Schneider Shorts 28.08.2026 – Liberalism’s fertility problem

Schneider Shorts of 28 August 2026 – racism affair in Ghent explodes in all directions, a German university deals with a Nazi doctor, another German university has been rigging Wikipedia, retractions for scholars in Italy and USA, and finally, a new antibody kerfuffle uncovered.

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Science Elites

Liberalism’s fertility problem

In Belgium, things are escalating. As I reported in last August 2026 Shorts, Nathan Cofnas, the racist philosopher who spews Nazi pseudoscience, was suspended by the Ghent University and is facing the sack. Cofnas claims that to be a retaliation for his blowing the whistle on the plagiarism of the Cambridge professor Jason Arday, whom the Cofnas-led racist lynch mob and the far-right media then drove into the presumed suicide.

As I also wrote in July 2026 Shorts, already Cofnas’s employment in Ghent was a major scandal, which caused protests of the faculty and the students, to which the international coalition of racist academics reacted in March 2026 with a massive letter of support, co-organised by a long-time defender of Cofnas, the Queen Mary University of London professor Abhishek Saha:

Then it accidentally came out that some people were added to it without their knowledge or permission: Enzo Rossi complained to me, having seen a copy of that letter on my website with his name as signatory. Saha first denied to have anything to do with that signature campaign, then admitted being in charge of it, and offered to remove Rossi’s name. Saha blamed the “first few signatories”: Peter Singer, Francesca Minerva, Jeff McMahan, Brian Leiter and Steven Pinker.

Now there is a new support campaign, even bigger, and featuring many of the same people! It was set off by Cofnas whining that he was being fired:

The letter from Ghent University’s legal department to Cofnas was shared on Bluesky, where it becomes clear that he was being suspended for being a racist:

Here is the full suspension letter from UGent that was sent to Nathan Cofnas, it shows ample reason for his suspension and potential termination. Including breach of contract, using the University of Ghent’s name and legitimacy to promote his racial supremacist views and causing reputational damage.

— roterote (@roterote.bsky.social) 2026-08-22T16:08:03.647Z

As mentioned, the racist academic community reacted to the suspension with another open letter in support of Cofnas, organised by yet another London mathematician: John Armstrong at King’s College London. It had over 900 signatories last I looked. I made a copy below:

Again, it is not surprising to see racist and eugenicist academics also on this new letter – Pinker, Singer, Satoshi Kanazawa, Richard Haier, Eric Rasmusen, J. Michael Bailey, Lee Jussim, Eric Kaufmann, Heiner Rindermann, Russell Warne, Garett Jones, Amy Wax, Marco Del Giudice, Emily Willoughby, Guy Madison, Gregory Clark, Timothy Bates, Geoffrey Miller, Rosalind Arden, Alessandro Strumia, Axel Meyer, Jerry Coyne, J Philippe Rushton’s widow Elizabeth Weiss, and of course Cofnas’s PhD mentor Neven Sesardić. The toxic atheists Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins joined, and on the other end of racist spectrum they even allowed the Nazi “anthropologist” Edward Dutton to sign, as a phony professor in a phony university Poland.

Others are at least open-minded towards racists: the British research integrity scholar Daniele Fanelli, or again Saha, the author of the March 2026 Cofnas support letter. Also RFK Jr’s former vaccine czar and medical contrarian Vinay Prasad signed, but he actually called for both Cofnas and the Ghent University rector to be sacked.

But there are also unexpected signatories. Like the US professor Alexander Kustov (an advocate for immigration!), or the founder of Skeptic magazine Michael Shermer. Both position themselves as fighters against racism, Kustov’s line is that one must defend everybody’s academic freedom (he himself focusses on defending Cofnas only). Shermer however clearly hates everything “woke” and, like some other older folks, he gets triggered by the existence of trans people:

Another seemingly unexpected supporter of Cofnas is Sabine Hossenfelder, a German science influencer who makes videos debunking bad science. She also reposted the threat issued to Ghent University by the US Ambassador to Belgium:

Hossenfelder now started to retweet Cofnas’s friends and fellow racists, even the worst of the worst like Jordan Lasker aka Cremieux and Richard Hanania, she also seemingly defends racists concepts as “science”:

There’s also a counter signature campaign organised by the Ghent faculty, and it is much more successful, with over 3,700 signatories. It explains why Cofnas is not a victim:

“It is Cofnas himself who makes it impossible to separate his criticism of Jason Arday from his views on race. He was invited to a plethora of podcasts to talk about the Arday case and on multiple (if not most) occasions he combined this with an exposé on his views on race (e.g. here and here and here).  […]
Cofnas himself seems less concerned with the issue of academic freedom. In his own writings, we find numerous passages calling for the expulsion of those who disagree with him rather than engaging in rational dialogue with them.”

