Schneider Shorts 21.08.2026 – Two names inside the same argument

Schneider Shorts of 21 August 2026 – after the racists got their lynching, guess who joins the Jason Arday debate, one Spanish professor and one Canadian professor explain things, and two white men lose papers due to Chinese papermills.

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Science Elites

Two names inside the same argument

The lynch mob got what it wanted, the Black man is dead. The Cambridge professor Jason Arday, central subject of most of headline reporting by British right-wing press (and others also), was found dead on 15 August 2026, aged merely 41. Most likely he killed himself.

I previously mentioned that the lynch mob against Arday was led by the racist pseudoscientist and former Cambridge fellow Nathan Cofnas in July 2026 Shorts. The original initiator was however the British professor emeritus David Harris, who (as Guardian reported) was “stripped of his professor emeritus title after he wrote a post about critical race theory that was deemed “controversial” by colleagues, but it was reinstated in 2026“.

I won’t go into the details of the Arday affair, the internet is full of it. It does seem that he was a compulsive liar and cheater, guilty of having plagiarised his PhD thesis and inventing fairy tale stuff about himself. Most probably Arday had mental health issues – I wrote about quite a number of academic fraudsters and not one of them ever killed himself when exposed (some do threaten suicide though, to make you feel guilty). Fraudsters are usually mentally stable and manipulative people, but then again, I never really wrote about Black fraudsters in white academic environment.

On the other hand, one of world’s richest men, the far-right German-born tech billionaire Peter Thiel also had a role to play in the Arday lynching. As Byline Times wrote:

“At the ideological centre of the network is Aporia, an online magazine which serves as the public-facing arm of the Human Diversity Foundation – now known as Polygenic Scores.

The Human Diversity Foundation was a rebranded and relaunched version of the Nazi-era Pioneer Fund, which sought to mainstream its eugenics doctrines through Aporia.

Tech billionaire Peter Thiel has cultivated ties to key actors in this network: to Cambridge Professor James Orr, through whom he channelled a donation to Cambridge; to Orr’s Cambridge circle; to online magazine Quillette which published attacks on Arday; and directly to Nathan Cofnas and Aporia senior editor Noah Carl.

Orr linked this infrastructure to politics. Reform UK’s Head of Policy, and an advisor to the Free Speech Union organisation, he invited Aporia into national conservatism.”

This Cambridge “race scientist” and associate professor of divinity, James Orr, is not just a Thiel’s lapdog, he also “hosted Charles Murray at Cambridge University in 2021” – Murray is one of god-fathers of academic racism, with his infamous book “The Bell Curve“. As Byline Times previously uncovered, Orr has been using his university as “a recruitment ground for a hard-right political project linked to his role as Reform’s policy chief.” Yes, Orr is Nigel Farage’s official henchman. We can probably guess who that mysterious Cambridge “whistleblower” in the Arday case was, who roped in Cofnas and the far-right media.

The Free Speech Union was founded by the far-right journalist Toby Young, Orr is member of its advisory council. This organisation led its own campaign against Arday, and so did the far-right magazine Quillette, which is also sponsored by Thiel, and whose editor Claire Lehmann is another Free Speech Union advisor. Quillette then brought a piece by the racist Richard Haier (psychology professor at University of California Irvine), where Haier defended Cofnas and the so-called “intelligence research” which is nothing else but racism, its central claim being that the white race is superior and Black people are genetically stupid.

Free Speech Union’s founder Young and Aporia‘s editor Noah Carl are co-directors of Skeptics Ltd, which connects their organisations. Free Speech Union is financially supported by the Trump-pardoned British businessman Ben Delo, who in turn sponsors both the fascist Reform UK and its Nazi comeptitor Restore UK. Delo also pays the rent for the “Cambridge Scrutonian Society, founded by two of James Orr’s students” and the far-right conferences organbised by Aporia.

One of Aporia‘s cofounders is Matthew Frost, who in 2025 “attended a notorious neo-Nazi gathering in Estonia known as the “Scandza Forum”“.

