DFG and Marburg drop misconduct investigation of Roland Lill papers

The German Research Foundation (DFG) has terminated the investigation against their Senator and Marburg University professor Roland Lill, after having found no research misconduct in his papers on yeast biochemistry. No comments are issued on the integrity of the data in his papers as it was flagged on PubPeer and reported on my site, or on the fact that some unusual image manipulations were already admitted by Lill and his former PhD students (read here), or that some papers already had to be corrected (read here). All I was told that the investigation was dropped after DFG followed the Marburg University in their decision that “a scientific misconduct can not be proved”.

This was the letter I received yesterday from the Marburg University Ombudsman Helmut Remschmidt : Continue reading “DFG and Marburg drop misconduct investigation of Roland Lill papers” →

Karolinska gets taught German medical ethics

A most bizarre thing happened. In the aftermath of the scandal around the thoracic surgeon and regenerative medicine enthusiast Paolo Macchiarini, which left many patients dead, his former employer Karolinska Institutet (KI) in Stockholm, Sweden, requested a retraction of one of his papers. It was not about a trachea transplant, but about unethical and painful medical experiments on a dying patient (actually, two of them). KI’s decision to request a retraction of the paper Jungebluth et al, “Autologous peripheral blood mononuclear cells as treatment in refractory acute respiratory distress syndrome”, Respiration, 2015 was based on the investigation commissioned by Swedish Central Ethics Review Board (CEPN). The Swiss-German and family-owned medical publisher Karger and its journal Respiration however categorically refused to retract the paper and ordered KI not “to patronize the readers of the journal ‘Respiration’.”

It gets much worse. The German Editor-in-Chief of this journal has a huge conflict of interest. It is better you just read on, because if I try to summarize it here, I might get sued by Macchiarini’s German friends and associates once again, and next time it might even be prison for me. In Germany, doctors have a very special status. Journalists or even patients do not, as I learned in court.

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No good news, instead a major disaster in appeal court re: Macchiarini affair

The German justice has spoken on trachea transplants again, in the appeal hearing at Kammergericht Berlin, and found the problem to lie with the journalists and press freedom. Good news first: I might have won the first injunction case against Philipp Jungebluth, or at least in large part, so I will probably get most of my money refunded there (Update 30.05.2018: the court tricked me and rejected my appeal on that injunction too. It remains valid to 1/3 just as before, see below). This only happened because the judges regarded how exactly Jungebluth left his job in Heidelberg being a minor enough issue (they did advice him to sue a Swedish newspaper for interviewing him about his sacking in Sweden (sic!)). This money I then will pay back to Paolo Macchiarini‘s acolyte and the court, and much, much more on top, because the three appeal court judges announced to uphold the second injunction in full. These are their oral arguments from yesterday summarised: Continue reading “No good news, instead a major disaster in appeal court re: Macchiarini affair” →

The Kathrin Maedler Dynasty

German academic jargon has a peculiar expression: Doktorvater. It means “doctoral father”, a fatherly figure who takes his helpless PhD student progeny by the hand and guides and teaches the offspring of his academic loins the wisdom of science, up to the graduation. Nowadays with the system being less patriarchal, one can instead have the figure of a Doktormutter, doctoral mother. Which obviously doesn’t bring same gravitas or inspires same respect and awe, and is therefore hardly ever used.

The German diabetologist and Professor and University of Bremen Kathrin Maedler is a central figure of an academic dynasty. Using Photoshop simulations (read here), she discovered a cure for diabetes via inhibition of the inflammatory cytokine interleukin-1-beta (IL-1β), which was then confirmed as a definite cure for diabetes in clinical trials led by her own Swiss Doktorvater Marc Donath, then professor at University of Zürich, now in Basel. Over 15 years later, the Maedler-Donath cure was proven as utterly ineffective against hypoglycaemia and diabetes by same Donath, in another clinical trial. Because of her Photoshop creativity with discovering diabetes cures and ensuing retractions, Donath’s past PhD student Maedler was asked by the German Research Council DFG to surrender her prestigious Heisenberg professorship, while the German Diabetes Society (DDG) revoked her Ferdinand Bertram Prize from 2011 (read here). Since 2017, her PhD thesis is again under investigation of University of Zürich.

That diabetes research was also what made the career of Maedler’s own PhD student, Amin Ardestani, presently junior research group leader at the University of Bremen. His thesis received an award from the local Rotary Club, of course also Ardestani got a prize from DDG, which he also saw revoked for engaging into same activities as his Doktormutter. Still, he is still receiving awards, including from Elsevier. I will present below some data irregularities and unacknowledged textual reuse from Ardestani’s 2013 PhD thesis, which was supervised by Maedler.

