Preprinters of the World Unite
The following is a rant in praise of preprints. I blog of usefulness of preprints, open science and open access, how BioRxiv works and their Plan U.
Category: Blog
Western blot loading control libraries and beyond
Too many scientists defend the practice of not probing for loading controls for each protein gel. They say a “library” method perfectly suffices, when one separate loading control gel is run once for reference. Such sloppiness can sometimes be a hint of even worse practices taking place.
Eric Lam: shady research at Imperial to cure breast cancer
Eric Lam is yet another of the many “Curing Cancer with Photoshop” researchers which PubPeer is full of. This professor of molecular Oncology at Imperial College in London is responsible for several papers with duplicated gel bands, but does it matter? He has 250 more.
Olivier Voinnet, the new Dreyfus?
Much of French media and academia, and certainly also the international plant science community now debates a hot conspiracy theory: what if Olivier Voinnet is actually innocent, a visionary genius who fell prey to a conspiracy of fraudulent colleagues and scheming bureaucrats? I discuss here the widespread dishonesty and data manipulation among Voinnet’s co-authors and peers. Is French research culture to blame?
The alpha males of physics
Two sets of events for Women in STEM: the theoretical physicist Alessandro Strumia, soon likely ex-CERN affiliated, decried feminist conspiracies and the discrimination against males like himself, in a workshop talk on gender. Right after, the Nobel Prize for physics was finally after 55 years given to a woman. Thing is: one of the other recipients, Gerard Mourou, made it clear in a 2013 video what the roles of males and females in physics are.
The anti-social mini-brains of Neanderthals
Neanderthals colonised Europe and Middle East long before modern humans and went extinct less than 30,000 years ago, when our species has spread there. Their story inspired the fantasies of generation of scientists, some of whom still cannot accept the idea that Neanderthals were just another kind of humans very similar or maybe simply just like us. Even new age phrenology is paraded as scientific explanation to why Neanderthal died out.
Pravda of Jessus report, CNRS Politburo scared of own people
Following my recent article about attempts to fix data irregularities in the papers by CNRS’ chief biologist and director ofContinue Reading
Jungebluth injunction hearing, another court travesty
Yesterday, November 23rd 2017, I travelled 600 km to Berlin to stand my second injunction trial, instigated by Philipp Jungebluth,Continue Reading
Call to research integrity, or at least a minor revolution at CNRS
When I first started digging into the affair of data manipulations around the former star of plant sciences Olivier Voinnet in earlyContinue Reading
DFG Senator Roland Lill explains how to do science properly
My earlier article about strange image irregularities in the publications of the German mitochondria researcher Roland Lill seem to haveContinue Reading
For Better Science 