Aporia‘s other cofounder Emil Kirkegaard is another Nazi pseudoscientist who promoted paedophilia, he of course celebrated Cofnas’s attack on Arday, together with his fellow white supremacist Steve Sailer (about whom Guardian wrote here). The self-avowed “white nationalist” and Aporia‘s executive editor, Bo Winegard. wrote on 8 August 2026 a piece in attacking Arday.

Cofnas is a martyr hero to every academic racist out there, below the signature campaign in support of him. Shortly before Arday’s death, Cofnas was interviewed on YouTube by the white supremacist historian David Starkey,who is also an advisor to Free Speech Union.

Cambridge still refuses to say who at its Emmanuel College employed Cofnas as fellow., and strangely, the university “retained Nathan Cofnas’ fellowship after Emmanuel College severed ties with him in 2024“. He has a new job at Ghent University in Belgium now. Well, not for long, see this university rector’s statement from 19 August 2026 and Cofnas’s posts on X:

It is very difficult to untangle the accusations against Arday now. The philosophy professor Jason Stanley blogged that “Arday’s impact is easily comparable to the leading scholars in his academic field” and that he was therefore rightly employed by Cambridge due to his high citation score in a promising field.

As others pointed out, Arday brought to University of Cambridge just what they needed: a Black mascot to be made their youngest Black professor, simply so that the elite university won’t have to actually recruit any more Black people. For Cambridge, a Black person must show superhuman skills and ridiculously excessive achievements to get a chance at such an academic job, pedestrian Blacks need not apply, while any whitey can become a Cambridge don with enough “networking”, and we saw what kind of networking Orr does. There should be a lot of soul-searching happening in the British journalism and academia now, but the atmosphere was poisoned too much by racism on one side and blind support for a Black cheater on the other.

Now, I read this in the Guardian, about “Tributes paid to Jason Arday“:

“Other leading figures to pay tribute included the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, and the Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy. […] Speaking on Newsnight, Ribeiro-Addy read out a list of names including William O’Reilly, Ros Holmes, David Latchman, and Nicola Morrison.”

David Latchman. A multi-millionaire heir who built his entire scientific career on research fraud, and was even found guilty of it. Only to become appointed as Vice-Chancellor of the University of London, incidentally I wrote about that in the same July 2026 Shorts as about the Cofnas/Arday affair.

Fact is: a Black fraudster will always get hunted down, while a white fraudster will be protected, sometimes even promoted.

And guess who joined the Arday debate now.

Paolo Macchiarini, the murderous trachea transplant surgeon who is apparently now out of jail. Macchiarini even set up a Substack blog, Cell & Ink, where he now blogged about Arday on 15 August 2026:

Macchiarini was always a master in manipulating people around him. Probably the best ever. He made everyone either admire or fear him, often both. His violent anger towards subordinates was legendary, and so was his charm: he seduced women to use them for his purposes. He lied and manipulated with every word of his, and he now does this on his blog. Macchiarini just very indirectly insinuates that even he might be driven to suicide, just like Arday was. And the blame would be of course with people who wrote all those bad things about him, which made his children cry. Of course his threat of suicide is yet another manipulation by this narcissistic psychopath who is utterly incapable of any shame, remorse or any empathy with anyone except himself.

I found Macchiarini’s blog because a colleague pointed me to him complaining in comments about people claiming that he “kills patients”. Clearly, Macchiarini spends his time trawling the internet for mentions of his name, now that he is likely out of the jail on parole. By the way, Macchiarini refers to a Washington Post article about the Arday affair which mentioned him (and another sacked fraudster, Anil Potti).

That article from 13 August 2026 was authored by Retraction Watch‘s owners Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky, who previously paraded Cofnas as expert in Retraction Watch‘s “exclusive” take on the Arday case. In their Washington Post article, two white Americans, Oransky and Marcus, criticised “the lazy use of race to explain a truly colorblind phenomenon” and warned that “the lessons of the Arday affair transcend the role of DEI in universities.” They also mentioned Claudine Gay, who was forced to resign as Harvard University’s first Black president over accusations of plagiarism, and concluded: “But if history is any indication, Cambridge and Harvard probably would have dug in just as fiercely had Arday and Gay not been Black.” I suggest Oransky and Marcus study US history a bit, instead of constantly chasing money from Trump’s friends – like from Anthony Wood and his WoodNext Foundation (read about Wood here, he also sponsored JD Vance), or from George Tidmarsh, read here and March 2025 Shorts).

