffsky Endowed Chair. She also holds a Chair in Cardiovascular Science at Imperial College London.”

And this is the quality of Rosenthal’s science, at least where Musaro was involved:

Gabriella Dobrowolny , Cristina Giacinti , Laura Pelosi , Carmine Nicoletti , Nadine Winn , Laura Barberi , Mario Molinaro , Nadia Rosenthal , Antonio Musarò Muscle expression of a local Igf-1 isoform protects motor neurons in an ALS mouse model The Journal of Cell Biology (2005) doi: 10.1083/jcb.200407021 

Cloned fragments on forged western blots, and here are more of those:

Antonio Musarò , Karl McCullagh , Angelika Paul , Leslie Houghton , Gabriella Dobrowolny , Mario Molinaro , Elisabeth R. Barton , H L Sweeney, Nadia Rosenthal Localized Igf-1 transgene expression sustains hypertrophy and regeneration in senescent skeletal muscle Nature Genetics (2001) doi: 10.1038/84839 

Even more here, in fact some really advanced forgery to be admired:

Michele Pelosi, Francesco Marampon, Bianca M. Zani , Sabrina Prudente , Emerald Perlas , Viviana Caputo , Luciano Cianetti , Valeria Berno , Shuh Narumiya , Shin W. Kang , Antonio Musarò, Nadia Rosenthal ROCK2 and its alternatively spliced isoform ROCK2m positively control the maturation of the myogenic program Molecular and cellular biology (2007) doi: 10.1128/mcb.01735-06

Now, this is the statement Musaro gave me in an email:

“I am aware of some of the comments that appeared on PubPeer, based also on the interaction I had with the editors of some journals.

Thus, I clarified directly with the journals, for the papers in which I was corresponding author, the mistakes evidenced in some papers, and some journals published an erratum statement.

I would like to also inform you, as I indicated to some of the journals with which I was in contact, that the presentation of some figure’s panels was not intentionally misleading, the data were not misinterpreted, and the conclusions drawn from the data were not altered; there was an error in assembling some representative figures.

It is important to note that neither of these errors impacts the overall results of the papers or the interpretation of the data and conclusions. These findings have been validated and supported by numerous other publications, not only from our research groups but also from various independent groups over the years. Additionally, I would like to inform you that after an independent analysis of the figures and the content of the manuscripts conducted by the journals, along with our explanations, the editors expressed satisfaction with the responses provided by the authors.

As I also indicated in the correspondence with the journals, I, as corresponding author, apologize to the journals and to the scientific community for the oversight in assembling some of the figures, which curiously has escaped the attention of authors, reviewers, editors, and readers during the last 15-20 years (since the time of publication).

I do appreciate your vigilance and for bringing the PubPeer notes to our attention, and I sincerely apologize for any confusion or concern these errors may have caused.”

Rosenthal refused all communication with me, even when I challenged her to oppose Musaro’s outrageous attitude on basic research integrity, unless she wants to appear to fully share it. So we assume she co-signs the statement above.

Musaro has more stuff on PubPeer, also without Rosenthal. One Publisher’s note from July 2021 warned: “The journal is publishing this note to alert readers to the duplication, which does not impact the conclusions of the paper.“

Now, here is a collaborative paper co-authored Musaro and Rosenthal, but I think we can guess who faked the figure here.

Although, with so many Italian authors…

Bianca Maria Scicchitano , Lucia Spath , Antonio Musarò, Mario Molinaro , Nadia Rosenthal , Clara Nervi , Sergio Adamo Vasopressin-dependent myogenic cell differentiation is mediated by both Ca2+/calmodulin-dependent kinase and calcineurin pathways Molecular Biology of the Cell (2005) doi: 10.1091/mbc.e05-01-0055 

Now, since Rosenthal is Jackson Lab’s scientific director, she would be in charge of investigating herself. Not helpful. But she is still affiliated with the intergovernmental research organization European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), in a rather senior role. I contacted the EMBL director Edith Heard. She is a former collaborator of the science fraudster Olivier Voinnet, and achieved corrections to their joint papers where retractions would have been the correct choice of action. Read here:

