Biomedical scientists insist they absolutely need to perform cruel experiments on animals, especially on millions of mice, because this is how we will find a cure for cancer and other diseases.

But what if those experiments are sloppy at best and fake at worst? How can we trust scientists with making valid scientific conclusions if they are unable even to arrange a peer-reviewed figure without copy-pasting a mouse or two?

Sholto David follows up on his earlier investigation of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI), and finds dodgy mouse images throughout USA and beyond.

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Mice don’t count

By Sholto David

I was interested to see that the most popular image in the recent Dana-Farber media coverage was Irene Ghobrial’s formation of five mice that made a (now famous) “knight move” across Figure 2C in her 2014 paper in Blood. This image was republished by the New York Times, Nature, and others.

Yu Zhang, Michele Moschetta, Daisy Huynh, Yu-Tzu Tai, Yong Zhang, Wenjing Zhang, Yuji Mishima, Jennifer E. Ring, Winnie F. Tam, Qunli Xu, Patricia Maiso, Michaela Reagan, Ilyas Sahin, Antonio Sacco, Salomon Manier, Yosra Aljawai, Siobhan Glavey, Nikhil C. Munshi, Kenneth C. Anderson, Jonathan Pachter, Aldo M. Roccaro, Irene M. Ghobrial Pyk2 promotes tumor progression in multiple myeloma Blood (2014) doi: 10.1182/blood-2014-03-563981

I think I can understand why this captured people’s attention. Mice are probably a little easier to grasp than western blots (conceptually speaking, of course; they are probably quite difficult to grasp when running loose). Mice are also living, breathing beings, the consequences of muddling these experiments are more immediately apparent. And of course, experiments on mice are understood to be a key stepping stone towards experiments on humans…

But these mice have been rapidly eclipsed, a far greater threat to scientific integrity has risen! I am talking about the AI generated rat published by Frontiers…

Erm, how did Figure 1 get past a peer reviewer?! https://t.co/pAkRmfuVed H/T @aero_anna pic.twitter.com/iXpZ1FvM1G

— Dr CJ Houldcroft 🕷️ (@DrCJ_Houldcroft) February 15, 2024

Whilst I also thought this was funny, there is something uncomfortable about how much attention this hallucination gathered, and what the furious reaction seems to imply about the expectations people had of peer review at Frontiers. Michael Eisen (who hits consistent winners on Twitter) posted something succinct that reflected some of my thoughts.

I’m struggling to figure out if it’s worse if people are feigning surprise that nonsense AI figures can get through peer review or if they’re actually surprised.

— Michael Eisen (@mbeisen) February 16, 2024

So this blog post will be a discussion of the rodents in research that I think are truly important. To keep some sense of order, I will restrict myself to problems with bioluminescent images of mice that I have been posting about in the last few months, since these turned out to be so popular already… And where better to start than where I left off previously, at Dana-Farber of course!

Harvard Medical School Affiliates

Kornelia Polyak is a Professor of Medicine at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and a co-leader of the Cancer Cell Biology Program. Pay attention to the mice in red rectangles at the bottom right of the figure below. These are the same mice, imaged at the same time, not a week apart as the figure legend claims.

Michalina Janiszewska, Doris P. Tabassum, Zafira Castaño, Simona Cristea, Kimiyo N. Yamamoto, Natalie L. Kingston, Katherine C. Murphy, Shaokun Shu, Nicholas W. Harper, Carlos Gil Del Alcazar, Maša Alečković, Muhammad B. Ekram, Ofir Cohen, Minsuk Kwak, Yuanbo Qin, Tyler Laszewski, Adrienne Luoma, Andriy Marusyk, Kai W. Wucherpfennig, Nikhil Wagle, Rong Fan, Franziska Michor, Sandra S. McAllister, Kornelia Polyak Subclonal cooperation drives metastasis by modulating local and systemic immune microenvironments Nature Cell Biology (2019) doi: 10.1038/s41556-019-0346-x

It’s useful to look at the bioluminescence signal, as well as the positions of the tails and paws. I asked an additional question on PubPeer about the way the mice are numbered (related to the stripes on the tail), none of the authors responded. When I emailed the journal and authors I received an indignant response from Kornelia, explaining that these images of mice are “only for illustration purposes“… A correction request has been submitted all the same.