Macchiarini will probably write a book now, or rather have someone write one for him. It will become a bestseller and earn Macchiarini a lot of money.

Arday never killed anyone, his fraud and lies ultimately hurt only himself. Macchiarini’s fraud and lies killed many people, and he actually almost escaped all responsibility. All of his white male partners in patient abuse in UK, Sweden, Germany, Spain, Italy (never mind russia!) kept their professorships and their reputations. They were all supported and protected by other fellow white men in power. Patricia Murray and Peter Wilmshurst have just published a excellent overview of “a network of employees of UCL and associated hospitals that are guilty of misconduct that harmed patients […] centred on Professor Martin Birchall and Paolo Macchiarini, who were co-principal investigators in a 2008 Lancet report of “clinical transplantation of a tissue-engineered airway”. (Macchiarini et al., 2008)” (hyperlinks mine)

Ironically, some these white male surgeons in London, Paolo De Coppi and Martin Elliot, previously claimed to have been victims of my… racism.

Can you imagine how the story would’ve developed if Macchiarini was Black? There would be no story: a Black man, no matter how cunning and manipulative, could never have ever risen to such heights in academia.

Rest in peace, Jason Arday. Shut your gob and crawl back under your stone, Paolo Macchiarini.

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No comments respect to the training demonstrated figure

We have a hot candidate for the Most Insolently Stupid Replies on PubPeer award!

Soraya Lilian Valles is professor at University of Valencia in Spain. On her old Twitter profile, she used to invite us: “Do you want to speak about science?“. Why yes, we do!

Since recently, and thanks to the efforts of Aneurus Inconstans, Valles has a small, but ratehr outrageous PubPeer record. We’ll start with something easy, where her reply on PubPeer was at least superficially not unhinged.

Soraya L. Valles, Pablo Dolz-Gaiton, Juan Gambini, Consuelo Borras, Ana LLoret, Federico V. Pallardo , Jose Viña Estradiol or genistein prevent Alzheimer’s disease-associated inflammation correlating with an increase PPAR gamma expression in cultured astrocytes Brain Research (2010) doi: 10.1016/j.brainres.2009.11.044 

Valles replied on PubPeer with:

“Yes, we noted that. As GFAP is a control protein to demonstrate that all the samples are with the same micrograms, probably I did a mistake to use one of them. But if you see at both westerns GFAP are with the same micrograms and PPAR change depens or the conditions.”

Jose Vina used to be Vice-Dean for Medicine at University of Valencia, and is currently 78 years old and therefore fittingly head of Age and Exercise Research Group FreshAge. Here their paper, re-using data from the above:

Adrian Jorda, Martin Aldasoro, Constanza Aldasoro , Sol Guerra-Ojeda, Antonio Iradi, Jose Mª Vila, Juan Campos-Campos , Soraya L. Valles Action of low doses of Aspirin in Inflammation and Oxidative Stress induced by aβ1-42 on Astrocytes in primary culture International Journal of Medical Sciences (2020) doi: 10.7150/ijms.40959 

Valles said about the blot reused between two papers: “Yes, we think is the same blot. We change the laboratory computer and the blots of tubulin are not defined by experiment“. And about Fig 6A, she said this:

“we do not think is the same. […] Can be the students used that because the problems with my computer, because we change my computer and the new in the lab. Another thing is that, the machine (it analized the wester of all the department of Physiology in the University of Valencia and the INCLIVA Clinic hospital), was changed to a new one. We copy all our the results to a pendrive and add to my computer and the new computer in the lab. Perhaps that will be the razon.“

However, on the other thread (Valles et al 2010), she admitted that it was the same western blot:

“figure 2B are correct and figure 6A we think is correct too. If it will be the same perhaps my students do a mistake because the machine that read the western was changed and University of Valencia recommended to put all the results of all people in a pendrife.”