Also this was corrected in March 2015, with the note “Fig. 3 is incorrect. A mistake was made by the authors during the assembly of panel 3B. The loading control U6 is duplicated for the XY D0 and D2 samples.“

In January 2015, Heard educated me about that fake gel:

“The first author admits to making a minor error inadvertently in this paper, without any consequences for the conclusions. […] I would appreciate it if you could stop contacting me further on these allegations“

The first author Constance Ciaudo made it to professor at ETH Zürich, but even if she was officially exempt from investigation, she left academia in 2022 to become a “Scientific Expert” with a company called Immunai. Maybe that was also because another paper by Ciaudo, Voinnet and Heard (Ciaudo et al 2013), also in Plos Genetics, was retracted in September 2015 for data manipulation. Heard’s stated contribution to that paper was “generation of reagents including an ES cell line required for the study“.

Now I contacted Heard again, no reply of course. She’ll probably send the police upon me.

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A rigorous academic community

A recent paper by Benjamin G. Neel, Director of the Perlmutter Cancer Center at NYU Langone Health was discussed on PubPeer:

Shuang Zhang, Igor Dolgalev , Tao Zhang , Hao Ran , Douglas A. Levine , Benjamin G. Neel Both fallopian tube and ovarian surface epithelium are cells-of-origin for high-grade serous ovarian carcinoma Nature Communications (2019) doi: 10.1038/s41467-019-13116-2 

Next to the recycled image of cells, there was a problem with the raw data for a graph, as Actinopolyspora biskrensis noted:

“Could the authors explain why they used a formula to calculate the 10th set of figures used in generating the graph shown in Figure 3c? […] there are some measurements that are duplicated. In one case, the WT measurements in the 4th and 5th columns are identical for the whole time period, which seems more likely to represent data that was cut and pasted, rather than a coincidence. There are also two other numbers which are duplicates, and one case of a number in triplicate (indicated with like-colored fonts).“

The first author kept providing confusing explanations and shared replacement raw data (comment #10), while Neel eventually offered “be contacting Nature Communications to see whether they would like to see a formal erratum“.

Orchestes quercus asked these interesting questions:

1. How do the authors take measures of tumor dimensions down to a the accuracy of a cell diameter (10 um)?
2. Do the authors consider tumors measuring 0.042 cm x 1.796 cm realistic?
3. Why do values differ between the published dataset and the one provided in #10?
4. What is your opinion on the coincidence of finding a surprisingly high number of identical tumor volumes with different dimensions, colored cells in #10?

Like Orchestes, I am also mightily impressed by Neel’s lab discovery of ‘spaghetti’ tumours which are “40 cells wide, with a length that is more than 40x its width”.

On his instituional website, Neel says:

“As the director of Perlmutter Cancer Center, I lead a rigorous academic community of clinician–scientists and basic scientists“

Neel previously was Chair of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and head of the cancer biology program at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), Boston. In that role, he actually cracked down on the massive fraudster, animal abuser and, as a witness told me, open antisemite Sam W Lee:

According to my information, Neel kicked Lee out of BIDMC (for reasons unknown) and had him moved to a distant part of the Massachusetts General Hospital, on the very periphery of Harvard Medical School. But what about Neel’s own research?

Neel published together with such rigorous researchers like Barbara Kahn and Tony Tiganis (e.g., Zabolotny et al 2001, Loh et al 2011, Dodd et al 2015, also see Kahn’s and Tigranis‘ PubPeer records); Robert Weinberg (5 retractions and a fat PubPeer record); and Julian Downward (Baksh et al 2005), more Downward stuff on PubPeer, with a Nature retraction for which Retraction Watch celebrated him as a hero.

And here is Neel with the some cheaters from Toulouse, France:

Marie Bellio , Cédric GARCIA , Thomas Edouard, Sophie VOISIN , Benjamin G. Neel , Cendrine Cabou , Philippe Valet , Jun Mori , Alexandra Mazharian, Yotis A. Senis, Armelle Yart , Bernard Payrastre , Sonia SEVERIN Catalytic dysregulation of SHP2 leading to Noonan syndromes affects platelet signaling and functions Blood (2019) doi: 10.1182/blood.2019001543 

This fraudulent travesty was fixed with a Mega-Erratum in June 2020, the journal deleted the old fake version and replaced it with a new, less obviously fake one.

