Today I stood my second injunction trial (previous here), and once again, the evidence was irrelevant. Today’s trial of Philipp Jungebluth against myself in the Berlin regional court was set for 30 minutes and this is also how long it took. The reason: the judge (and two co-judges) already made up their decision to uphold Jungebluth’s injunction against me (see story here and here), regardless of all evidence from my side about this doctor’s past. They were perfectly free to do so, because it was a speed trial, where (in theory) I was supposed to get my chance to finally defend myself after the very same judge passed that injunction without my prior knowledge or involvement, based on the claims submitted by Jungebluth. Such is the German law on press freedom, take it or leave the country. Also now, I didn’t get to say much, while Jungebluth and his lawyer were welcomed to explain their case to the court once again. My lawyer and I hardly got a chance to squeeze a word in. Continue reading “Judge in Jungebluth trial announces to uphold his injunction, dismisses all evidence”
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The western blot doctors of Silesia
Protein expression analysis by western blots appears to be the weak spot of life science, because these blots are so often reported to be manipulated. However, this is only because anybody, even without any background in biology can spot re-used western blot bands, just using a good eye or some computer skills. Unlike with other analytical tools, like real-time PCR or microscopy imaging, you don’t need specialist knowledge or access to raw data to spot digital manipulations of western blots. One of the most famous western blot breeders is the Brazilian diabetes researcher Mario Saad (see whistleblower reports on my site here and here). Below is the case of his two colleagues from Poland.
Some time ago, I was contacted by a Polish scientist with a dossier of suspected western blot duplications in the publication of the pharmacologist Bożena Gabryel from the Department of Pharmacology at the Medical University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. Gabryel specializes in oxidative stress research, four of her publications on this topic were accused to feature duplicated western blots, in different context. Sometimes suspicions were raised that selected individual bands in different western blots look too similar, which might suggest manipulative band duplications.
Soon after, another whistleblower independently contacted me with another dossier about yet another set of Gabryel’s papers, all featuring as lead or even corresponding author Krzysztof Łabuzek, who is an adjunct professor at this same Medical University of Silesia with interest in immune system and who also has a clinical practice for internal medicine in a small town near Katowice. Labuzek’s papers seem to feature a whole gallery of re-used western blots, as the dossier suggests. Additionally, that second whistleblower expressed concerns about western blot splicing and suspected band re-used in papers featuring the first author Joanna Ślusarczyk, PhD student in the lab of Agnieszka Basta-Kaim at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Krakow. Basta-Kaim is also co-author on one Gabryel paper now suspected of data manipulations.
Bavarian court sentences me to prison if I dare repeat unwelcome facts of Walles’ trachea transplants
Just before the end of the year 2016, I received per mail an official letter from the Bavarian Regional Court in Würzburg, where I was found guilty of lies and libel in a trial I was not invited to. Under the threat of a prison sentence of 6 months (since I could never pay even a fraction of the fine of €250,000) I was ordered by the judge to remove a short paragraph from this article which described the same tracheal transplants which the Würzburg University professors Heike and Thorsten Walles were proudly promoting through all available media only a couple of years ago. Now, when the trachea transplant scandal around their former collaborator Paolo Macchiarini exploded, the mere reference to their earlier common publications amounts to a crime of libel in the German state of Bavaria. I was also sentenced to pay the court costs, though I only learned about this Kafkaesque “Prozeß” once a final decision against me was delivered by mail. Luckily, I still have the right to appeal, which I will do once I recruit a suitable legal counsel. If you wish to help in any way, please get in touch. Continue reading “Bavarian court sentences me to prison if I dare repeat unwelcome facts of Walles’ trachea transplants”
Two EMBO corrections for the martyred saint Maria Pia Cosma
The cell biologist Maria Pia Cosma, top-funded and prize-winning professor in Barcelona, is either an indestructible zombie scientist or a martyred saint. Her name means in Italian Mary the Pious, so it is probably the latter. So the following post is written in the style of a canonical satire.
Holy Mary Pia was accused by evil tongues on PubPeer of research misconduct in several of her publications. Philistines pointed crooked fingers and cast stones at duplicated western blot bands in papers published by St. Maria Pia in exalted scriptures like Cell. The accusers, envious of such impact factors, wished those gospels of scientific truth crucified on the cross of retraction and demanded for Our Lady of Barcelona to be judged and investigated. Yet Lord took mercy upon the tortured saint and sent His angels to defend her.
