Science journalism by Leonid Schneider, on research integrity and academic publishing in life sciences and biomedicine
Two old gynaecology professors in Milan decided to racially profile, then rate their misinformed young patients for sexual attractiveness. Their even published this as an evo-psych study in a respected society journal.
Patricia Murray uncovers the business secrets of the Nobelist Martin Evans and his partner Ajan Reginald. It seems the magic iMP cells used to treat patients in Greece were drawn from the blood of patients in Swansea, for the purpose of a secret PhD thesis. There is no serious science behind it, only serious investor money and a fraudulent patent.
Yehuda Shoenfield is either a genius or a quack of autoimmunity research, depending on which side you stand in the antivax debate. He is also apparently a plagiarist, even Wikipedia is not safe. And this is why he is now a Member of Israel Academy of Sciences.
Royal Society of Chemistry published a research paper which unashamedly peddled TCM, under the title: “Probing the Qi of traditional Chinese herbal medicines by the biological synthesis of nano-Au”. Both Editor-in-Chief and publisher executive saw no problem there because the paper passed peer review.
Sir Martin Evans, winner of Nobel prize 2007, founded in 2009 the stem cell start-up Celixir, together with a struck-off dentist Ajan Reginald. With the help of the British heart surgeon Stephen Westaby, they ran a very profitable clinical trial in Greece, which now moved into UK.
The 2008 Lancet paper of Paolo Macchiarini and Martin Birchall about the world first trachea transplant might end up retracted. Until recently, the journal’s editor Richard Horton used to ignore and suppress “non peer-reviewed” evidence, but due to combined pressure of activism, media and politics, things started to move.
In yet another investigation, UCL whitewashed Martin Birchall of all responsibilities. I publish here the confidential report and excerpts from a secret PhD thesis, which the UCL committee carefully avoided to read.
The trachea-transplanting company Videregen, based in Liverpool, got another £2 million grant from UK governmental agency Innovate UK, to advance their tracheal replacement technology.
Manipulated data in 17 papers from one cancer research lab in China gets flagged on PubPeer. It ends with the university hospital in Wuhan issuing a secret statement accusing the US pharma giant a Merck of a conspiracy to slander a Chinese Academy member, Dr Ding Ma.
The team around the paediatric oncologist Nabil Ahmed at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, discovered a way to engineer T-leukocytes to bypass the blood-brain barrier at attack otherwise untreatable brain cancers. Their amazing technology to get this published in Nature was brazenly insolent data fakery.