Also at Harvard Medical School, but this time at Massachusetts General Hospital, allow me to introduce the delightfully named Associate Professor Marcela V. Maus! In this case, look at the magenta rectangles in Figure 3b, and the green shapes in Figure 3e. Figure 3e is a little trickier to see, because the bioluminescence signal is not the same; it is better to pay attention to the tails.

Rebecca C. Larson, Michael C. Kann, Charlotte Graham, Christopher W. Mount, Ana P. Castano, Won-Ho Lee, Amanda A. Bouffard, Hana N. Takei, Antonio J. Almazan, Irene Scarfó, Trisha R. Berger, Andrea Schmidts, Matthew J. Frigault, Kathleen M. E. Gallagher, Marcela V. Maus Anti-TACI single and dual-targeting CAR T cells overcome BCMA antigen loss in multiple myeloma Nature Communications (2023) doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-43416-7

Professor Maus replied to me by email after I sent Figure 3b to the journal. She seems well intentioned, although good intentions aren’t really a substitute for competence. I was able to find three more papers with similar errors, as well as further contradictions between the data shown in charts and the bioluminescence images. There are now 8 PubPeer threads for Professor Maus, with possibly more to find, and there is even a fish on PubPeer (Jan et al 2022), which unfortunately falls outside the scope of this rodent blog. As far as I am aware, Professor Maus intends to correct all these papers.

Maria Ormhøj, Irene Scarfò, Maria L Cabral, Stefanie R Bailey, Selena J Lorrey, Amanda A Bouffard, Ana P Castano, Rebecca C Larson, Lauren S Riley, Andrea Schmidts, Bryan D Choi, Rikke S Andersen, Oriane Cédile, Charlotte G Nyvold, Jacob H Christensen, Morten F Gjerstorff, Henrik J Ditzel, David M Weinstock, Torben Barington, Matthew J Frigault, Marcela V Maus Chimeric Antigen Receptor T Cells Targeting CD79b Show Efficacy in Lymphoma with or without Cotargeting CD19 Clinical Cancer Research (2019) doi: 10.1158/1078-0432.ccr-19-1337

The next paper by Professor Maus has been already corrected twice.

Max Jan, Irene Scarfò, Rebecca C. Larson, Amanda Walker, Andrea Schmidts, Andrew A. Guirguis, Jessica A. Gasser, Mikołaj Słabicki, Amanda A. Bouffard, Ana P. Castano, Michael C. Kann, Maria L. Cabral, Alexander Tepper, Daniel E. Grinshpun, Adam S. Sperling, Taeyoon Kyung, Quinlan L. Sievers, Michael E. Birnbaum, Marcela V. Maus, Benjamin L. Ebert Reversible ON- and OFF-switch chimeric antigen receptors controlled by lenalidomide Science Translational Medicine (2021)
doi: 10.1126/scitranslmed.abb6295

In April 2022, the Erratum informed that

“Fig. 5G contained two errors. A bar graph pertaining to a different experiment (from Fig. 4G) was inadvertently included instead of the intended bar graph. The drug concentrations within the flow cytometry histogram were inadvertently mislabeled 100 nM, and now have been corrected to match the bar graph drug concentration label of 1000 nM. Figure 5 has now been corrected. The text and overall findings of the study are unchanged.”

In July 2023, the second Erratum reassured the readers:

“Figs. 4A and 5A contained a error. The sequence fragment from ZFP91 was inadvertently misnumbered. The Fig. 4 legend and Fig. 5 and its legend and have now been corrected. The online PDF and HTML (full text) have been updated. These corrections do not affect the interpretation of the data or the conclusions of the paper.”

There is now a need for a 3rd Erratum, to make sure that the interpretation of the data or the conclusions of the paper remain forever unaffected:

Also this paper was corrected in 2018, but for a formality issue: “the supplemental figures were omitted“. Instead, a mouse featured twice in a main figure:

Irene Scarfò, Maria Ormhøj, Matthew J Frigault, Ana P Castano, Selena Lorrey, Amanda A Bouffard, Alexandria Van Scoyk, Scott J Rodig, Alexandra J Shay, Jon C Aster, Frederic I Preffer, David M Weinstock, Marcela V Maus Anti-CD37 chimeric antigen receptor T cells are active against B- and T-cell lymphomas Blood (2018) doi: 10.1182/blood-2018-04-842708

I wasn’t going to write about Harvard Medical School without bringing up Kenneth C. Anderson, of course. In this figure of atrocious quality (published by Nature Medicine, current APC $12,290) you have to pay attention to the noise as well as the signal. I spotted this one after the initial DFCI post went live, so it has not been previously blogged. Don’t worry if you’re struggling to see it, you can rest assured that these are duplicates, it was corrected on 14 February 2024: “one of the bioluminescence images was erroneously duplicated. Treatment [Tx], day 19, “Low sensitivity” was inadvertently pasted into the figure twice, and thus was also shown as Control, day 19, “Low sensitivity””.

