Olivier Voinnet loses EMBO Gold Medal, Sonia Melo investigated by EMBO
News piece: The former star plant scientist Olivier Voinnet, currently professor at the Swiss elite university ETH Zürich has nowContinue Reading
Science journalism by Leonid Schneider, on research integrity and academic publishing in life sciences and biomedicine
I am an independent science journalist, with around 13 years of biomedical research experience in molecular cell biology, stem cells and cancer research.
The usual science journalism restricts itself to repeating after the cues given by scientific elite and leading research institutions. What we mostly read in the science news, is the voice of power and money. The climate of fear is omnipresent in science: bad science is very rarely exposed in the open, fraud and ethics breach are routinely covered up, while accusations and criticisms are raised only behind closed doors and are often unfairly or even wrongfully assigned. There are many good and honest scientists out there, but they have no voice. My site is for them.
Therefore, one goal of my site is to give voice to such concerned scientists who would normally never dare to speak out their critique, for fear of their influential colleagues. Some of these voices are named, some names are confidential. You can be one of them, just contact me below.
My conference presentations are available for you to browse and re-use at Slideshare. Some of my seminars are available as videos on YouTube. My academic CV and original research publications are listed on ORCID. Finally, I am also a cartoonist, please visit my Facebook page Science Cartoons.
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I welcome your opinions, suggestions and stories for my future journalistic investigations. Confidentiality guaranteed! Please leave a functional email address where I can reach you, if you want me to follow up on information you share.
Yours, Leonid Schneider
PS: those of my “special” readers, who aren’t interested in talking to me, but rather in engaging lawyers and German courts to stop my reporting, can save time searching for my residence address (Landungsanschrift): Taunusstr. 11, 63526 Erlensee, Germany
Pittsburgh associate professor Raju Reddy and a colleague sue JBC over a retraction. I suggest here more Reddy papers for the chop.
Catherine Verfaillie is a zombie scientist: her past stem cell research long discredited, but she still is an influential and very well funded star of Belgian science. Now Elisabeth Bik had a fresh new look at Verfaillie’s papers
A dishonest cancer researcher. A dud cancer drug based on rigged lab data. A clinical trial in The Lancet. A greedy university which finds no misconduct. And a medical journal which tramples over patients.
Johan Thyberg discusses the Macchiarini affair in the context of ethical shortcomings of Karolinska’s own leadership.
Ashutosh Tiwari and his patron Tony Turner were found guilty of research misconduct by Linköping University. Turner is to be sacked as EiC of his Elsevier journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics, a paper he tried to correct there will be retracted. Meanwhile, Tiwari and his LiU colleague Mikael Syväjärvi started a new business: they offer heart surgeries in India.
Liverpool professor Patricia Murray continues investigating shady dealings of the regmed company Celixir, owned by struck-off dentist Ajan Reginald and Nobelist Sir Martin Evans
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.