We have written a statement in support of Ghent Uni's decision to suspend Nathan Cofnas. We resist attempts to frame this as a punishment for "whistleblowing" or censorship of "controversial research". We invite all academics who share our views to sign our letter. forms.gle/qwN8xzEM5C7Q…

— Pieter T. L. Beck (@ptrbck.bsky.social) 2026-08-25T18:12:24.164Z

But alas, Cofnas will stay for a few months more now, probably until early 2027. The US Ambassador White invited Cofnas to the embassy. and forced the rector Petra De Sutter to lift his suspension and let Cofnas continue with his employment. What threats did America deploy, one wonders?

This brings us to Ghent University’s associate professor who employed Cofnas and who also co-signed the support letter: Bouke De Vries.

In December 2025, the magazine Apache reported that De Vries participated in August 2024 in the infamous “London Conference of Intelligence (LCI)“, which used to be organised by academic racists at UCL in London, until a public outcry in 2018 forced that university first to pretend the conference happened without their knowledge, and then to prevent any further occurrences.

In 2023, LCI moved to Budapest, Hungary, because Victor Orban supported such things financially, now it will probably have to go elsewhere again. Apache wrote (translated):

“The 2024 three-day conference kicked off on August 16 at the “fashionable and cozy” Muzikum Klub & Bisztró , right next to the Hungarian National Museum, with welcome words from organizers Emil Kirkegaard and James Thompson . The brochure shows that philosophy professor Bouke de Vries from Ghent University was also on the conference program.

On day two (17/8/24) Bouke de Vries gave a lecture on gender differences and moral status. According to the short description, De Vries reflected on an assumption that is central to feminism and liberalism: the idea that men and women have equal status. De Vries believes it is high time to question this assumption. He refers to other “factors” that can have an influence, including IQ.”

The Budapest conference was “was a tribute to the psychologist Richard Lynn“, the dead racist professor from Northern Ireland who used to run the Pioneer Fund (which was set up by actual Nazis in 1930ies to advance “race science”). The paedophilia-promoter Emil Kirkegaard was Lynn’s academic “son”, and he took over the Pioneer Fund and its racist academic journal Mankind Quarterly, the fund was recently quietly transformed into Human Diversity Foundation (HDF), which has its own magazine, Aporia.

Next to Kirkegaard, other Nazis and racists at the Lynn-Trubute conference included the aforementioned Dutton and Davide Piffer, read about them here:

Aporia also re-published De Vries’s preprint, which later appeared in the Elsevier journal Futures (De Vries 2024), which is basically his screed about “The Great Replacement”. De Vries’s main worry is that non-white and often Muslim migrants have more children then whites like him:

“the populations of post-industrial countries are becoming less intelligent due mostly to the negative relationship that has emerged within these societies between intelligence and fertility and to the proclivity of intelligent people to delay parenthood.”

De Vries 2024

The paper ends with De Vries basically equalling non-white people to monkeys:

“For while it is widely accepted nowadays that all human beings, including our descendants, have equal moral status, […] one struggles to see how reductions in humanity’s intelligence that bring us closer to the intelligences of other species commonly believed to possess a lower moral status, including those of our primate cousins, could not come to matter morally and normatively eventually. “

And to stop the Great Replacement, De Vries demands radical measures (hyperlink added by me):

“The most promising ways of doing so appear to be to invest in education; introduce policies that incentivize and encourage intelligent people, especially women, to have (more) children as well as have them at a younger age; and to develop and deploy technologies such as embryo selection and gene-editing to make respectively future and current people smarter (cf. Anomaly, 2020)”

