By Leonid Schneider, on research integrity, biomedical ethics and academic publishing
Anne Dejean is a very important cancer researcher in France. To whom shall she bequeath her high-achieving Institut Pasteur lab when she retires? The German shooting star Oliver Bischof is the right man to continue Dejean’s craft.
Guido Kroemer receives on 8 November 2019 the €1mn Lombardy Award for Healthy Ageing, at La Scala in Milan. And why not, one panel member was Carlo Croce.
St Carlos of Oviedo almost was canonised as Spain’s first living martyr, but now Nature revoked his mentoring award. Spanish media and science elites are desperate, even the Queen is not amused. The Royal Academy of Sciences insists Lopez-Otin is a victim of journal’s failure.
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.
Smut Clyde will take you on a meditative Ayurvedic trip where the most respectable of research institutions and their world-renowned academics were caught dancing with the Guru Deepak Chopra himself. Famous cardiologist and medical writer Eric Topol and the Nobel Prize winner Elizabeth Blackburn were just two most prominent US academics listed on Chopra’s Panchakarma clinical trial.
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.
The fraud case of Bristol cell biologist Abderrahmane Kaidi looked rather straightforward: Bristol University caught a group leader on data faking and bullying, and immediately had him removed. Turns out, it was not really like that.
Now I publish some very revealing leaked material, spiced with stories of a guerrilla Twitter account and a deleted student newspaper article.
University of Bristol mysteriously lost its senior lecturer, Abderrahmane Kaidi. His institutional website was wiped out in August 2018. I obtained an internal email which lifts the mystery: Kaidi was namely found guilty of “having fabricated research data”, and resigned with “immediate effect”. Affected by research misconduct are also publications from Kaidi’s postdoc period with Stephen Jackson in Cambridge.
More bad news for Karl Lenhard Rudolph: misconduct findings and 2 year funding ban from DFG. Good news: the international scientific community stands to him in solidarity, no retractions, even some corrections won’t be implemented.
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