Via the common author Armelle Yart, Neel teamed up with the another cheater from Toulouse, Patrick Raynal. Read about him in the article above.

Once again on Noonan Syndrome, Neel with Cheng-Kui Qu of Emory University School of Medicine:

Neel with Lionel Ivashkiv of Weill Cornell Medicine, the latter’s PubPeer record here.

Zhimei Du , Yuhong Shen , Wentian Yang , Ingrid Mecklenbrauker , Benjamin G. Neel , Lionel B. Ivashkiv Inhibition of IFN-alpha signaling by a PKC- and protein tyrosine phosphatase SHP-2-dependent pathway Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2005) doi: 10.1073/pnas.0408854102

Neel with Tomasz Skorski of Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University:

Neel refused communicating with me. He did however generally reply on PubPeer.

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Bad ecologists

#MeTooStem journalist Michael Balter has two new cases of misconduct in academia. In June 2023, Balter tweeted about the bullying ecologist Adrien Finzi, who is still listed by Boston University as professor although he resigned in June 2023:

“According to sources, the allegations go back at least as far as 2005, soon after Finzi received tenure, when his behavior towards fellow faculty and students became increasingly hostile. These incidents continued over the following years and became more and more serious, especially around 2009, when Finzi began to make overt physical threats against fellow faculty members. Over the years, as the behavior continued, faculty members made numerous complaints to the biology department chairs and various deans, who reportedly admonished Finzi but took no serious action. […] However, as Finzi’s bullying increasingly targeted his graduate students, it became more obvious to the university administration that something had to be done. Finally, according to sources, the current dean of arts and sciences, Stan Sclaroff, became involved and obtained Finzi’s resignation”

Balter’s most recent case is that of another ecologist: Max Allen, Research Assistant Professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. This one is accused of sexual harassment. Balter published the summurized accounts of two witnesses by the pseudonyms Alice and Jill, describing Allen’s unwelcome and obsessive attention.

“according to sources, some of the above faculty members had become aware that Allen had also harassed at least one and possibly more undergraduate women he came into contact with in the university’s undergrad wildlife society, and also some cases of bullying students, including one graduate student whose career was badly affected by the abuse”

There were two Title IX complains, filed on behalf of the victims by the two department chairs:

“The university, after a somewhat cursory investigation, decided to conduct an “Educational Conversation” with Allen, which took place on June 23, according to the Title IX records. The case was then closed. However, on July 15, 2022, the case was reopened to include new information, including testimony from a student who had been a witness to the events in Iowa and in Illinois. […] all indications are that the university never informed any of the students about any actions it did take.”

At the time of writing, Allen still invites on his instituional website:

“I frequently have internship opportunities for undergraduate students – interested students should contact me.”

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Honesty built on lies

NPR reports about two fallen stars of psychology research:

“Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino are two of the biggest stars in behavioral science. Both have conducted blockbuster research into how to make people more honest[…]. The two worked together on a paper about how to “nudge” people to be more honest on things like forms or tax returns. Their trick: move the location where people attest that they have filled in a form honestly from the bottom of the form to the top.

But recently, questions have arisen about whether the data Ariely and Gino relied on in their famous paper about honesty were fabricated — whether their research into honesty was itself built on lies. The blog Data Colada went looking for clues in the cells of the studies’ Excel spreadsheets, the shapes of their data distributions, and even the fonts that were used.

The Hartford, an insurance company that collaborated with Ariely on one implicated study, told NPR this week in a statement that it could confirm that the data it had provided for that study had been altered after they gave it to Ariely, but prior to the research’s publication: “It is clear the data was manipulated inappropriately and supplemented by synthesized or fabricated data.”

There’s a full statement by the insurance company as pdf and a 25 min NPR podcast to accompany this.