De Vries’s reference list is basically a who-is-who parade of academic racists: the aforementioned racist and eugenicist Jonathan Anomaly, plus Dutton, Kirkegaard, Lynn, Piffer, Kaufmann, Rindermann, Michael Woodley of Menie, Arthur Jensen, Ian Deary, Gerhard Meisenberg (Editor-in-Chief of Mankind Quaterly), etc

In May 2025, Apache published an open letter of Ghent faculty and students protesting De Vries’s teaching of racism and eugenics. But De Vries doubled down and recruited Cofnas, against which the faculty protested even more, in this open letter available online and below:

Eventually, De Vries’s collaborators jumped ship, nobody wants to work with him. The website of his research group “GRELP – Ghent Research in Ethics, Law and Politics” lists now only De Vries:

De Vries is very sad when you call him a racist. He explained in his interview to the Belgian media, on the occasion of his hiring of Cofnas (translated):

“I have myself been criticized for the statement that there is a loss of intelligence at a collective level in various countries, because individuals with higher intelligence have, on average, later and fewer children. Yet studies indicate that countries such as the US, UK and Iceland have seen a long-term decline in gene variants associated with educational success, which in turn strongly correlates with intelligence.“

In that interview to HLN in March 2026, De Vries also mentioned that he employed Cofnas based on a recommendation latter from Richard Haier – retired US professor, Editor-in-Chief of the eugenics journal Intelligence and a known racist (Haier of course signs every open letter in support of Cofnas). De Fries also said this about Cofnas:

“he has never defended white supremacy or racial discrimination, which would also be strange given his Jewish origins; on the contrary, he has explicitly opposed them.“

De Vries about Cofnas

We can’t look into Cofnas’s head, but in public he spreads not just white supremacy, but also clearly antisemitic narratives about conniving and conspiring Jews. In fact, De Fries himself postulated “intelligence differences between groups” to be a scientific fact, and he himself suggested that Jews and Chinese are more intelligent than Blacks:

“ignoring such disparities can fuel conspiracy theories and hostility toward groups that perform above average academically and economically, such as Ashkenazi Jews and East Asians. It also suggests that unequal outcomes may be less the result of discrimination and racism than many contemporary progressives claim.”

Apache revealed in December 2025 even more:

“Meanwhile, De Vries went one step further. Apache identified himself as the author of the article Refugees’ IQs are Normatively Consequential in the Journal of Controversial Ideas , which was published under the pseudonym Tavren Oshal. In it, the philosopher argues that the assumption that the IQ of refugees is lower has moral consequences, and that there are reasons to exclude refugees with a low IQ. The article, which appeared on November 11, 2025, is part of the polemic that arose following an article by the controversial racial scientist Heiner Rindermann in the same magazine, about the IQ of refugees in Germany.

De Vries defends (under his pseudonym) the pseudoscientific literature on race and IQ. He therefore explicitly supports so-called race science and claims in the article (just as in the ‘ dysgenics ‘ article) that this type of research is “suppressed”.”

De Vries invited Cofnas to work on his project “Liberalism’s fertility problem“, which is funded by the Ghent University. Soon, the fertility problem of white Belgian women will be solved by De Vries all alone: his postdoc Maarten Boudry left Ghent University, as Boudry’s signature to the Cofnas support letter shows.

It is very unlikely that the peer community didn’t know that De Vries was a racist and a eugenicist, but since his racism and eugenics passed peer review, they qualified him to an ERC grant, which he obtained in 2023. The EU Commission gave De Vries over €1 million for “Protecting people from loneliness“. Lots of money to address his own academic loneliness inside his faculty.

The ERC grant ends in March 2028. That will be probably the latest when De Vries will leave Ghent.

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“Remigrate or cremate”

More racism now. In the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, elections will happen soon, and the far-right AfD is already leading all polls. One university doctor was preparing for the AfD Machtergreifung – Dr Ronald Siems, responsible for organ transplantations at the University of Rostock, and very ironically, expert for palliative medicine.

He is accused of having posted really horrible things about mass-murdering migrants and Germans with migrant background – on social media, under his own name. Translated:

• “So I only see biomass fuel that can solve our energy problem! Remigration or (concentration) camp.”
• “Remigrate or cremate“
• “Economically would be to cremate“
• “Defensive weapons and use when needed. Carry a firearm and use it when in need. That I would make myself criminally liable for weapon ownership, is irrelevant to me compared to the damage I could suffer (from them)”

Siems also repeatedly threatened to murder German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. The activists who recorded all this are sure that Siems posted those things himself and was not impersonated.

