The Fraud Squad
Either a Muslim colleague or a retired technician did it. Or so these Sicilian professors insist.
By Leonid Schneider, on research integrity, biomedical ethics and academic publishing
Either a Muslim colleague or a retired technician did it. Or so these Sicilian professors insist.
“These figures were elaborated by me personally and I remember quite well how I made them. Definitely, the images shown in this figure were cut and pasted from the originals in order to elaborate the figures, the overlapping was done “manually” using GIMP…” – Dr. José R Pérez-Castiñeira
“”Dear Aneurus Inconstans, thank you for your series of valuable suggestions. We will sincerely verify the matters pointed out. I’m sorry, many collaborators have already resigned from academia.”
“No, none of my data is forged.” – Ahmed Esmail Shalan
Meet Danish Ahmed and other members of the Sam Higginbottom gang. I am not making those names up.
On the gate of Constantinople was written, in a steel plate, the order of the Sultan:
“All the males of the Gjomarkaj, generation after generation, from the cradle to the grave, will carry the title of Kapidan”
“You can be assured that neither I nor any of my colleagues […] would tolerate any data manipulation.” – Natasha Raikhel
“Recently we realized that some images were used wrongly in the paper, so I want to retract this article.
The key message of the paper is very solid and results have been reproduced independently in many laboratories, but I find unacceptable the wrong use of some images during figure preparation” – Pedro L Rodriguez
A microbiology institute in Sofia is investigating a string of problematic papers on arthritis. Lead author Nina Ivanovska: “I consider myself the major culprit”. She might be right.
They are professors of molecular biology and they don’t know how microscopy or western blots are supposed to work. But it passed peer review!