The Jorda et al 2020 paper shared western blots with yet another paper by Valles, where she again blamed the old broken machine:

Ferran Abat , Soraya-L Valles, Pablo-Eduardo Gelber , Fernando Polidori , Adrian Jorda, Sergio García-Herreros, Joan-Carles Monllau , Jose-Manuel Sanchez-Ibáñez An experimental study of muscular injury repair in a mouse model of notexin-induced lesion with EPI® technique BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation (2015) doi: 10.1186/s13102-015-0002-0 

Valles replied with that “pendrife” again:

The following study features one of Spain’s top biomedical researchers: Manuel Serrano, who feels strangely attracted to every Spanish fraudster (e.g., as mentor of Susana Gonzalez and friend of Carlos -Lopez-Otin). Or to this guy:

Maybe because Serrano isn’t honest himself? Anyway, also here Valles chimed in, despite beign just a middle author.

Juan Gambini, Mari Carmen Gomez-Cabrera, Consuelo Borras, Soraya L. Valles, Raul Lopez-Grueso , Vladimir E. Martinez-Bello , Daniel Herranz , Federico V. Pallardo, Jesus A.F. Tresguerres , Manuel Serrano , Jose Viña Free [NADH]/[NAD(+)] regulates sirtuin expression Archives of Biochemistry and Biophysics (2011) doi: 10.1016/j.abb.2011.04.020 

Again, Valles replied on PubPeer in her charming version of English:

Here, it gets totally insane:

José M. Palanca, Diana Aguirre-Rueda , Manuel V. Granell , Martin Aldasoro , Alma Garcia , Antonio Iradi , Elena Obrador , Maria Dolores Mauricio , Jose Vila, Anna Gil-Bisquert , Soraya L. Valles Sugammadex, a Neuromuscular Blockade Reversal Agent, Causes Neuronal Apoptosis in Primary Cultures International Journal of Medical Sciences (2013) doi: 10.7150/ijms.6254 

Clearly plagiarism, the western blots were stolen. As reply, Valles posted this Trumpian screed:

I highlight the best bits:

“My Western blots are do it for my group. We can show you the westerns we did at this time. I never used flip or vinculin to do it. I don’t think you can copy a western at this time. The technology didn’t permet that on 2013. Yours sincerely Dr. Valles. Otherwise, I will determine all the western do it from my students at this time to understand what happen with this westerns. My student Diana Aguirre-Rueda goes out from my group because a problem with other profesor at Faculty of physical education and sport occured. She take information from my results and did an abstract with this profesor. When I ser that I spoke with him and the abstract was eliminated from the Congress. I want to speak with this professional. Also I want to obtain the email of Diana because I never contacted her again. But I know people that have it. I think she is in Colombia at this moment and I have ear that she now is an associate professor in this country.”

What can one reply to this, except asking what the f*** is wrong with Spanish academia that such unstable nutcase works as a university professor there? By the way, PubPeer moderators claim that “PubPeer policy does not permit attribution of author responsibilities unless supported by publicly available information“. But the policy is very narrowly applied, only to papers by Leonid Schneider, read here:

Now, to a set of two papers by Valles, where pronounced to have nothing to do with any western blots, and again blamed a colleague:

• Ana M Blanco, Soraya L Vallés , Maria Pascual, Consuelo Guerri Involvement of TLR4/type I IL-1 receptor signaling in the induction of inflammatory mediators and cell death induced by ethanol in cultured astrocytes The Journal of Immunology (2005) doi: 10.4049/jimmunol.175.10.6893 
• Ana M. Blanco , María Pascual , Soraya L. Valles , Consuelo Guerri Ethanol-induced iNOS and COX-2 expression in cultured astrocytes via NF-kappa B Neuroreport (2004) doi: 10.1097/00001756-200403220-00021 

Valles explained on PubPeer:

A few days later, Valles’s colleague from University of Valencia, María Pascual replied also, in slightly better English, but just as shamelesly blaming the first author, in accordance to PubPeer rules:

“Although the NeuroReports paper is quoted throughout the entire J Immunology 2005 paper, it is true that we should have made clear that the figure being shown was the same that was used to illustrate the NeuroReport 2004 paper, the first first-author publication of Dr. AM Blanco (who also was first author in the J Immunol paper). Main responsibility for including the same figure in both papers is for this first author, but the figure does not misrepresent the paper contents in none of the two papers.“

Pascual also shamelessly claimed that the highlighted bands were never different, although they most obviously are, see my analysis below:

“although we do not have your instrument for fine-analyzing intensities of the published material, we do not agree with your interpretation, […] Thus, we would attribute this to printing differences in the journals at the time when this was less automated than nowadays.”