The Atlantic reported on 2 August 2023 further details of Ariely’s insurance fraud:

“Some entries were in one font, some in another. Some were rounded to the nearest 500 or 1,000; some were not. But the detail that really caught their attention was the distribution of recorded values. With such a dataset, you’d expect to see the numbers fall in a bell curve—most entries bunched up near the mean, and the rest dispersed along the tapering extremes. But the data that Ariely said he’d gotten from the insurance company did not form a bell curve; the distribution was completely flat. Clients were just as likely to have claimed that they’d driven 1,000 miles as 10,000 or 50,000 miles. It’s “hard to know what the distribution of miles driven should look like in those data,” the scientists wrote. “It is not hard, however, to know what it should not look like.”

Soon after, Atlantic editor Daniel Engber tweeted:

“Francesca Gino has filed a $25 million defamation lawsuit against Harvard University and the Data Colada bloggers [Uri Simonsohn, Leif Nelson, Joe Simmons] […] It also suggests that Gino was a victim of gender bias, and links her treatment by Data Colada to that of Amy Cuddy.“

Engber also linked to the lawsuit file and mentioned that it is about this YouTube video by Data Colada:

Gino and Arieley are filthily rich and can afford to sue everyone. On a related subject, Nick Brown tweeted linking a 2018 Buzzfeed article:

“Small world: Brian Wansink ran a Kickstarter that never delivered anything. Dan Ariely was the biggest donor.“

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Retraction Watchdogging

An updated version of the manuscript

Retraction for the Alzheimer’s researcher Bart De Strooper, professor at KU Leuven in Belgium and director of the UK Dementia Research Institute at UCL, who previously tried to bully everyone into accepting that despite data manipulations, no conclusions were ever affected. Read about De Strooper’s problematic papers and his even more problematic attitude in earlier Friday Shorts.

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 

In December 2022, 3 years after the evidence was posted, De Strooper replied on PubPeer:

“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.

In July 2023, he wrote this on PubPeer:

“We have published a corrected version on bioRxiv: https://biorxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2023.07.28.550932v1 and is also submitted to a peer reviewed journal“

That was because a Retraction was published, or about to be published:

“This article has been withdrawn by the authors. The journal concluded that there was possible undeclared splicing in Fig. 2C, 3A, 4B, and possible image manipulation in figure 7B. The raw data provided was not able to resolve these issues. The withdrawing authors stand by the overall findings and conclusions of the article, and they will make an updated version of the manuscript available for the community.”

Well done, Bart. Now retract your other fudged papers.

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Offered to submit a revised manuscript

Unexpected retraction for the French fraud gang from Grenoble, led by Saadi Khochbin, Sylvie Gazzeri, Elisabeth Brambilla, Brambilla’s husband Christian Brambilla, and her mentee and successor as group leader upon retirement, Beatrice Eymin. In earlier Friday Shorts I wrote how these senior scientists were whitewashed by their of Institute of Advanced Biosciences and negotiated corrections or utter inaction on their outrageously fraudulent papers. I assumed the journal Oncogene will act similarly. But now the paper was retracted:

C Leduc , P Claverie , B Eymin , E Col , S Khochbin , E Brambilla , S Gazzeri p14ARF promotes RB accumulation through inhibition of its Tip60-dependent acetylation Oncogene (2006) doi: 10.1038/sj.onc.1209446

And now it was retracted, on 31 July 2O23:

“The Editors-in-Chief have retracted this article. After publication, concerns were raised regarding western blot band similarities and vertical breaks in the blot backgrounds in Figs. 4a. 4b, 5a, 5b and 7a. The authors have repeated the experiments to validate the results, but have been unable to explain the similarities or background irregularities in the published figures. The Editors-in-Chief therefore no longer have confidence in the presented data.

The authors have been offered to submit a revised manuscript containing data from the repeated experiments for further peer review.”

We are also informed that Khochbin agreed to the retraction; Eymin and Gazzeri did not agree, and the rest hid under the table. Let’s see what revised manuscript they will resubmit for further peer review to replace their retracted paper after almost two decades.

