Schneider Shorts 25.08.2023 – Longevity XXX

Schneider Shorts of 25 August 2023 – a Nobelist opens an anti-aging business, a journal remains evil under new leadership, with retractions for former ERC president, an Oz bully and other fraudsters, embarrassing corrections or inactions elsewhere, frontiers in communism, and finally, a victim of clinical abuse releases documentary.

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Industry Giants

Longevity XXX

The main character quality of a usual male Nobel Prize laureate seems to be immense greed, sometimes combined with a penchant for quackery.

Bruce Beutler, professor at University of Texas-Southwestern in USA, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2011 for “discoveries concerning the activation of innate immunity”. His mentor Ralph Steinmann, who died just 3 days before the announcement, has received the main half of the Nobel Prize (Jules Hoffman received the remaining 1/4 of the Prize, some say undeservingly). Beulter previously became obscenely rich with his 1992-registered patent for the anti-inflammation drug Enbrel, a TNF inhibitor. Obviously this is not enough money, so the man decided to make even more on the anti-aging market. Beutler just recently founded a company called Longevity X, which is currently in the stage of raising capital from billionaire investors.

It’s all hush-hush for now, but there was this September 2023 conference announcement in Hong Kong, where Beutler is announced to speak:

“In recent years, his lab has also developed the Automated Meiotic Mapping (AMM) platform, which makes the positioning of clones become a real-time procedure. The application of AMM enabled them to attribute approximately 30,000 phenotypes to a single mutation in a relatively short time, which would have taken thousands of years in the past. This major breakthrough allowed them to identify most of the genes required for strong immunity, while also opens a door to the systematic search for disease-modifying mutations. This technology is the main platform of his new company Longevity X. Dr. Hank Wu, co-founder of Longevity X, also shared his vision for the company and how we can derive greater value from something that cannot be measured by money, such as time. It was exciting to see how the vision of Longevity X will be beneficial to all of humanity…”

Wen-Chih “Hank” Wuh is professor of epidemiology at the Brown University and a full-time businessman. He is also a book author, his scholarly masterpiece from 2002, “Sexual Fitness”, informs the inclined reader “how seven basic factors-diet, supplements, medications, sensual stimulation, exercise, sleep, and stress reduction-directly influence sexual health“, with dietary guidelines and recipes. Professor Wuh also holds a 1999 patent titled “Method and composition for improving sexual fitness“, which is about a “dietary supplement comprising L-arginine, alone or in combination with ginseng and ginkgo biloba and/or additional nutritional supplements“. I trust all this will be part of Longevity XXX, pardon the pun?

Not only! In the not-yet-for-public promotional video on Vimeo (which one of the Hong Kong announcements linked to) Beutler and Wuh announce not just to massively extend life span, but also to cure all diseases including cancers, all of them. The technology to find a genetic cure for everything to be AI and Machine Learning, combined with Beulter’s invention “automated meiotic mapping”. Beulter says he will use this “breakthrough” technique to crack in 10 years all longevity and cancer problems humanity would normally need 1700 years to solve. And he already has 17 life-extension mutations in his company’s portfolio. He promises “a lead compound” for clinical trial in the next two years, if given enough investor money.

We also learn that Longevity X board members are Beutler’s fellow moustache wearer, former vice president of John Hopkins University and CEO of Hopkins Medicine Paul Rothman, and Yale professor of obstetrics Mary Polan. Also the CEO of the Californian company Aardvark Therapeutics (where Beulter is chief scientific advisor) speaks on the video, which probably means this weight-loss business is involved with Longevity X.

Expect bombastic announcements about Longevity X in the news worldwide soon, once the multi-million financing round is completed. Old age and all diseases are to be cured, for all paying customers of Professor Beutler.

But then again, despite the Enbrel patent success, maybe Beulter is not such a great entrepreneur after all. The company Tollbridge Therapeutics he founded in 2015 with his brother Earl Beutler (even bigger moustache!), in order to provide “innovative therapies that harness the immune system to fight cancer and other diseases“, looks a complete failure.

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Breathtaking

Australian journalist Robert Cockburn previously published a guest post on For Better Science about the illegal clinical tests he became a victim of.

Australian universities are driven to industry collaborations at any costs, and sometimes these costs are the health and safety of their patients. Cockburn was one such patient and he suffered permanent damage to his health while testing an experimental asthma device without a proper informed consent. He investigated, the result is this 29 minute-long documentary, which is now available https://youtu.be/Flpu7uYqmj8 in near-final version. Robert Cockburn invites your feedback!

