Alfonsina Desiderio and her pathological Bully Boys
Smut Clyde and Clare Francis studied the works of Milanese cancer researchers around Maria Alfonsina Desiderio. There are even ideas for T-shirts!
By Leonid Schneider, on research integrity, biomedical ethics and academic publishing
Smut Clyde and Clare Francis studied the works of Milanese cancer researchers around Maria Alfonsina Desiderio. There are even ideas for T-shirts!
In 2018, the pharma giant Sanofi appointed with John Reed a new R&D head. Apparently Sanofi does not believe in PubPeer.
Get ready to meet Dr Richard Hill and his amazing jumping blots. Just don’t stare, or you’ll get hurt.
In David Latchman affair, UCL finally gave censored investigative reports to journalists. These show the Master of Birkbeck was found guilty of misconduct by recklessness, trice. Former investigator John Hardy now speaks out exclusively on my site.
Spain is where dishonest research gets rewarded, with awards, grants and media fame. No wonder the New York-based immunologist Andrea Cerutti opened a second lab in Barcelona.
Eric Lam is yet another of the many “Curing Cancer with Photoshop” researchers which PubPeer is full of. This professor of molecular Oncology at Imperial College in London is responsible for several papers with duplicated gel bands, but does it matter? He has 250 more.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has a cancer research unit in France, IARC. Some papers from there contain impressive manipulations. The works of art are authored by Massimo Tommasino and his former junior colleague there Uzma Hasan, now tenured group leader at INSERM. Some of this research took place at the Schering-Plough Research Institute which was taken over by German pharma giant Merck.
With nobody above him, ICR director Paul Workman was seemingly investigating himself, and found two female colleagues guilty of placing fake data into his papers, primarily the ICR emeritus Ann Jackman. One paper was retracted, another received an outrageous correction. The previous ICR CEO, Alan Ashworth, together with his right-hand man Chris Lord, have their own impressive, but hitherto ignored, record on PubPeer.
The Paolo Macchiarini investigation was initiated in 2016 by the interim Karolinska Rector Karin Dahlman-Wright, finalised this year by the newly installed Ole Petter Ottersen. The irony is that several Dahlman-Wright papers were now scrutinised data integrity sleuths with the result that one wonders if Dahlman-Wright was the right person to supervise any research misconduct investigations. Also Ottersen himself might be tainted: he is co-author on an old paper with image duplication.
On 7 April 2010 the Spanish diabetes researcher Margarita Lorenzo died of metastatic melanoma, aged only 51. Two months after her death, Lorenzo’s colleagues submitted a paper to the journal Diabetes. The paper, which studies the mechanisms of obesity and insulin resistance, seems to be full of manipulated western blot data. While Lorenzo was dying of cancer, her colleagues advanced their careers using her reputation, using their own disreputable Photoshop skills.