Douglas W McMillin, Jake Delmore, Ellen Weisberg, Joseph M Negri, D Corey Geer, Steffen Klippel, Nicholas Mitsiades, Robert L Schlossman, Nikhil C Munshi, Andrew L Kung, James D Griffin, Paul G Richardson, Kenneth C Anderson, Constantine S Mitsiades Tumor cell-specific bioluminescence platform to identify stroma-induced changes to anticancer drug activity Nature Medicine (2010) doi: 10.1038/nm.2112

Another Harvard Medical School finding, this time involving Sabina Signoretti. The mice in the red rectangles are labelled as having been imaged three days apart, but are near pixel-perfect duplicates, perhaps they were imaged three seconds apart? Really, Sabina is worthy of an entire blog post of her own, with an impressive and growing PubPeer history. Instead, she only got a mention in Friday Shorts.

De-Kuan Chang, Raymond J Moniz, Zhongyao Xu, Jiusong Sun, Sabina Signoretti, Quan Zhu, Wayne A Marasco Human anti-CAIX antibodies mediate immune cell inhibition of renal cell carcinoma in vitro and in a humanized mouse model in vivo Molecular Cancer (2015)
doi: 10.1186/s12943-015-0384-3

Recently, The New York Times covered allegations related to my previous blog about Sam S. Yoon at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), Sam’s papers included plenty of cruel experiments on mice, but no bioluminescence errors that I could find!

But here is an institutional crossover! Research conducted at MSKCC by Eric L. Smith, who subsequently moved to DFCI, very cosy! The red rectangles are pixel perfect duplicates, the green, blue, and yellow rectangles are more similar than expected.

Carlos Fernández De Larrea, Mette Staehr, Andrea V. Lopez, Khong Y. Ng, Yunxin Chen, William D. Godfrey, Terence J. Purdon, Vladimir Ponomarev, Hans-Guido Wendel, Renier J. Brentjens, Eric L. Smith Defining an Optimal Dual-Targeted CAR T-cell Therapy Approach Simultaneously Targeting BCMA and GPRC5D to Prevent BCMA Escape-Driven Relapse in Multiple Myeloma
Blood Cancer Discovery (2020) doi: 10.1158/2643-3230.bcd-20-0020

Scripps Campus in Florida

And now to the University of Florida’s Scripps Biomedical Research Institute with two papers involving their Associate Dean of Graduate Studies, Christoph Rader. The first one appeared in Oncogene.

Haiyong Peng, Thomas Nerreter, Katrin Mestermann, Jakob Wachter, Jing Chang, Michael Hudecek, Christoph Rader ROR1-targeting switchable CAR-T cells for cancer therapy Oncogene (2022) doi: 10.1038/s41388-022-02416-5

Christoph has accepted this above duplication on PubPeer and a correction has recently materialised, impressive, since the co-editor-in-chief Justin Stebbing is pretty busy these days.

No one has claimed responsibility for the mistake in the following paper, although one would assume Christoph is aware. To be fair this was published in the Molecular Therapy “family”, I doubt there is any point in emailing, they are also rather busy these days.

Vijay G. Bhoj, Lucy Li, Kalpana Parvathaneni, Zheng Zhang, Stephen Kacir, Dimitrios Arhontoulis, Kenneth Zhou, Bevin McGettigan-Croce, Selene Nunez-Cruz, Gayathri Gulendran, Alina C. Boesteanu, Laura Johnson, Michael D. Feldman, Enrico Radaelli, Keith Mansfield, MacLean Nasrallah, Rebecca S. Goydel, Haiyong Peng, Christoph Rader, Michael C. Milone, Don L. Siegel Adoptive T cell immunotherapy for medullary thyroid carcinoma targeting GDNF family receptor alpha 4 Molecular Therapy Oncolytics (2021) doi: 10.1016/j.omto.2021.01.012 issn: 2372-7705

Industry efforts with Fate Therapeutics

NK cells are the next CAR-T, and the University of Minnesota and Fate Therapeutics are joining the gold rush. The blue and red triangles in the following figure point to matching mice, the last author, Frank Cichocki, has accepted the duplications and promised to fix them.