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Retraction Watchdogging

Mauro Ferrari did not respond to any correspondence

Another retraction for nanofabricator Mauro Ferrari, who used to be a bigwig in Texas, then got (briefly) appointed as President of European Research Council (ERC) in order to embarrass the institution (I did warn them). The following is yet another retraction Ferrari earned with his fraudster buddy Haifa Shen.

Min Zhou, Jun Zhao, Mei Tian , Shaoli Song , Rui Zhang, Sanjay Gupta , Dongfeng Tan , Haifa Shen , Mauro Ferrari, Chun Li Radio-photothermal therapy mediated by a single compartment nanoplatform depletes tumor initiating cells and reduces lung metastasis in the orthotopic 4T1 breast tumor model Nanoscale (2015) doi: 10.1039/c5nr04587h

The retraction notice was published on 18 August 2023:

“The authors hereby wholly retract this Nanoscale paper due to an error in Fig. 3c and 5b.

In Fig. 3c the infrared thermal images of the mice in the control panel and the RT/PTT panel are identical.

In Fig. 5b, kidney histology of 4 four treatment groups were compared. The image used for the kidney RT/PTT panel was wrongly used and contains overlap with the kidney control panel.

We feel that these errors undermine the integrity of this study. We regret any confusion and apologize to the scientific community.

Haifa Shen and Mauro Ferrari were contacted about this retraction but did not respond to any correspondence.

Signed: Min Zhou, Jun Zhao, Mei Tian, Shaoli Song, Rui Zhang, Sanjay Gupta, Dongfeng Tan, Chun Li”

How this bullshitting crook Ferrari got appointed as ERC president in the first place is something which EU Commission should be investigating, but of course they won’t.

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Extreme authorship changes

After the German professor Dirk-Uwe Sauer left his post as Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Energy Storage, others have to retract the fraudulent papermill trash he waved through.

Here is the recent one:

Dongmin Yu, Tao Zhang , Guixiong He , Sayyad Nojavan , Kittisak Jermsittiparsert , Noradin Ghadimi Energy management of wind-PV-storage-grid based large electricity consumer using robust optimization technique Journal of Energy Storage (2020) doi: 10.1016/j.est.2019.101054 

This is the retraction notice, presumably issued on 18 August 2023:

“This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief.

Post publication, the editors discovered suspicious changes in authorship between the original submission and the revised version of this paper. The extreme authorship changes did not correspond with the changes between the original and the revised versions.

In addition, the changes were made without explanation and without the exceptional approval by the handling Editor, which is contrary to the journal policy on changes to authorship. The editor investigated further, and the explanation provided by the corresponding author was deemed unsatisfactory.”

Read the above again. What kind of editor allows this to happen in his journal? Prof Dr Sauer does.

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Apparent re-use of all the figures

Retraction for the Chen twin brothers Smut Clyde previously wrote about.

The paper was 100% plagiarised trash.

Tim Chen, J. C-y Chen A New Viewpoint on Control Algorithms for Anthropomorphic Robotic Arms Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems (2020) doi: 10.1007/s10846-020-01149-5 

A retraction notice was issued on 17 August 2023:

“The Editor in Chief has retracted this article. After publication, concerns were raised regarding the apparent re-use of all the figures in this article from an article published earlier by different authors [1]. There also appears to be partial text overlap between Appendix II of this article and an article published earlier by different authors [2].

Furthermore, the journal received concerns regarding incorrect affiliations provided by the author, J. C.-y. Chen. None of the authors have responded to correspondence from the editor about this retraction.”

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The authors admit and apologize

Maarten van Kampen achieved a retraction of a previously corrected paper by the nanotechnology fraudster Ahmed Shalan, his trainee Mohamed Ahmed and his protector, the Spanish institute director Senentxu Lanceros-Méndez.

This is the paper:

Mohamed K. Ahmed, Ahmed Esmail Shalan , Mohamed Afifi , Mohamed M. El-Desoky, Senentxu Lanceros-Méndez Silver-Doped Cadmium Selenide/Graphene Oxide-Filled Cellulose Acetate Nanocomposites for Photocatalytic Degradation of Malachite Green toward Wastewater Treatment ACS Omega (2021) doi: 10.1021/acsomega.1c02667 

A lengthy Correction was issued on 18 May 2022, beginning with

“Here, we report editing errors in Figures 1, 5, and S1 in the published article and provide the corrected figures. These corrections do not affect any discussion or conclusions of the work. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused by these editing errors.”

