Science journalism by Leonid Schneider, on research integrity and academic publishing in life sciences and biomedicine
The 2015 Nature Cell Biology paper by the Spanish cancer researcher Carlos Lopez-Otin and his US partner George Q Daley, stem cell titan and dean of Harvard Medical School, is being retracted. First author and Lopez-Otin’s student Clara Soria-Valles caused Daley even more trouble: her next groundbreaking paper was meant to be already published, but it is not even submitted and might never be.
Following my reporting, the cancer researcher Carlos López-Otín abandoned his ERC-funded 36-member-strong “Degradome” lab at the University of Oviedo in Spain and moved in with his collaborator in Paris, France, Guido Kroemer. Yet Lopez-Otin’s data integrity issues seem as poppycock compared to what Kroemer and his life partner Laurence Zitvogel dished out to the scientific community.
Janine Erler is a star of Danish cancer research, funded by ERC. Her earlier research led to the discovery of the key role of the enzyme lysyl oxidase in cancer metastasis and brought the scientist and businesswoman very close to curing cancer. Until some sad envious bad-wishers found duplicated gel bands in Erler papers.
I previously reported about numerous cases of suspected (or even blatantly obvious) data manipulation at the Weizmann Institute of ScienceContinue Reading
The Portuguese cancer researcher Sonia Melo has now achieved the status of a zombie scientist. After an internal investigation whichContinue Reading
Did you ever wonder why certain zombie scientists were still in academic jobs? Despite having been caught on data manipulationContinue Reading
The science of the fallen star of regenerative medicine Paulo Macchiarini was simple: take a dead organ, strip it ofContinue Reading
Sweden is a tolerant country, which is a very good thing. Unfortunately, sometimes this Swedish tolerance seems ill-advised. Dishonest scientistsContinue Reading
A scientist finds serious measurement errors in three publications of his former collaborators. He alerts the journals and makes hisContinue Reading
Open Science is these days largely about mandatory publishing in Open Access (OA), regardless of the costs to poorer scientistsContinue Reading
