Science journalism by Leonid Schneider, on research integrity and academic publishing in life sciences and biomedicine
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.
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 new ERC President Mauro Ferrari used to closely collaborate with two very controversial cancer researchers at MD Anderson in Texas: Anil Sood and Gabriel Lopez-Beerestein. Will that experience affect ERC’s already wanting stance on research integrity?
Two and a half years after Maria Fousteri was found guilty of scientific misconduct by her former employer, the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), exactly nothing at all happened. ERC and Molecular Cell ignored LUMC letters from June 2016, while Fouster’s British co-authors interfered to save own papers. Of 4 scheduled retractions, none took place.
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.
Janine Erler is a star of Danish cancer research, funded by ERC. Her earlier research led to the discovery of the key role of the enzyme lysyl oxidase in cancer metastasis and brought the scientist and businesswoman very close to curing cancer. Until some sad envious bad-wishers found duplicated gel bands in Erler papers.
Academic research is dependent on funding, and funding agencies, both public and charity ones, play a crucial gatekeeper function inContinue Reading
Maria Fousteri is a highly successful Greek molecular cell biologist who studies the molecular mechanisms of DNA damage repair inContinue Reading
Did you ever wonder why certain zombie scientists were still in academic jobs? Despite having been caught on data manipulationContinue Reading
Sweden is a tolerant country, which is a very good thing. Unfortunately, sometimes this Swedish tolerance seems ill-advised. Dishonest scientistsContinue Reading