The University of Rostock reacted already:

University websites and university’s social media posts mentioning Siems have been swiftly deleted (here one archived copy). Even the football club Hansa Rostock (infamous for its Nazi fans), deleted videos where Siems advocated for the organ donor card.

In German law, nobody can be ever named in the media, no matter what they did. Courts always side with the real victim – the perpetrator, whose identity must be always protected, so much that you shouldn’t be able to even try to guess who that might be. That is why the social media accounts which quote Siems and other horrible Germans are operated anonymously. All relevant media reporting therefore never names Siems or mentions what job he did in Rostock. In this regard, the local media reported on 26 August 2026 that the unnamed doctor has been suspended and will be likely sacked and criminally charged.

Siems worked at University Clinic Rostock for many years it seems. Did they really had no clue about his views?

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Hire colleagues to do this for you

Now something funny, from another university in eastern Germany: the University of Magdeburg.

In my article about the papermill fighter and miracle healer Bernhard Sabel, I mentioned that his Wikipedia page, and that of some other Magdeburg professors, were edited by a local contractor.

Turns out, the university itself paid for it. They now deleted this webpage on the “Innovationsportal Sachsen-Anhalt” which this university operates:

This is what the website used to say, translated (highlights mine):

“As part of the project, the external presentation of the scientists at the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg and the other universities in Wikipedia is to be improved. With almost 2 million pages, Wikipedia is the largest free German online encyclopedia on events, factual topics and biographies.

Due to the high relevance and quality of the articles, Wikipedia has an outstanding Google ranking. Every link pointing to Wikipedia improves the ranking in search results.
Universities and research institutes are listed on Wikipedia. These entries must be kept current. In addition, as many professors at a university as possible should be found on Wikipedia and be connected to the university. This strengthens the external reputation of a research institution.

In principle, anyone can create contributions to Wikipedia. The prerequisite for serious work is to register with a user account. The work of new users is monitored by experienced users; contributions are only online after a so-called screening. Only after editorial practice do you get your own viewing rights.
It is not desirable for anyone to write an article about themselves because this is viewed as a lack of editorial distance. So hire colleagues to do this for you.“

This is what the page looks now:

Yes, the University of Magdeburg has been rigging Wikipedia, editing their own and their professors’ profiles. And the public paid for this.

Wait, it gets even sillier. The project was managed by a “Dr. Habil. Sylvia Springer“, who used to be the Head of Academic Transfer at the University of Magdeburg, but is actually a professional…. hypnotist. Springer offers in her private hypnosis practice “mesmerism” therapy for “harmonization of the body axes“, “balancing (..) energy potentials“, where the “giving hand (…) directs energy into the body or into the aura of the other person“, all of that is of course “scientifically supported“.

By a crazy coincidence, the editing of Sabel’s and other Magdeburg professors’ Wikipedia profiles was done by a user who also edited the profile of a fellow hypnotist called Norbert Preetz. That user’s name was “Springer54”, and yes, Sylvia Springer was born in 1954.

Anyway, the University of Magdeburg is facing bigger challenges. The federal state elections in Sachsen-Anhalt on 6 September are very likely to bring the far-right AfD into power.

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pERK or PERK?

Sholto David set up his own blog now, and his first first post there is about yet another antibody mix-up!

In his article from 25 August 2026, Sholto turned his attention to these two proteins and their antibodies:

• “ERK is an abbreviation for Extracellular signal-Regulated Kinase. This is an entirely different protein related to cell growth, division, and survival. Actually, “ERK” usually refers to two proteins (ERK1 and ERK2), but these cat in the hat style details aren’t so important. Like many signalling proteins ERK has a phosphorylated state which controls its activity, phosphorylated ERK is usually abbreviated as p-ERK or pERK. I will use p-ERK throughout.
• PERK is an abbreviation for Protein Kinase RNA-Like ER Kinase. Also known as EIF2AK3. PERK is a membrane-bound protein which helps coordinate the unfolded protein response in the endoplasmic reticulum.“

p-ERK, PERK who cares, same thing – decided not just some illiterate papermillers in China, but some serious scientists, even in USA. Sholto “identified nearly 200 papers that have recorded using the wrong antibody“.

