By Leonid Schneider, on research integrity, biomedical ethics and academic publishing
This is a story of a plant scientist in France, Steffen Reinbothe. He and his sister Christiane used to hold academic positions in Germany, but now they both returned to France, to Grenoble. The move might have had to do with a dossier from 2009, made by a former lab member and circulated among peers.
Whatever concerns any peers might have had: Steffen and Christiane Reinbothe could rely on the “contributed” track at PNAS.
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.
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.
German Research Foundation (DFG) terminated the investigation against their Senator and Marburg University professor Roland Lill, after having found no research misconduct. No comments are issued on the integrity of the data in his papers on yeast biochemistry, or on some unusual image manipulations which were already admitted by Lill and his former PhD students
Neanderthals colonised Europe and Middle East long before modern humans and went extinct less than 30,000 years ago, when our species has spread there. Their story inspired the fantasies of generation of scientists, some of whom still cannot accept the idea that Neanderthals were just another kind of humans very similar or maybe simply just like us. Even new age phrenology is paraded as scientific explanation to why Neanderthal died out.
In the aftermath of the scandal around Paolo Macchiarini, which left many patients dead, his former employer Karolinska Institutet requested a retraction a paper. The Swiss-German medical publisher Karger and its journal Respiration however categorically refused and ordered KI not “to patronize the readers of the journal ‘Respiration’.” The German Editor-in-Chief had namely a huge conflict of interest.
The German justice has spoken on trachea transplants again, in the appeal hearing at Kammergericht Berlin, and found the problemContinue Reading
German diabetologist Kathrin Maedler is a central figure of a questionable academic dynasty. Using Photoshop simulations, she discovered a cure for diabetes, which was then allegedly validated in clinical trials led by her Swiss PhD advisor Marc Donath. 15 years later, the Maedler-Donath diabetes cure was proven as utterly ineffective by same Donath, in another clinical trial. Maedler’s own PhD student, Amin Ardestani is group leader in Bremen, despite data irregularities and unacknowledged textual reuse in his thesis.
The biochemistry research lab of professor Roland Lill at the Philipps University Marburg in Germany is a place where space,Continue Reading
If you wish to report data irregularities, especially a recurrent pattern thereof, one is well adviced not to write toContinue Reading
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