But Maarten did not accept this and on 10 August 2023 the publisher ACS informed him that the paper will be retracted. The retraction notice was published on 24 August 2023:

“The authors retract this Article due to concerns about the misinterpretation and misrepresentation of electron density data as atomic force microscopy images, specifically in Figures 3 and 7. The authors used the SEM images as a source of the generated topography images shown in Figures 3 and 7 using imaging software (Gwyddion 2.45) to study the surface roughness, as it was mentioned in the experimental part of the paper. However, topographic images were erroneously presented as AFM images in the publication. While the use of SEM images as a source was mentioned in the experimental part of the paper, it was not unambiguously stated in the results and discussion.

Further, the authors admit and apologize for the duplication of content (Figure 2b) published simultaneously in Figure 5a of 10.1016/j.synthmet.2021.116824.

As a result, the authors retract the Article to avoid any misleading conclusions and to maintain scientific integrity. The original Article was published on August 29, 2021. A correction was issued on May 18, 2022, to address editing errors in Figures 1, 5, and S1; however, following the publication of this correction, data misinterpretation concerns were also raised, and as such, the article is being retracted on August 23, 2023.”

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Unlikely the experiments were actually performed

Australian newspaper “The Age” reports:

“Melbourne’s iconic Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre has become embroiled in a research misconduct scandal after an investigation discovered experiments in an important cancer study were likely never performed.
The centre could now be required to repay taxpayer dollars used to run the melanoma study.”

And it’s because the sacked fraudster Mark Smyth (read about him in earlier Friday Shorts) retracted another paper:

Mark J Smyth , Hideo Yagita , Grant A McArthur Combination Anti-CTLA-4 and Anti-RANKL in Metastatic Melanoma Journal of Clinical Oncology (2016) doi: 10.1200/jco.2013.51.3572 

The recent retraction notice goes:

“An external investigation committee found that although the raw data used to produce Figure 2 was accessible in handwritten and electronic formats, there was a lack of correlation between the mouse numbers in the handwritten notes and the animal use database. Due to the lack of supporting information in the animal database records, the investigation committee concluded that on the balance of probabilities, it is unlikely that the experiments shown in Figure 2 were actually performed.

Per the recommendation of the author’s institution, in agreement with the corresponding author, this article has been retracted as of August 11, 2023.”

The Age wrote about this retracted study:

“The paper looked at the case of a 39-year-old woman with melanoma that had spread to her bones. She was treated with two antibodies, ipilimumab and denosumab. The woman made a striking recovery, and by the end of treatment, her pain was gone.
The researchers then claimed they tested the combination of the two antibodies in mice with melanoma, and also found it to be effective. Based on human and mouse data, the researchers suggested the combination treatment should be further studied in humans.”

The newspaper doesn’t discuss the clinical data, but it is more likely than not the cancer patient did not recover, but suffered additional pain and misery thanks to Smyth’s abuse. We can only hope he didn’t kill her.

This is also informative, since academia still admires its white male sociopaths as science geniuses:

“A review by QIMR, released earlier this year, found Smyth was “a bully who used his reputation, status and power to intimidate” and avoid scrutiny of his research.

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Scholarly Publishing

Independently reviewed by three editors

Human Molecular Genetics is an evil place. Its former Editor-in-Chief, the Oxford professor Dame Kay Davies has three hobbies: publishing fake science, covering fraudsters, and ratting out whistleblowers.

Clare Francis reported to the journal this paper:

As the evidence shows, gel lanes in two gels have been cloned after mirroring. A classic case of fraud. But this is what Kirsty Vance, Managing Editor of Human Molecular Genetics, replied to the sleuth:

“Dear Claire Francis,

Thank you for getting in touch with Human Molecular Genetics regarding 10.1093/hmg/8.13.2339.

Your message has been independently reviewed by three editors at the journal. Following this review, the editors request that you elaborate on how you drew the conclusion that the data were problematic, and how this may have impacted the results.”