Karrune V. Woan, Hansol Kim, Ryan Bjordahl, Zachary B. Davis, Svetlana Gaidarova, John Goulding, Brian Hancock, Sajid Mahmood, Ramzey Abujarour, Hongbo Wang, Katie Tuininga, Bin Zhang, Cheng-Ying Wu, Behiye Kodal, Melissa Khaw, Laura Bendzick, Paul Rogers, Moyar Qing Ge, Greg Bonello, Miguel Meza, Martin Felices, Janel Huffman, Thomas Dailey, Tom T. Lee, Bruce Walcheck, Karl J. Malmberg, Bruce R. Blazar, Yenan T. Bryceson, Bahram Valamehr, Jeffrey S. Miller, Frank Cichocki Harnessing features of adaptive NK cells to generate iPSC-derived NK cells for enhanced immunotherapy Cell Stem Cell (2021) doi: 10.1016/j.stem.2021.08.013

Associate Professor Cichocki is the first author in the following paper, the duplicated sections in the red rectangles were identified by a colleague and posted to PubPeer by me. The blue rectangles point to images which show different levels of background noise; I think this indicates that the detector has not be used at a consistent sensitivity, thus calling into question the validity of the entire figure, although Frank assured me it’s fine. Believe who you like!

Frank Cichocki, Jodie P. Goodridge, Ryan Bjordahl, Sajid Mahmood, Zachary B. Davis, Svetlana Gaidarova, Ramzey Abujarour, Brian Groff, Alec Witty, Hongbo Wang, Katie Tuininga, Behiye Kodal, Martin Felices, Greg Bonello, Janel Huffman, Thomas Dailey, Tom T. Lee, Bruce Walcheck, Bahram Valamehr, Jeffrey S. Miller Dual antigen-targeted off-the-shelf NK cells show durable response and prevent antigen escape in lymphoma and leukemia Blood (2022)
doi: 10.1182/blood.2021015184

Frank said he’s writing to Blood to correct the duplications. You’ll be more likely to get a correction from a stone than from Blood, as the idiom goes.

Assorted US Universities

Now from researchers at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Another set of pixel-perfect duplicates to conveniently prolong the duration of an experiment without requiring data collection, or perhaps a tragic mistake? The authors, led by the UNC Immunotherapy Program Director and Highly Cited Researcher (Top 1%, 2020-2023) Gianpietro Dotti, are yet to tell us which.

Sarah Ahn, Jingjing Li, Chuang Sun, Keliang Gao, Koichi Hirabayashi, Hongxia Li, Barbara Savoldo, Rihe Liu, Gianpietro Dotti Cancer Immunotherapy with T Cells Carrying Bispecific Receptors That Mimic Antibodies Cancer Immunology Research (2019)
doi: 10.1158/2326-6066.cir-18-0636

I could credibly be accused of having an anti-east-coast bias, so here’s a finding from UCLA-based researchers at the unfortunately named Keck School of Medicine. The figure legends in the original paper should be read carefully here, as the mouse in question is shared between control groups. However, I can’t find a way to reconcile the timings of the experiments. Splicing individual mice together like this to make figures is inadvisable:

Babak Moghimi, Sakunthala Muthugounder, Samy Jambon, Rachelle Tibbetts, Long Hung, Hamid Bassiri, Michael D. Hogarty, David M. Barrett, Hiroyuki Shimada, Shahab Asgharzadeh Preclinical assessment of the efficacy and specificity of GD2-B7H3 SynNotch CAR-T in metastatic neuroblastoma Nature Communications (2021) doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-20785-x

Here’s another west coast error, from researchers at Fred Hutch. Some of the same data is legitimately repeated in the supplemental figure, but the highlighted mice can’t show both day 28 and day 35.

