By Leonid Schneider, on research integrity, biomedical ethics and academic publishing
Elisabetta Ciani uses mouse models to help children with neurological genetic disorders. Problem is: her own lab members reported Ciani for data manipulation. Records reveal that University of Bologna gaslighted the whistleblower, blamed the transgenic mice alone and fibbed the funding charities.
“Aaronson may have finally realized the need to modify his behavior when his young children confronted him one day and complained, “Daddy, we’re afraid of you”. After he told us this story he added that perhaps he was being too harsh at work as well.”
Cancer Research UK is a charity which relies on donations, volunteer work and fundraising. What if these citizens knew their money goes to fund bad science?
Johan Thyberg discusses the Macchiarini affair in the context of ethical shortcomings of Karolinska’s own leadership.
Brain cancer professor Jasti Rao enjoyed the American dream of gigantic salary, political support and lavish research grants, in Texas and in Illinois. Did he ever perform any research, in-between casino gambling and terrorizing his lab employees? 109 fraudulent papers on PubPeer suggest otherwise.
French cancer researcher Patrick Legembre works on cell death, but his datasets come alive as zombies of varying cell types. So Legembre investigates!
Lulea University of Technology is a dark and violent place, according to these victim accounts. Bullying, blackmail, sexual nepotism, robbery and even threats of physical violence and suicide are not unheard of. LTU leadership seems to be part of the problem, and money plays a role.
Cancer researcher Giorgio Zauli publicly declared himself exonerated because he simply forbids his University of Ferrara to publish the investigative report. The ultra-right connected rector used the occasion to equal his critics to Nazis and to announce defamation lawsuits.
A UCLA dentistry student writes in a leaked letter: ” I was having disagreements with my research mentor, and thought that Dr. Tetradis could help. Instead, he distorted the issues to attack my mentor, and sexually harassed me. When I filed the Title IX complaint, his powerful colleagues discouraged me from filing.”
A former Karolinska researcher is subject of research misconduct investigation, for forwarding to university OA publishing bills for her past research there. To save €3k, no trick is too dirty for Karolinska Institutet.
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