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Patients before and after treatment

An Italian plastic surgeon and anti-aging facial cream shill loses a paper because he rejuvenated his paying customers with Photoshop:

Maurizio Cavallini, Carmen De Luca , Giovanni Prussia , Mauro Raichi PN‐HPT ^® (Polynucleotides Highly Purified Technology) in facial middle third rejuvenation. Exploring the potential Journal of Cosmetic Dermatology (2022) doi: 10.1111/jocd.14578 

On 26 July 2023, the paper was retracted:

“After publication, concerns were raised by a third party regarding possible duplication between the multipaneled images within Figures 3 and 4—specifically, that they did not show the patients before and after treatment as reported. As part of the journal’s investigation, the authors provided the raw, unmodified images for review. The analysis of the raw images resolved the issues for Figure 3. However, concerns remained about the duplication of images between the reported baseline and posttreatment images in Figure 4 that the authors were unable to provide a satisfactory explanation for. As a result, the conclusions reported in the article are no longer considered reliable.“

In between, Maurizio Cavallini, who has a private plastic surgery practice in Milan, used to openly shilling at sponsored conferences for the makers of the anti-aging cream, Mastelli Aestetics, while insisting:

“Regarding financial support and sponsorship, the authors declare their study was spontaneous and touched off by scientific curiosity arising from published medical literature. […] The authors declare they have no conflict of interest inappropriately influencing the representation or interpretation of reported research results. Mastelli Srl, Sanremo, Italy, holder of the PN-HPT® patents and producer of the investigated medical devices, will limit its support to contributing to the manuscript publication costs”

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Mr. Suls said he would print a retraction

22 years are a lot of time. People get born, grow up, have children of their own. Alternatively, that’s how long you sometimes need between the retraction request and the actual retraction.

Karen M. Ruggiero , Jennifer Steele , Anne Hwang , David M. Marx “Why Did I Get a ‘D’?” The Effects of Social Comparisons on Women’s Attributions to Discrimination Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (2000) doi: 10.1177/0146167200262008 

The retraction notice from 26 July 2023 merely said:

“Retracts an article by K. Ruggiero et al (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2000 [Oct], Vol 26[10], 1271–1283). The senior author notes that the data reported in this article are invalid and should not be considered part of the scientific literature of psychology.”

Not much to start with, but maybe this NIH report of Findings of Scientific Misconduct from December 2001 helps?

“On November 26, 2001, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) entered into a Voluntary Exclusion Agreement with Harvard University and Karen M. Ruggiero, Ph.D., former Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology at Harvard University. Based on the report of an inquiry conducted by Harvard University (Harvard Report), and related actions and findings by Harvard based on the Harvard Report, as well as additional analysis conducted by ORI in its oversight review, PHS found that Dr. Ruggiero engaged in scientific misconduct by fabricating data in research supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).”

Details of falsifications are in the report, and two retractions were ordered back in 2001:

• “Dr. Ruggiero fabricated three experiments, including data reported as having been obtained from a total of 240 participants, published in the following paper“: Ruggiero, K.M. & Major, B.N. “Group status and attributions to discrimination: Are low- or high-status group members more likely to blame their failure on discrimination?” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (1998) doi: 10.1177/0146167298248004
• “Dr. Ruggiero fabricated two experiments, including data reported as having been obtained from a total of 360 participants, published in the following paper:” Ruggiero, K.M., Mitchell, J.P., Krieger, N., Marx, D.M., & Lorenzo, M.L. “Now you see it, now you don’t: Explicit versus implicit measures of the personal/group discrimination discrepancy.” Psychological Science (2020) doi: 10.1111/1467-9280.00298

The latter paper was retracted in 2002, the former will be probably retracted in the year 2045.

It was a huge scandal in psychological science back in 2001. Chronicle reported back in July 2001:

“Ms. Ruggiero, an assistant professor who was recruited to Austin in September with a $100,000 startup package for her scholarly work on the attitudes of women and other groups about discrimination, resigned in a June 22 letter after notifying Texas officials that Harvard was investigating fraud charges against her. […]

Jerry M. Suls, a professor of psychology at the University of Iowa and editor of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, said he had received three letters, two in June and one this month, from Ms. Ruggiero, asking him to print a retraction for “Why Did I Get a D? The Effects of Social Comparisons on Women’s Attributions to Discrimination,” a paper that appeared in the publication in October.