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Lill space-time-blot anomaly in Marburg

The biochemistry research lab of professor Roland Lill at the Philipps University Marburg in Germany is a place where space, time and western blot continuum collapses into an anomalous singularity, where paradoxes abound, but only one fact remains certain: there was never any data manipulation in the lab of this senator of the German Research Council (DFG). Only misunderstandings (here) and solid science, with sometimes unorthodox figure assembly methods (here).

One of those anomalies is the recent correction by Lill and his former PhD student Heike Lange (now tenured CNRS researcher at The Olivier Voinnet Institute for Research Integrity in Plant Sciences (IBMP) in Strasbourg, France, published in the prestigious journal PNAS in March 2018. A western blot was found to contain duplicated, triplicated and mirrored bands, and was replaced with a version of same gel, its irregularities fixed. What exactly the new old figure shows, is not clear. The Ombudsman of Marburg University insists that no digital image versions of the western blot exist, only some almost two decade old thermo-paper printouts which were shared only with PNAS. Neither can those archive documents be scanned or photographed, as it will probably either destroy them, or alter the results they show. A PNAS editor however admitted to me that the correction actually shows a pdf file which the authors Lill and Lange supplied by email, a gel image which again seems to be different from the original thermoprinter records. Yet also this digital pdf file cannot be shared, probably because otherwise the time-space continuum will collapse and our universe, or at least the Marburg lab of DFG Senator Lill might end up teleported back into the year 1999, when the prints were made. And anyway, all two decade old experiments were faithfully reproduced by the Lill lab just now, using exactly same reagents. Those results however are also apparently not for sharing.

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Princess Sabine, her Ombudsman chaperone and a frog

If you wish to report data irregularities, especially a recurrent pattern thereof, one is well adviced not to write to the scientist behind those published papers, but to the institutional Ombudsman. This is also what is recommended by the US Office for Research Integrity (ORI, here) and by two real-life whistleblowers from Sweden:

“Collect evidence, but don’t contact the accused with questions if you are certain that they fabricated data, because they may then hide their tracks. Identify the appropriate authority where misconduct should be reported; this could be at your own or the accused’s institution”.

My own experience with reporting evidence to institutional Ombudspersons is mixed. Some do not reply at all (one of those has actually shady data in his own papers), some eventually write something non-saying back, some do take the issue seriously. A German university Ombudsman quickly put right a professor and dean of her department, and issued an apology on her behalf, after she attacked me for disagreeing with her on the academic merits of predatory conferences and medals issued by the false Linköping University professor Ashutosh Tiwari.

The Ombudsman of the University of Osnabrück in northern Germany, when alerted to PubPeer evidence of some strange image duplications in papers by an Osnabrück plant scientist, acted differently. The Ombudsman, a law professor, indirectly threatened me with a libel lawsuit, and refused to process the notification. The next day, the plant scientist admitted duplications on PubPeer, one paper has been already extensively corrected. Continue reading “Princess Sabine, her Ombudsman chaperone and a frog” →

Expert witness Macchiarini to help Berlin court sentence criminal journalist

The stem cell pioneering surgeon Paolo Macchiarini is back in court now. No, he is not the accused this time. He is an unbiased, independent expert witness invited by his student and acolyte Philipp Jungebluth to help him sue me in Berlin. There are two court injunctions against me, one was already partially lifted, while another was upheld in full, and the main issue are Macchiarini’s trachea transplants in Italy described in an unpublished manuscript. I cannot say much more without facing a €250,000 fine or a 6 months prison term.

Macchiarini recently saw the Swedish state prosecutor drop charges against him because another misconduct-tainted Swedish trachea transplanter, Michael Olausson, served as secret expert for prosecution. At least, no journalists faced court sentencing in Sweden for exposing trachea transplant scandals. It is different in Germany, where constitutional press freedom counts little if someone doesn’t like your reporting, which is why medical scandals in Germany are so rare. The ruinous court trials Macchiarini-associates Jungebluth and Heike & Thorsten Walles imposed on me seem to have scared German media into near-complete silence on the trachea transplant affair. What about the central role of Germany, especially Macchiarini’s and Jungebluth’s university Hannover Medical School (MHH) and their recent cover up of the trachea transplants? Definitely no public interest there, even if Macchiarini’s only remaining (adjunct) professor title was bestowed by MHH. My appeal hearing for both Jungebluth injunctions is at the Berlin Kammergericht court on May 24th. It is public, feel free to come. Maybe even Prof Macchiarini pops in?

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For Better Science

Science journalism by Leonid Schneider, on research integrity and academic publishing in life sciences and biomedicine

Tag: Germany