Here is C Ronald Kahn, a major bigwig in Harvard:

Gurjit Singh , InSug O-Sullivan, Arivarasu Natarajan Anbazhagan, Ranjan K.C , Zeba Farooqui , Kaige Ma , Jun Wang, Fackson Mwale, Gina Votta-Velis , Benjamin Bruce , C. Ronald Kahn, Andre J. Van Wijnen, Hee-Jeong Im Loss of PKCδ/Prkcd prevents cartilage degeneration in joints but exacerbates hyperalgesia in an experimental osteoarthritis mouse model Gene (2024) doi: 10.1016/j.gene.2023.147920 

Here Sholto caught Pravin Singhal (professor at Hofstra University) and Sanjeev Gupta (professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York), this duo featured prominently in November 2025 Shorts. Their paper was flagged before by Claire Francis:

Rukhsana Aslam , Ali Hussain , Kang Cheng , Vinod Kumar , Ashwani Malhotra , Sanjeev Gupta , Pravin C Singhal Transplantation of mesenchymal stem cells preserves podocyte homeostasis through modulation of parietal epithelial cell activation in adriamycin-induced mouse kidney injury model Histology and histopathology (2020) doi: 10.14670/hh-18-276

Other authors in the eight papers discussed are however not known as cheaters. See the following paper from Ohio State University:

Eshan Khan , Hannah Hylton , Neel Rajan , Stephanie J. Bouley , Jalal K. Siddiqui , Swetha Rajasekaran , Ganesh R. Koshre , Hayden Storts , Anisley Valenciaga , Misbah Khan , Sandya Liyanarachchi , Francisco Fernandez , Xuguang Zheng , John Phay , Priya H. Dedhia, Jing Wang , James A. Walker , Matthew D. Ringel, Wayne O. Miles Proteomic Profiling of Medullary Thyroid Cancer Identifies CAPN1 as a Key Regulator of NF1 and RET Fueled Growth Thyroid (2025) doi: 10.1089/thy.2024.0102 

Sholto was puzzled:

“The phosphorylation site is labelled in this figure as Thr980 which is not an ERK phosphorylation site… but it is a PERK phosphorylation site! If that wasn’t confusing enough, the antibody is not a phosphorylation specific antibody anyway. The western blot shows the characteristic double band for both p-ERK and ERK but p-ERK is labelled with a molecular weight of 140 kDa vs. ERK at 44 kDa.””

How big do these scholars think is a phosphate group? 100 kDa, really?

Also for this paper from Israel, Sholto noticed: “The authors used an incorrect antibody for p-ERK, listing Abcam’s ab65142 which is a PERK antibody. Even more confusing the bands selected from the full length blot and labelled as “pERK” are at the wrong molecular weight.“

Michal Navon , Noam Ben-Shalom , Maya Dadiani , Michael Mor , Ron Yefet , Michal Bakalenik-Gavry , Dana Chat , Nora Balint-Lahat, Iris Barshack, Ilan Tsarfaty, Einav Nili Gal-Yam, Natalia T. Freund Unique characteristics of autoantibodies targeting MET in patients with breast and lung cancer JCI Insight (2025) doi: 10.1172/jci.insight.187392 

Is this why they cut out the middle part of the gel in their figure?

The full list of almost 200 misguided PERK papers was posted by Sholto here.

In other news, Sholto helped Reese Richardson find over 18,000 fake western blots in antibody data-sheets by several major companies, as they reported on Zenodo and in a blog post. The news covered by several major news outlets.