In the last letter, Mr. Suls said, Ms. Ruggiero had explained that the paper’s data were invalid and that the problem lay with her and not with her three colleagues, “whose sole role was to edit multiple drafts” of her work.

Mr. Suls said he would print a retraction in the bulletin’s September issue.”

Then, maybe a squirrel hushed past the Dr Suls’ window, the University of Iowa professor got detracted… Anyway, Suls stepped down as Editor-in-Chief of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in the same year and probably took Ruggiero’s letters home, for sentimental value, or maybe he wrapped his sandwiches in them or whatever… In any case, the affair was forgotten. For 22 years.

Now this paper is finally retracted. Applause for the science self-correcting.

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New and good data

Maarten van Kampen achieved a retraction of an already corrected paper!

Fahimeh Vafaee, Samira Mandizadeh, Omid Amiri , Mansour Jahangiri , Masoud Salavati-Niasari Synthesis and characterization of AFe₂O₄ (A: Ni, Co, Mg)–silica nanocomposites and their application for the removal of dibenzothiophene (DBT) by an adsorption process: kinetics, isotherms and experimental design RSC Advances (2021) doi: 10.1039/d1ra02780h 

Fake spectra, replaced in a Correction from July 2022:

“The authors regret an error in Fig. 4 where a section of the XRD for 4(a) and (b) is identical.

The authors have repeated the experiment and provided new data for Fig. 4. An independent expert has viewed the new data and has concluded that it is consistent with the discussions and conclusions presented.”

All well, science self-corrected and reliable again? Not so fast, Maarten found this:

This is the left-hand part where the spectra are allegedly different:

The author Masoud Salavati-Niasari protested on PubPeer:

“The authors have repeated the experiment and provided new and good data for Fig. 4.”

Maarten informed the publisher. On 31 July 2023, the paper was retracted with the statement:

“The Royal Society of Chemistry, with the agreement of the authors, hereby wholly retracts this RSC Advances article due to concerns with the reliability of the data.

Following the publication of a previous correction to replace the XRD patterns in Fig 4a and b,¹ a new concern has been identified with the published article. The XRD patterns in Fig. 2b and both the original Fig. 4a and b contain multiple overlapping sections. In addition, new information brought to the attention of the Editor undermines the integrity of the authors’ original explanation, meaning that the Editor has lost confidence that the findings presented in this paper are reliable.

Omid Amiri, Mansour Jahangiri, and Masoud Salavati-Niasari wish to state that they had no role in preparing the XRD data.”

The last bit is somewhat true. Salavati-Niasari never did any XRD experiments for sure. Not even here:

Mojgan Ghanbari , Masoud Salavati-Niasari Copper iodide decorated graphitic carbon nitride sheets with enhanced visible-light response for photocatalytic organic pollutant removal and antibacterial activities Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety (2021) doi: 10.1016/j.ecoenv.2020.111712 

Salavati-Niasari offered replacement data:

“According to the explanations of the dear referees, the XRD pattern was taken again from the samples (C and I) you wanted and replaced. It is necessary to explain that the text of the article will not change.”

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Counterfeiting of Academic Journals from Multiple Player Perspective

Smut Clyde commented on a retraction:

“So meta. Someone bought a papermilled manuscript about how unscrupulous fraudsters take advantage of naive authors.”

Ai Lei, Chuhan Qian A Probe into the Counterfeiting of Academic Journals from Multiple Player Perspective Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience (2022) doi: 10.1155/2022/3054668 

This was the retraction notice from 26 July 2023:

This article has been retracted by Hindawi following an investigation undertaken by the publisher [1]. This investigation has uncovered evidence of one or more of the following indicators of systematic manipulation of the publication process:

• (1)Discrepancies in scope
• (2)Discrepancies in the description of the research reported
• (3)Discrepancies between the availability of data and the research described
• (4)Inappropriate citations
• (5)Incoherent, meaningless and/or irrelevant content included in the article
• (6)Peer-review manipulation

The presence of these indicators undermines our confidence in the integrity of the article’s content and we cannot, therefore, vouch for its reliability. Please note that this notice is intended solely to alert readers that the content of this article is unreliable. We have not investigated whether authors were aware of or involved in the systematic manipulation of the publication process.