Quy Le, Brandon Hadland, Jenny L. Smith, Amanda Leonti, Benjamin J. Huang, Rhonda Ries, Tiffany A. Hylkema, Sommer Castro, Thao T. Tang, Cyd N. McKay, LaKeisha Perkins, Laura Pardo, Jay Sarthy, Amy K. Beckman, Robin Williams, Rhonda Idemmili, Scott Furlan, Takashi Ishida, Lindsey Call, Shivani Srivastava, Anisha M. Loeb, Filippo Milano, Suzan Imren, Shelli M. Morris, Fiona Pakiam, Jim M. Olson, Michael R. Loken, Lisa Brodersen, Stanley R. Riddell, Katherine Tarlock, Irwin D. Bernstein, Keith R. Loeb, Soheil Meshinchi CBFA2T3-GLIS2 model of pediatric acute megakaryoblastic leukemia identifies FOLR1 as a CAR T cell target Journal of Clinical Investigation (2022) doi: 10.1172/jci157101

A single representative mouse was duplicated by researchers at City of Hope (pink triangles, following image). Some might say this is petty to point out, but if they felt it was important enough to include, presumably it is also important enough to be correct?

Eric Hee Jun Lee, John P. Murad, Lea Christian, Jackson Gibson, Yukiko Yamaguchi, Cody Cullen, Diana Gumber, Anthony K. Park, Cari Young, Isabel Monroy, Jason Yang, Lawrence A. Stern, Lauren N. Adkins, Gaurav Dhapola, Brenna Gittins, Wen-Chung Chang, Catalina Martinez, Yanghee Woo, Mihaela Cristea, Lorna Rodriguez-Rodriguez, Jun Ishihara, John K. Lee, Stephen J. Forman, Leo D. Wang, Saul J. Priceman Antigen-dependent IL-12 signaling in CAR T cells promotes regional to systemic disease targeting Nature Communications (2023)
doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-40115-1

Saul J. Priceman responded on PubPeer to say he would remedy the above issue; will he also correct the following much older (and much worse) figure?

Jeremy B. Burton, Saul J. Priceman, James L. Sung, Ebba Brakenhielm, Dong Sung An, Bronislaw Pytowski, Kari Alitalo, Lily Wu Suppression of Prostate Cancer Nodal and Systemic Metastasis by Blockade of the Lymphangiogenic Axis Cancer Research (2008) doi: 10.1158/0008-5472.can-08-1488

Diversity and Inclusion Initiative

On the subject of bias, Barret J. Rollins wrote that my last blog on DFCI was quote: “Puerile, snarky, (and) misogynistic”… To avoid any accusations of racism against Americans, I should point the finger at some researchers based in other countries. Since the above-mentioned Christoph Rader is German, let’s start with Germany, specifically the prestigious Max-Delbrück-Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin. Again we find images of mice (red rectangles) which are supposed to have been taken days apart, but match exactly.

Julia Bluhm, Elisa Kieback, Stephen F. Marino, Felix Oden, Jörg Westermann, Markus Chmielewski, Hinrich Abken, Wolfgang Uckert, Uta E. Höpken, Armin Rehm CAR T Cells with Enhanced Sensitivity to B Cell Maturation Antigen for the Targeting of B Cell Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and Multiple Myeloma Molecular Therapy (2018) doi: 10.1016/j.ymthe.2018.06.012

Norwegian researchers publishing in MDPI, can’t they afford the APC for something better? Mice in red rectangles are identical again.

Yixin Jin, Claire Dunn, Irene Persiconi, Adam Sike, Gjertrud Skorstad, Carole Beck, Jon Amund Kyte Comparative Evaluation of STEAP1 Targeting Chimeric Antigen Receptors with Different Costimulatory Domains and Spacers International Journal of Molecular Sciences (2024)
doi: 10.3390/ijms25010586

To israel now, the Hadassah Medical Center of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. These mice also appear to be rather more similar than one would expect by chance. Looking carefully at what’s left of the labels at the bottom of the pictures seems to confirm they were derived from the same original image. Again, the practice of mouse-splicing should be strongly condemned.

Ortal Harush, Nathalie Asherie, Shlomit Kfir-Erenfeld, Galit Adler, Tilda Barliya, Miri Assayag, Moshe E. Gatt, Polina Stepensky, Cyrille J. Cohen Preclinical evaluation and structural optimization of anti-BCMA CAR to target multiple myeloma Haematologica (2022)
doi: 10.3324/haematol.2021.280169

Now, some low-hanging mice. How about researchers from China? Zhigang Nian admits these three mistakes in one paper, but fortunately “The conclusion still stands the same“! AACR are remarkably accommodating for these things, I’m sure the authors won’t need to trouble themselves with a correction.