Incredible attitude. Nothing has changed since Davies and her co-EiC, a noble entity named Anthony Wynshaw-Boris, stepped down. Although, the duo remain honorary editors of Human Molecular Genetics, so maybe they acted as two of the three expert reviewers. Actually it doesn’t matter who these three editors were, what matters is that the arrogant crookery and fraud abetting continue to be this journal’s business model even under the new leadership.

The new Editor-in-Chief responsible for the noxious farce above, is Charis Eng, professor at Cleveland Clinic, USA. Here is the editorial board, suspect each one of them to be either a moron or a crook unless proven otherwise.

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An intended effect

The Italian cheater Maurizio Sabbatini apparently found some accommodating editors to endorse his forged data which he himself admitted to have been digitally manipulated. Aneurus Inconstans wrote about Sabbatini and his mentor before:

Sabbatini has almost 40 fraudulent papers on PubPeer. This is the study in question:

Michela Bosetti , Maurizio Sabbatini , Anna Calarco , Alessia Borrone , Gianfranco Peluso , Mario Cannas Effect of retinoic acid and vitamin D3 on osteoblast differentiation and activity in aging Journal of Bone and Mineral Metabolism (2016) doi: 10.1007/s00774-014-0642-2 

Sabbatini stated on PubPeer (highlight mine):

“All images of the publication were discussed with editor in chief and accepted for publication.”

He later added:

“The similarity of the cells was an intended effect”

This journal has an all-Japanese editorial board and two Japanese editors-in-chief, one or both must have accepted Sabbatini’s fraud. These EiCs are Toshio Matsumoto, emeritus professor at University of Tokushima, and Toshiyuki Yoneda, emeritus professor at Osaka University. Both were contacted by Aneurus already in April 2023, and both chose not to reply. Or do anything. They also remain unresponsive now, when invited to deny that they indeed support the obvious falsifications which Sabbatini apparently even admitted.

At least Springer Nature replied and announced to investigate.

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Repeated with cells thawed 23 years later

The difference between pedestrian failed scientists and true geniuses who publish in Nature is that the geniuses can easily go back and repeat their experiments from quarter a century ago, obtaining the exactly same result. This is what Johns Hopkins University bigwig Bert Vogelstein and his mentee, the LMU Munich professor Heiko Hermeking, now did. A welcome change from their original plans to sue their critics.

This is the 24 year old Nature paper:

Bert Vogelstein, Timothy A. Chan, Heiko Hermeking, Christoph Lengauer , Kenneth W. Kinzler 14-3-3Sigma is required to prevent mitotic catastrophe after DNA damage Nature (1999) doi: 10.1038/44188 

A Correction was issued on 22 August 2023 (highlights mine):

“A possible duplication of the top panel in Fig. 2a has been brought to our attention. As the source data for the images are no longer available, we have repeated the control with the cells frozen in 1999 and thawed 23 years later. This new experiment showed that the nuclear morphologies of cells with and without 14-3-3σ in the absence of DNA damage induced by adriamycin are indistinguishable, as shown in Fig. 1 of this correction. Figure 3d of the original paper also shows independent confirmation of the indistinguishable nuclear morphologies.

We also wish to clarify that the legend of Fig. 4a should have stated that the sequential anti-cdc2 and the anti-cyclin B1 stainings in the right panel represent different orientations of overlapping fields of the same cells. Figure 2 of this correction shows the staining when the fields are aligned, and at higher resolution than in the original. Figure 4a was not intended to show co-localization; co-localization between cdc2 and 14-3-3σ was shown at high magnification in the original Fig. 4c.”

Elisabeth Bik was not convinced and wrote on PubPeer:

“Here is the figure from the Correction that shows the anti-cdc2 and anti-cyclin B1 staining of the same cells. The authors have aligned the two panels to show that the two images are overlapping. They explained the panels look very similar because they same cells were stained consecutively with two different antibodies. The red boxes are my addition, to show where the panels overlap.”

“The two panels look very, very similar in their overlapping region. I would have expected a restained set of cells
Although I accepted the authors’ statement in 2015, I am not sure if I am convinced now.
Can cells prepared for immunofluorescence and mounted in DAPCO[sic]/glycerol be ‘stripped’ and restained with a different fluorescence-labeled antibody? And would they then look exactly the same like they do in Figure 4a? Wouldn’t cells be very damaged by the washing procedure to remove the first antibody?”

It’s not possible to do this re-staining, not even on recently mounted slides. No lab can do this. And after 23 years, frozen slides are nothing but trash anyway. But Nature fell for this drivel because of who Vogelstein is. Maybe the correct description for Vogelstein is not “genius” but another word. Choose your own.

