By Leonid Schneider, on research integrity, biomedical ethics and academic publishing
I finally succeeded to interview the only woman among Human Brain Project leaders, the scientific director Katrin Amunts. In my previous article, I published a non-interview, using bits from HBP website as stand-in for her answers. Now, in this long read, Professor Amunts provided me with her replies.
This is Appeal by several European scientists protesting against Plan S, recently revealed by the EU and a coalition of European research funders. Lynn Kamerlin and her coauthors worry that Plan S will deprive them of quality journal venues and of international collaborative opportunities, while disadvantaging scientists whose research budgets preclude paying and playing in this OA league. They offer instead their own suggestions how to implement Open Science.
I was keen to interview the only woman among Human Brain Project leaders, the scientific director Katrin Amunts. In November 2017, she agreed to do an interview by email. In March 2018, Amunts announced that “the manuscript already has a veritable size of several pages”. She never contacted me since. This is therefore a non-interview.
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.
Imagine you are Martin Birchall, laryngologist and ENT surgeon, star of regenerative medicine at UCL and trachea transplant enthusiast. You and your business partner Videregen need to explain to EU bureaucrats why your technology of decellurised cadaveric trachea is perfectly safe, what with all the dead patients of yours and your former best friend Paolo Macchiarini. Yet both your trachea transplant pigs die. EU authorities however accept this as proof that your method is safe!
The European Commission admitted that their €6.8 mn phase 2 clinical trial TETRA with cadaveric tracheas, led by the UCL laryngologist Martin Birchall is unlikely to ever recruit any patients. In January 2019, the status was changed to “grant agreement terminated”
The European Union Commission staunchly refuses to tell me what exactly their funded scientists intend to do to the scheduledContinue Reading
Swedish start-up Verigraft received €2.2 Million from European Union, to further develop regenerative medicine technology tainted by research misconduct and patient abuse. The founder of this very company: Suchitra Sumitran-Holgersson. A clinical trial is scheduled based on debunked science of recellurising dead blood vessel grafts.
The British laryngologist and UCL professor Martin Birchall is one of the two founding fathers of “bioengineered” trachea, the other one beingContinue Reading
Following is my email interview with Thomas Lippert, professor and director of the Institute for Advanced Simulation and the Jülich SupercomputingContinue Reading
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