The last paper is on PubPeer since 2022, but Valles and Pascual haven’t replied yet, surely they can blame Ana Blanco for that also?

Soraya L. Valles , Ana M. Blanco , Inmaculada Azorin , Rosa Guasch , María Pascual , Mar??a Jose Gomez-Lechon, Jaime Renau-Piqueras, Consuelo Guerri Chronic Ethanol Consumption Enhances Interleukin‐1‐Mediated Signal Transduction in Rat Liver and in Cultured Hepatocytes Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research (2003) doi: 10.1097/01.alc.0000099261.87880.21 

Valles’s research focus is not only Alzheimer’s but also alcoholism’s effect on the brain. Well, we can now make theory about what happened to her own brain.

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The images were intended to overlap in places

Here we have another candidate for the Most Insolently Stupid Replies on PubPeer award!

Christopher Rudd is professor of medicine at the at the Université de Montréal in Canada, and adjunct professor at at the neighbouring McGill University. He considers himself notable enough to make sure he has a Wikipedia page where his research publications and academy memberships are duly honoured, because he is “credited with having had a major impact” and “important clinical outcomes“.

Rudd’s papers on PubPeer (currently 17) were mostly flagged by the pseudonymous sleuth Claire Francis. Here, Rudd tried to help with COVID-19:

Thai Hien Tu, Fatima Ezzahra Bennani , Nasser Masroori , Chen Liu , Atena Nemati , Nicholas Rozza , Amichai Meir Grunbaum , Richard Kremer, Catalin Milhalcioiu, Denis-Claude Roy , Christopher E. Rudd The identification of a SARs-CoV2 S2 protein derived peptide with super-antigen-like stimulatory properties on T-cells Communications Biology (2025) doi: 10.1038/s42003-024-07350-8 

The red arrows were added to the sleuth’s analysis by Rudd, because he wanted to prove something:

What Rudd actually proved, is that the flow cytometry plots were indeed not accidentally duplicated, but that the same FACS measurement of one sample was intentionally plotted with two different gates so that they look different. A lot of people would consider that to be fraud.

In the next case, Rudd’s replies became even more divorced from reality or sanity. Here, he collaborated with Germans, specifically with Klaus Strebhardt, professor of gynaecology at the University of Frankfurt:

Monika Raab, Klaus Strebhardt , Christopher E Rudd Immune adaptor SKAP1 acts a scaffold for Polo-like kinase 1 (PLK1) for the optimal cell cycling of T-cells Scientific Reports (2019) doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-45627-9 

Rudd replied on PubPeer with this

How deluded must one be to openly admit to have digitally copy-pasted cells inside a microscopy image, and then pretend that this is how one does science properly? And of course the gel bands are clearly identical, not similar, as further analysis proved.

Here another paper of by Strebhardt and his mentee Monika Raab with Rudd:

Monika Raab , Yuning Lu , Karsten Kohler, Xin Smith , Klaus Strebhardt, Christopher E. Rudd LFA-1 activates focal adhesion kinases FAK1/PYK2 to generate LAT-GRB2-SKAP1 complexes that terminate T-cell conjugate formation Nature Communications (2017) doi: 10.1038/ncomms16001 

Rudd decided to just bullshit even more:

What Rudd claimed about Fig 1a was insane, unless he meant to say that he intentionally falsified it. Those are either control or treated cells, they can’t be both, and the differences in fluorescence signal simply prove that this wasn’t an “honest” mistake of oversight.

Rudd also provided the raw data for the western blots in Fig 5c, which I analysed, and found that lane 2 was indeed digitally replace, presumably because that lane was underlorded in the original gel.