Anyway, there’s also this untrustworthy gel, its first lane digitally spliced on from who knows where:

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Inadvertently omitted

Another questionable Nature correction. For a cheater at Columbia University, Wei Gu. Read about him and his mentor here:

This is the corrected paper:

David Dominguez-Sola , Carol Y Ying , Carla Grandori , Luca Ruggiero , Brenden Chen , Muyang Li , Denise A Galloway , Wei Gu , Jean Gautier , Riccardo Dalla-Favera Non-transcriptional control of DNA replication by c-Myc Nature (2007) doi: 10.1038/nature05953 

This is the Correction, issued on 29 June 2023:

“In the version of this article initially published, the representative image shown in the lower-left panel of Figure 4e (buffer ethanol HFF-pB MycER) was an unintended duplication of the upper-right panel (a-amanitin 4-OHT HFF-pB). Moreover, a vertical line was inadvertently omitted from Figure 1e to indicate that the 15 samples were loaded on two western blot membranes, run in parallel, and an incorrect image was used for the ORC6 panel. The original and corrected versions of these figures are provided as Supplementary information, linked below. These errors do not affect the conclusions of the manuscript.”

But the authors forgot to correct this, in the same Figure 1E:

Cheshire noticed:

“Could the authors please compare the original data in Figure 1E with the published figure? It appears to me that the MAX band is showing lanes 16-30 as labeled in the original data, and not 14-28 as shown in the published figure. Is this true for the other panels?“

Hello Nature, another Correction about unaffected conclusions please!

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Frontiers in Communism

For those of you still unsure how serious a publisher Frontiers is, well, they are now publishing peer-reviewed propaganda for the Chinese Communist Party. Here is a particularly crass and idiotic example:

Outong Chen , Fang Guan , Yu Du , Yijun Su , Hui Yang , Jun Chen Belief in Communism and Theory of Mind Frontiers in Psychology (2021) doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.697251 

The abstract goes:

“A belief in communism refers to the unquestionable trust and belief in the justness of communism. Although former studies have discussed the political aim and social value of communism, the cognitive neural basis of a belief in communism remains largely unknown. In this study, we determined the behavioral and neural correlates between a belief in communism and a theory of mind (ToM). […] Hence, this study provides evidence that spontaneous brain activity in multiple regions, which is associated with ToM capacity, contributes to a belief in communism.”

The goal of communist ideologists of Soviet Union (and China) was to create via constant “education” a new species, Homo sovieticus. A worker drone with no sense of history, culture, ethnicity or social justice, speaking no other language but the state-approved (russian or Han-chinese), easily satisfied with cheap consumer goods and state propaganda, and unquestioningly hateful against whoever the Party currently sees as enemy.

So now this Marx-Engels Evolutionary Psychology passed Frontiers peer review. Homo sovieticus has evolved, and is genetically and intellectually superior, because unlike other species, it has a functional Theory of Mind. More from that paper:

• “A belief in communism is highly related to social relations and cooperation (Wang, 2002). To achieve a common goal and fulfill a common need, conspecifics must be able to cooperate and establish emotional contact (not necessarily involving physical contact), which are essential behaviors for social animals (Proverbio et al., 2011). These social abilities have been suggested to be correlated with theory of mind (ToM) abilities.”
• “Decades after the establishment of communism, its political aim and social values have been well-discussed; however, to our knowledge, no studies have systematically addressed the psychological basis of a belief in communism. Therefore, we designed two studies to reveal the psychological basis of a belief in communism at the behavioral level and the neural level. […] We predicted that a belief in communism would be associated with brain regions of the ToM brain network.”
• “To achieve a common goal and fulfill a common need, which is the main tenant of communism (Bukharin and Preobrazhenskii, 1921), a capacity for social understanding, social interaction, and cooperation is needed (Wang, 2002). Interestingly, these abilities are closely correlated with ToM abilities (Astington and Jenkins, 1995).”
• “Thus, the positive relationship between ReHo of the thalamus and belief in communism in this study may reflect that higher levels of a belief in communism are associated with greater ToM abilities. Therefore, this result supported our main hypothesis that a belief in communism is positively associated with greater ToM abilities, which contribute to the characteristics of social interaction, cooperation, and communication representative of communism.”

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