Zhigang Nian, Xiaohu Zheng, Yingchao Dou, Xianghui Du, Li Zhou, Binqing Fu, Rui Sun, Zhigang Tian, Haiming Wei Rapamycin Pretreatment Rescues the Bone Marrow AML Cell Elimination Capacity of CAR-T Cells Clinical Cancer Research (2021) doi: 10.1158/1078-0432.ccr-21-0452

Another from China, the authors also accepted this error, again, Elsevier’s Molecular Therapy is unlikely to respond quickly, if at all.

Xin Tang, Shasha Zhao, Yang Zhang, Yuelong Wang, Zongliang Zhang, Meijia Yang, Yanyu Zhu, Guanjie Zhang, Gang Guo, Aiping Tong, Liangxue Zhou B7-H3 as a Novel CAR-T Therapeutic Target for Glioblastoma Molecular Therapy – Oncolytics (2019) doi: 10.1016/j.omto.2019.07.002

Now that Hindawi has committed Seppuku at the behest of Wiley, documenting problems in their titles might seem like a waste of time, but some people still think Frontiers is a real publisher (hence the shock about AI rat), so perhaps it is best to stay on top of these things. The mice annotated with triangles below may have different bioluminescent signal, but they are certainly not different mice.

Qing Zhang, Haixu Zhang, Jiage Ding, Hongyan Liu, Huizhong Li, Hailong Li, Mengmeng Lu, Yangna Miao, Liantao Li, Junnian Zheng Combination Therapy with EpCAM-CAR-NK-92 Cells and Regorafenib against Human Colorectal Cancer Models Journal of Immunology Research (2018)
doi: 10.1155/2018/4263520

A Blast from the (Recent) Past

So far I have discussed never-blogged-before findings, but to finish I would like to resurrect two examples from a previous effort of mine. Ned Sharpless was Trump’s pick for director of the National Cancer Institute, a choice apparently inspired by Ronald DePinho‘s whisperings.

These two findings bring us full circle, because it was Ned’s connections that caused me to look carefully at DFCI in the first place… Now that Ned and his coauthors have had a few months to get to grips with these problems, has anything been done? Unfortunately not, maybe because the last author, the Buck Institute professor and senolytics entrepreneur Judith Campisi recently died, taking all raw data to the grave.

Marco Demaria, Monique N. O’Leary, Jianhui Chang, Lijian Shao, Su Liu, Fatouma Alimirah, Kristin Koenig, Catherine Le, Natalia Mitin, Allison M. Deal, Shani Alston, Emmeline C. Academia, Sumner Kilmarx, Alexis Valdovinos, Boshi Wang, Alain De Bruin, Brian K. Kennedy, Simon Melov, Daohong Zhou, Norman E. Sharpless, Hyman Muss, Judith Campisi Cellular Senescence Promotes Adverse Effects of Chemotherapy and Cancer Relapse Cancer Discovery (2017)
doi: 10.1158/2159-8290.cd-16-0241

But the last author here, NYU Langone professor Kwok-Kin Wong is certainly alive and well:

Hongbin Ji, Danan Li, Liang Chen, Takeshi Shimamura, Susumu Kobayashi, Kate McNamara, Umar Mahmood, Albert Mitchell, Yangping Sun, Ruqayyah Al-Hashem, Lucian R. Chirieac, Robert Padera, Roderick T. Bronson, William Kim, Pasi A. Jänne, Geoffrey I. Shapiro, Daniel Tenen, Bruce E. Johnson, Ralph Weissleder, Norman E. Sharpless, Kwok-Kin Wong The impact of human EGFR kinase domain mutations on lung tumorigenesis and in vivo sensitivity to EGFR-targeted therapies Cancer Cell (2006) doi: 10.1016/j.ccr.2006.04.022

Closing Remarks

I like mice a lot, so perhaps I have a conflict of interest in writing this blog? I imagine mice have their own goals and aspirations, presumably more honourable than the scientists who experiment on them… Enjoying a tasty snack? Building a cosy burrow? Raising a family?

Perhaps I am too whimsical!

The mice probably wouldn’t care whether the experiment they suffered and died for was meaningful or not, but it does seem to matter to me. When I see a supplementary dataset downloaded by almost nobody, it gives me the sense of a recent memorial that is never visited, while muddled up experiments feel like a grave someone has trampled on.

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