Sometimes Rudd is able to change his mind, here another paper with Strebhardt and Raab:

Youg Raj Thaker , Monika Raab, Klaus Strebhardt, Christopher E Rudd GTPase-activating protein Rasal1 associates with ZAP-70 of the TCR and negatively regulates T-cell tumor immunity Nature Communications (2019) doi: 10.1038/s41467-019-12544-4 

In July 2026, Rudd replied on PubPeer:

A few days later, Rudd changed his mind completely. He admitted all duplications and announced corrections:

“We have been able to recover the uncropped figures and are happy to update the figure. Since multiple experiments were run for each figure, there was a mix-up in a couple of control lanes in certain blots in figures. This included the ZAP-70 control blot in Figure 4a and the Rasal1 control blots in Figures 2c and 3f. The patterns and results and conclusions are the same as outlined in the paper.”

Note that Rudd wasn’t able to find the original data for this paper from 2019, only replacements. Here is a situation where his German friends reused a western blot:

Monika Raab, Xin Smith , Yves Matthess , Klaus Strebhardt , Christopher E. Rudd SKAP1 protein PH domain determines RapL membrane localization and Rap1 protein complex formation for T cell receptor (TCR) activation of LFA-1 Journal of Biological Chemistry (2011) doi: 10.1074/jbc.m111.222661

That Nature Communications paper by Raab and Strebhardt has even more issues of duplicated gel bands, but so does their paper with Rudd:

Rudd reported to have “successfully retrieved the original, uncropped source blots corresponding to several figures” and presented some of them, claiming his “raw data demonstrates that proper internal loading controls were robustly and routinely performed” and “clarifies the continuity of our loading controls.” It actually made matters worse. The “raw data” doesn’t match the published actin blots, and it also turned out that only 4 out of 8 SKAP-1 gel bands match, and the other four don’t.

In many other PubPeer threads (e.g., Wang et al 2007, Jo et al 2005) Rudd tried to sit on two or more chair simultaneously. He denied the duplications while openly blaming his students and threatening to crack down on them.

As he did here, in another paper with his German friends, where the authors “thank H. Schneider (Cambridge University) for reviewing the manuscript“, which will become relevant later:

Monika Raab, Hongyan Wang , Yuning Lu , Xin Smith , Zhonglin Wu , Klaus Strebhardt , John E. Ladbury , Christopher E. Rudd T Cell Receptor “Inside-Out” Pathway via Signaling Module SKAP1-RapL Regulates T Cell Motility and Interactions in Lymph Nodes Immunity (2010) doi: 10.1016/j.immuni.2010.03.007

In his reply from Canada, Rudd blamed Raab in Germany:

Not keen on defending Rudd’s finger-pointing at Monika Raab here, but didn’t PubPeer sternly warn that “”PubPeer policy does not permit attribution of author responsibilities unless supported by publicly available information“? I personally think that such a rule is silly if it applies only to Leonid Schneider.

Strebhardt has 11 papers on PubPeer, as you saw not all are with Rudd. I hoped to get also his insights into the issues in his papers with Rudd, but unfortunately Strebhardt didn’t reply. He is busy curing cancer all day, you see.

Thing is, in February 2025, Strebhardt and his lab members Raab and Mourad Sanhaji were celebrated by their University of Frankfurt for raising €1.5 million from risk capital investor CARMA FUND to cure ovarian cancer with miRNA against DAPK protein. To understand how exactly millions of women will be cured, do appreciate their recent paper on this very topic:

Monika Raab , Khayal Gasimli, Balázs Győrffy , Samuel Peña-Llopis, Sven Becker, Mourad Sanhaji , Klaus Strebhard Truncated DAPK Variants Restore Tumor Suppressor Activity and Synergize with Standard Therapies in High-Grade Serous Ovarian Cancer Cancers (2025) doi: 10.3390/cancers17121910 

The study was recently corrected in July 2026, but for only one of the issues (“an error occurred during the assembly of Figure 2E […] the scientific conclusions are unaffected“).