Wiley and Hindawi regrets that the usual quality checks did not identify these issues before publication and have since put additional measures in place to safeguard research integrity.

We wish to credit our own Research Integrity and Research Publishing teams and anonymous and named external researchers and research integrity experts for contributing to this investigation.

With research integrity issues, it takes one to know one.

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Science Breakthroughs

One of the safest and the easiest approaches

All is fair in Love, War and Alzheimer’s research. Now it’s a bodybuilder supplement.

Rush University Medical Center informs in a press release:

“The secret to protecting your memory may be a staple of a bodybuilder’s diet. RUSH researchers recently discovered that a muscle-building supplement called beta-hydroxy beta-methylbutyrate, also called HMB, may help protect memory, reduce plaques and ultimately help prevent the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.

HMB is not a prescription drug or a steroid, but an over-the-counter supplement that is available in sports and fitness stores. Bodybuilders regularly use HMB to increase exercise-induced gains in muscle size and strength while improving exercise performance. HMB is considered safe even after long-term use, with no known side effects.

“This may be one of the safest and the easiest approaches to halt disease progression and protect memory in Alzheimer’s disease patients,” said Kalipada Pahan, PhD, the Floyd A. Davis, MD, Professor of Neurology and professor of neurological sciences, biochemistry and pharmacology at RUSH Medical College.

Studies in mice with Alzheimer’s disease have shown that HMB successfully reduces plaques and increases factors for neuronal growth to protect learning and memory, according to neurological researchers at RUSH.”

This is the paper:

Ramesh K. Paidi , Sumita Raha , Avik Roy , Kalipada Pahan Muscle-building supplement β-hydroxy β-methylbutyrate binds to PPARα to improve hippocampal functions in mice Cell Reports (2023) doi: 10.1016/j.celrep.2023.112717 

“The authors declare no competing interests.”

Never mind that Kalipada Pahan is member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Hong Kong-based company Forest Hills Lab (FHL), which “is engaged in therapeutic drug development for highly unmet medical conditions in the neurodegenerative disease areas, such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease.” He also owns a startup named Pahan Therapeutics, it’s motto: “Finding the cure to cancer and autoimmune disorders“. Actually, it’s his wife Swarupa who is the president, Mr Pahan is merely the board member.

Why do these people always lie to hide their greed… Anyway, from the press release:

““Our study found that after oral consumption, HMB enters into the brain to increase these beneficial proteins, restore neuronal connections and improve memory and learning in mice with Alzheimer’s-like pathology, such as plaques and tangles,” Pahan said. […] “If mouse results with HMB are replicated in Alzheimer’s disease patients, it would open up a promising avenue of treatment of this devastating neurodegenerative disease,” Pahan said.”

Even if the drug fails against Alzheimer’s, those old folks will still get quite buff. Win-win!

Before bodybuilder supplements, Pahan used to push cinnamon. In his earlier peer-reviewed garbage he authored with his daughter Priyanka, he claimed that cinnamon cured Parkinson’s disease (“we have seen that Ceylon cinnamon is much more pure than Chinese cinnamon, as the latter contains coumarin“). The next year, the Rush University professor claimed that cinnamon also improves learning (Modi et al 2016): “This would be one of the safest and the easiest approaches to convert poor learners to good learners”. And in December 2022, this clown announced in MDPI (Sheinin et al 2022) a cure for cancer, which is… COVID-19: “Intranasal spike S1 protein could be used for late-stage lung cancer when there’s no other therapy to stop the progression.” Always: “The authors declare no conflict of interest.”

All this deranged nonsense has been sponsored for years by NIH, Veterans Affairs and the Alzheimer’s Association. And YOUR grant was just rejected. Hahahaha.

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