Continue reading “Two EMBO corrections for the martyred saint Maria Pia Cosma”
Kathrin Maedler: persecuted genius or zombie scientist?
The prize-winning German pharmacologist and diabetes researcher Kathrin Maedler is regularly in the German and international news, either as a celebrated genius about to cure diabetes or as a potential cheater, responsible for masses of duplicated images in her publications. The rectorate of her own University of Bremen absolved their professor of all suspicions of data manipulations, while admitting image duplications and loss of original data. One argument was that all results were successfully reproduced, yet by whom: that the Bremen rectorate prefers not to answer, together with all other relevant questions which would have made this investigation anywhere credible. In the same vein, another investigation at the University of Zürich in Switzerland, where Maedler did her PhD in 2000-2004 under the supervision of Marc Donath, absolved them both of any suspicion of misconduct as well, while refusing to provide any further explanations. Meanwhile, other labs have refuted Maedler’s discoveries, but these publications were dismissed by the University of Bremen as irrelevant. Maedler also had to retract a publication Ardestani et al 2011 from the Journal of Biological Chemistry (which is known to have a rather tough stance on suspected misconduct). Continue reading “Kathrin Maedler: persecuted genius or zombie scientist?”
Collapse of Biotrachea, or how Macchiarini’s greed saved human lives
The trachea transplant experiments by Paolo Macchiarini left many of his trusting patients dead or mutilated. His €5.5 Million EU-funded research project Biotrachea started in April 2012 and was specifically designed to treat even more human beings with lethal plastic tracheas (and with the slightly less lethal cadaveric ones). The consortium was terminated in 2014 (see some background here), but not because the Biotrachea scientists or EU officials suddenly had second thoughts when the Macchiarini scandal unraveled and when his misconduct, ethics breaches as well as painful deaths and suffering of his plastic trachea recipients became known. Unlike an EU spokesperson previously insisted, there were no ethics concerns at all regarding Biotrachea. In fact, all ethics approvals were in place, human Guinea pigs were supposed to be lured en masse using a highly inappropriate patient consent form towards their likely deaths for the sake of EU-funded mega-science.
In truth, Biotrachea collapsed only because of Macchiarini’s greed for money. His financial conflict about patent revenues with the British university UCL drove the star surgeon to seek another plastic transplant manufacturer and then to destroy the entire multinational research consortium which he was presiding over, after the EU rejected his new plastic provider. Not because that one was also deemed unsafe, but as the EU negotiators mentioned, it was because that new type of plastic trachea lacked novelty. All this only became known after the original Biotrachea documents, which the EU and all consortium participants refused to grant me any insight into, were fully legally obtained by Jonas Malmstedt under Swedish transparency from Macchiarini’s ex-employer, the Karolinska Institutet (KI). Thanks to this brave and decent surgeon, I make all that secret documentation available below.
Continue reading “Collapse of Biotrachea, or how Macchiarini’s greed saved human lives”
Regenerating in Hannover, Part 2: Axel Haverich’s “growing” heart valves
The science of the fallen star of regenerative medicine Paulo Macchiarini was simple: take a dead organ, strip it of its cells and seed the carcass with stem cells (usually the magic cells from bone marrow). After some days in a “bioreactor”, you take out a living trachea, esophagus, even heart, and implant it into a patient. Another human life saved, and not only media, even scientist colleagues fell for this outrageous quackery. As the result of this hubris, several patients died, others remained in permanent critical care. Macchiarini and his partners Philipp Jungebluth, Martin Birchall and others had to fake ethics approvals as well as to lie and cheat about medical records in their publications in The Lancet, all in order to present a miserably suffering recipient of a ”regenerated” trachea as fully recovered. Animal experiments were performed only after Macchiarini’s team operated their first human patient, as indirectly evidenced by Jungebluth’s own doctorate thesis at the Medical University Hannover (MHH) in Germany.
Macchiarini began to develop his “decell-recell” method of organ regeneration while working in Hannover, close to the renowned heart surgeon and MHH clinic director, Axel Haverich (see Part 1 for the background). In 2009, the Italian cheater then moved on to a professorship at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, where he was showered in funding money and received best institutional protection, despite his patient abuse and his lies about his qualifications. Continue reading “Regenerating in Hannover, Part 2: Axel Haverich’s “growing” heart valves”