A massive update: At least ~15 companies~ are selling scientists antibodies using faked validation data. We've documented 18,000+ manipulated images on 17,000+ products sold by leading laboratory suppliers including Thermo Fisher, Abcam, Santa Cruz Biotechnology, Millipore Sigma and Bio-Techne.1/🧵

— Reese Richardson (@reeserichardson.bsky.social) 2026-08-25T13:06:21.078Z

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Retraction Watchdogging

Impairment of cocaine-mediated behaviours

An Italian retraction, from the IRCSS San Raffaele Scientific Institute in Milan. The paper is about cocaine, and it was originally flagged on PubPeer in February 2024 by Mu Yang:

Simone Bido , Nicola Solari , Marzia Indrigo , Angela D’Antoni , Riccardo Brambilla , Michele Morari , Stefania Fasano Differential involvement of Ras-GRF1 and Ras-GRF2 in L-DOPA-induced dyskinesia Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology (2015) doi: 10.1002/acn3.202 

The retraction from 20 August 2026 went:

“The retraction has been agreed upon following an investigation into concerns raised by a third party. Several image overlaps and duplicated elements in Figures 1, 3, 6, and 7 were identified across different panels even though the corresponding images represent different samples. Accordingly, the editors have lost confidence in the data presented and consider the conclusions of this manuscript insufficiently supported. The authors have been informed of the decision to retract but remained unresponsive.”

Here are the lead authors Riccardo Brambilla, professor at the Cardiff University in UK, and his former mentee Stefania Fasano doing cocaine again, the paper was corrected:

Alessandro Papale , Ilaria Maria Morella , Marzia Tina Indrigo , Rick Eugene Bernardi , Livia Marrone , Francesca Marchisella , Andrea Brancale , Rainer Spanagel , Riccardo Brambilla , Stefania Fasano Impairment of cocaine-mediated behaviours in mice by clinically relevant Ras-ERK inhibitors eLife (2016) doi: 10.7554/elife.17111 

The Correction from 7 February 2025 went:

“We were notified by eLife journal and via PubPeer of three errors.

The first one is in Figure 3, where the “Scr RB1 cocaine” and “Scr RB3 cocaine” panels partially overlap. This unintentional duplication occurred during panel assembly. Since all histological analyses were performed in blind, captured images were assigned to numerical codes. During the preparation of the final images for the manuscript, treatments and conditions were made explicit and the selected representative images for publication were first duplicated in their original folders and then moved to “Final Folders”, containing only images for publication. During this process, an image from the original folder “Scr-RB1 cocaine” was accidentally duplicated twice and incorrectly placed into the Final Folder “Scramble RB3 Cocaine”. Consequently, both final folders named “Scr-RB1 cocaine” and “Scr-RB3 cocaine” contained the same image. To further complicate this matter, the images were cropped, making the duplication even harder to detect. […]

The second error is in Figure 2—figure supplement 1C, where “RB1 0.2 µM / Not stim” and “RB1 2 µM / Glu” panels partially overlap.

The third error is in Figure 2—figure supplement 1D, where “Scramble Glu” and “RB3 0.5 µM Glu” panels partially overlap. We believe that also these mistakes occurred during panel assembly, similarly to what happened in Figure 3. Unfortunately, due to the passage of time since the publication, we are unable to find the original uncropped images. Thus, Figure 2—figure supplement 1 has been removed from the paper.

Figure 2—figure supplement 1 which has now been removed from the published paper is shown for reference: […]

These mistakes do not affect to any extent the results, interpretation and conclusions of this work.

The article has been corrected accordingly.”

This was what the eLife editors found:

Fasano moved from Milan to Cardiff in 2016 and left in 2023, she is now “ADHD Life Coach”. This is not about cocaine though:

Ludovico Arcuri , Salvatore Novello , Martina Frassineti , Daniela Mercatelli , Clarissa Anna Pisanò , Ilaria Morella , Stefania Fasano , Blair V Journigan , Michael E Meyer , Willma E Polgar , Riccardo Brambilla , Nurulain T Zaveri , Michele Morari Anti-Parkinsonian and anti-dyskinetic profiles of two novel potent and selective nociceptin/orphanin FQ receptor agonists British Journal of Pharmacology (2018) doi: 10.1111/bph.14123 

And here an old one by Brambilla, on PubPeer for many years already:

Chiara Vantaggiato , Ivan Formentini , Attilio Bondanza , Chiara Bonini , Luigi Naldini , Riccardo Brambilla ERK1 and ERK2 mitogen-activated protein kinases affect Ras-dependent cell signaling differentially Journal of Biology (2006) doi: 10.1186/jbiol38 

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The explanations were not deemed sufficient