Reporting all this to the University of Frankfurt would be a pointless exercise even without an investor involvement. They already found Florian Greten and even Simone Fulda to be entirely innocent. And I can’t report Rudd to his University of Montreal either, because their rector ordered a blacklisting of your truly:

Returning to Rudd, here is his collaboration with his other German friend, and a former colleague in Harvard – the aforementioned Helga Schneider, who used to work at Imperial College London and University of Cambridge in UK, but ten years ago disappeared (it is not clear if this immunologist at University of Applied Sciences Biberach in Germany is her). But Rudd promptly blamed his former friend and her student, after having first shamelessly denied the obvious duplication of course:

Elke Valk , Rufina Leung , Hyun Kang , Kazuyo Kaneko , Christopher E. Rudd , Helga Schneider T cell receptor-interacting molecule acts as a chaperone to modulate surface expression of the CTLA-4 coreceptor Immunity (2006) doi: 10.1016/j.immuni.2006.08.024 

Rudd and Schneider have more fake stuff on PubPeer, they’ve just corrected a paper Wang et al 2003 in July 2026, likely for an image duplication in Figure 1 which wasn’t even flagged on PubPeer before.

While Rudd admitted to duplicated microscopy images for Lu et al 2012 (“Re-examination of the original data confirms that this figure-assembly error does not affect the quantitative analyses or the conclusions of the study“), for another paper with Schneider, he disappointingly chose not to reply at all, instead of his usual shouting that the gel bands were never identical:

Joanne E. Wood , Helga Schneider, Christopher E. Rudd TcR and TcR-CD28 engagement of protein kinase B (PKB/AKT) and glycogen synthase kinase-3 (GSK-3) operates independently of guanine nucleotide exchange factor VAV-1 Journal of Biological Chemistry (2006) doi: 10.1074/jbc.m604878200 

Rudd bullshitted also here, having simultaneously blamed his collaborators in case his lies won’t be believed:

Lynette Steele , Aarren J. Mannion , Gary Shaw , Kenneth A. Maclennan , Graham P. Cook , Christopher E. Rudd, Alison Taylor Non-redundant activity of GSK-3α and GSK-3β in T cell-mediated tumor rejection iScience (2021) doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2021.102555

No, one can never stain two different proteins in immunohistochemistry with two rabbit antibodies, certainly not with his methods. But in Rudd’s capable hands, this magically works.

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Retraction Watchdogging

Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience

It is always very unfortunate when a white male professor from a very prestigious western university ends up on a Chinese retraction, for fraud.

Richard Huganir is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, Director of Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience and co-director of the Brain Science Institute at the Johns Hopkins University in USA. His h-index is 145, but then again, every little counts, that’s why he somehow joined this fabrication from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and mainland China:

Lili Li , Yichao Fan , Xin Huang , Jie Luo , Lan Zhong , Xing-sheng Shu , Li Lu , Tingxiu Xiang , Anthony T.C. Chan , Winnie Yeo , Ceshi Chen , Wai Yee Chan , Richard L. Huganir , Qian Tao Tumor Suppression of Ras GTPase-Activating Protein RASA5 through Antagonizing Ras Signaling Perturbation in Carcinomas iScience (2019) doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2019.10.007 

The paper was flagged on PubPeer by pseudonymous Claire Francis in March 2026, the retraction from 10 August 2026 went:

“Post-publication, an investigation conducted on behalf of the journal by Elsevier’s Research Integrity & Publishing Ethics team identified a concern around the authenticity of the following figures/image panels:

• Figure 2A [GAPDH expression] [ESCC] and Figure 2E [GAPDH expression] [HCT116] from the current article and the corresponding GAPDH blots in Figure 2 (ESCC and Cervical Carcinoma, respectively) from the article published in PLOS ONE on which Lili Li, Xing-sheng Shu,Winnie Yeo, Anthony T. C. Chan, Qian Tao also appear as coauthors and which was available online prior to the current article having been submitted to iScience appear to share an overlapping region indicating that they depict the same source image, but are described as representing different experimental samples.
• Shu XS, Geng H, Li L, Ying J, Ma C, Wang Y, Poon FF, Wang X, Ying Y, Yeo W, Srivastava G, Tsao SW, Yu J, Sung JJ, Huang S, Chan AT, Tao Q. The epigenetic modifier PRDM5 functions as a tumor suppressor through modulating WNT/-catenin signaling and is frequently silenced in multiple tumors. PLoS One. 2011;6(11):e27346. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0027346

Furthermore, below images in the current article appear to show visual indicators of possible splice events.

RT-PCR gel image shown in Figure 2A [RASA5 expression] [ESCC]

RT-PCR gel images shown in Figure S1B

The authors were requested to provide comment on these concerns, as well as the original unprocessed image files to aid investigation, but were unable to provide a satisfactory response. Therefore, the Editor has lost confidence in the results and conclusions of the article and has determined it should be retracted.