Now, a retraction for a US professor: Renata Jaskula-Sztul, originally from Poland, now associate professor at University of Alabama at Birmingham. On this paper, she is accompanied by her Chair of the Department of Surgery and Senior Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, Herbert Chen, plus by her other co-lead of the Neuroendocrine Cancer Research Lab, Bart Rose, who prides himself to have been “the first to show differential expression of MEN1 in Black patients with pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors“:

Zviadi Aburjania, Jason D. Whitt, Samuel Jang, Dwayaja H. Nadkarni , Herbert Chen , J. Bart Rose, Sadanandan E. Velu, Renata Jaskula-Sztul Synthetic Makaluvamine Analogs Decrease c-Kit Expression and Are Cytotoxic to Neuroendocrine Tumor Cells Molecules (2020) doi: 10.3390/molecules25214940 

The retraction from 20 August 2026 went:

“Following the publication of the article, concerns were brought to the attention of the Editorial Office regarding the integrity of figures presented in this publication [1].

In accordance with the journal’s standard procedures, the Editorial Office and Editorial Board conducted an investigation that identified indications of inappropriate editing in Figure 7. Although the authors cooperated with the investigation, the explanations and supporting materials provided were not deemed sufficient by the Editorial Board to resolve the identified concerns. As a consequence, the Editorial Board has lost confidence in the reliability of the reported findings and has decided to retract this publication in accordance with MDPI’s retraction policy.

This retraction was approved by the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Molecules.

The authors have been informed of this retraction and have indicated their agree-ment with this decision.”

You can probably imagine that Jaskula-Sztul has more on PubPeer. Like this, with Chen and Rose:

Yichen Guo , Yinan Jiang , J. Bart Rose, Ganji Purnachandra Nagaraju , Renata Jaskula-Sztul , Anita B. Hjelmeland , Adam W. Beck , Herbert Chen , Bin Ren Protein Kinase D1 Signaling in Cancer Stem Cells with Epithelial-Mesenchymal Plasticity Cells (2022) doi: 10.3390/cells11233885   

Another one with Chen, someone placed a grey box into an image:

Yuling Xiao , Renata Jaskula-Sztul, Alireza Javadi , Wenjin Xu , Jacob Eide , Ajitha Dammalapati , Muthusamy Kunnimalaiyaan , Herbert Chen, Shaoqin Gong Co-delivery of doxorubicin and siRNA using octreotide-conjugated gold nanorods for targeted neuroendocrine cancer therapy Nanoscale (2012) doi: 10.1039/c2nr31853a

To me, there are even more problems with that Figure 2:

More by Jaskula-Sztul and Chen, again with their colleague Shaoqin Gong, professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison:

Guojun Chen , Renata Jaskula–Sztul, April Harrison , Ajitha Dammalapati , Wenjin Xu , Yiqiang Cheng , Herbert Chen , Shaoqin Gong KE108-conjugated unimolecular micelles loaded with a novel HDAC inhibitor thailandepsin-A for targeted neuroendocrine cancer therapy Biomaterials (2016) doi: 10.1016/j.biomaterials.2016.04.029 

Chen insisted on PubPeer that the particles were never identical, and claimed to have discovered “several distinct differences among them” using “FotoForensics, a powerful software tool for detecting image manipulation“.

Here is Jaskula-Sztul with other colleagues from University of Wisconsin-Madison:

Noé Galván , Renata Jaskula-Sztul, Peter S MacWilliams , Charles J Czuprynski , Colin R Jefcoate Bone marrow cytotoxicity of benzo[a]pyrene is dependent on CYP1B1 but is diminished by Ah receptor-mediated induction of CYP1A1 in liver Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology (2003) doi: 10.1016/s0041-008x(03)00338-7 

Returning to Chen, he also has this on PubPeer:

Jamie J. Van Gompel , Muthusamy Kunnimalaiyaan , Kyle Holen , Herbert Chen ZM336372, a Raf-1 activator, suppresses growth and neuroendocrine hormone levels in carcinoid tumor cells Molecular Cancer Therapeutics (2005) doi: 10.1158/1535-7163.mct-04-0334 

No wonder Chen “over 750 original research and review articles and has edited 29 textbooks (H-index 97)“, as his university boasts.

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