The authors agree with the retraction.”

Huganir has some other papers on PubPeer, for example one with Marc Tessier-Lavigne:

Tracy S Tran, Maria E Rubio , Roger L Clem, Dontais Johnson , Lauren Case , Marc Tessier-Lavigne , Richard L Huganir, David D Ginty, Alex L Kolodkin Secreted semaphorins control spine distribution and morphogenesis in the postnatal CNS Nature (2009) doi: 10.1038/nature08628

In September 2025, the corresponding authors Alex Kolodkin and David Ginty, both at Johns Hopkins, expressed their “appreciation to PubPeer for finding this error on our part with respect to the choice of these representative panels” and informed that the error “does not impact the conclusions in this study.” No correction was published.

The rest of Huganir’s current Pubpeer record is just scientific criticism, except maybe this, with Solomon Snyder, after whom the neuroscience department, which Huganir leads, is now named.

Qingming Hou , Yunfei Huang , Stephen Amato , Solomon H. Snyder , Richard L. Huganir , Heng-Ye Man Regulation of AMPA receptor localization in lipid rafts Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience (2008) doi: 10.1016/j.mcn.2008.02.010

Snyder, who is almost 90 years old, in turn has more and more serious stuff on PubPeer, some of it already corrected.

One of Snyder’s successful mentees was David Sabatini (well, until Sabatini’s fall):

David M. Sabatini, Hediye Erdjument-Bromage, Mary Lui , Paul Tempst , Solomon H. Snyder RAFT1: A mammalian protein that binds to FKBP12 in a rapamycin-dependent fashion and is homologous to yeast TORs Cell (1994) doi: 10.1016/0092-8674(94)90570-3 

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Eternal assistant

Here another white man at a fancy western university troubled by Chinese retractions. Ernesto Yague is a Spanish native who went to UK and eventually became assistant professor at Imperial College London.

Jingjing Liu , Lei Liu , Ernesto Yagüe, Qianxi Yang , Teng Pan , Hui Zhao , Yunhui Hu, Jin Zhang GGNBP2 suppresses triple-negative breast cancer aggressiveness through inhibition of IL-6/STAT3 signaling activation Breast Cancer Research and Treatment (2019) doi: 10.1007/s10549-018-5052-z 

Flagged in March 2025, retracted on 11 August 2026:

“The Editor-in-Chief has retracted this article. Concerns were raised regarding a number of figures, specifically;

• portions of the Cal51/P-AKT and MDA-MB-231/P-STAT3(Y705) bands in Figure 6A appear to be overlap;
• portions of the Cal51/STAT3 and Cal51/Beta-Actin bands in Figure 6B appear to overlap.

The authors have stated they were unable to locate the original data. The Editor-in-Chief therefore no longer has confidence in the soundness of the data reported in this article.

The authors have not replied to correspondence from the Publisher about this retraction”

Yague has more on PubPeer. Here he is with the same Chinese gang from Tianjin Medical University:

Yunhui Hu, Ernesto Yagüe, Jing Zhao, Luyao Wang, Jingchao Bai , Qianxi Yang , Teng Pan, Hui Zhao, Jingjing Liu , Jin Zhang  Sabutoclax, pan-active BCL-2 protein family antagonist, overcomes drug resistance and eliminates cancer stem cells in breast cancer Cancer Letters (2018) doi: 10.1016/j.canlet.2018.02.036 

And no, it is not just Chinese papermill fraud. At Imperial, Yague worked with two cheaters who were eventually kicked out: Eric Lam and Justin Stebbing. Here is Yague with hsi British mentor, Christopher Higgins, director of the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre and head of division at Imperial College London.

Rebecca A. Randle , Selina Raguz , Christopher F. Higgins , Ernesto Yagüe Role of the highly structured 5′-end region of MDR1 mRNA in P-glycoprotein expression Biochemical Journal (2007) doi: 10.1042/bj20070235

Yague is stuck in the assistant professor position since almost two decades. Presumably, in Imperial College they know about the quality of his science. But Higgins protects him.

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