Science journalism by Leonid Schneider, on research integrity and academic publishing in life sciences and biomedicine
A dishonest cancer researcher. A dud cancer drug based on rigged lab data. A clinical trial in The Lancet. A greedy university which finds no misconduct. And a medical journal which tramples over patients.
Suppose they gave a talk and no one came. It’s easy if you try.
I publish exclusively two uncensored UCL screening panel reports into the David Latchman and Anastasis Stephanou affair. Now we know which papers were investigated and which requested retractions didn’t happen.
Cancer researcher Giorgio Zauli publicly declared himself exonerated because he simply forbids his University of Ferrara to publish the investigative report. The ultra-right connected rector used the occasion to equal his critics to Nazis and to announce defamation lawsuits.
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.
After her lawyers threatened Linköping whistleblower Jaywant Phopase, accusing him of slander and demanding money, regmed researcher May Griffith wrote to me. She sent me a whole dossier: all misconduct findings against her were overruled, even in court. Turns out, ethics dumping is good and anyway, she is not responsible for her own publications.
The University of Manchester found out that someone has secretly manipulated data in the papers of their star cancer researcher, Richard Marais. Who might that be?
Former Linköping professor May Griffith set lawyers upon a former colleague who dared to protest about her research practices on my site. Jaywant Phopase is ordered to delete official documents I made available for download, retract his complaints to journals and pay Griffith a compensation. Or else.
Benjamin Bonavida is a prolific science book author and recently retired as UCLA professor. He previously had to retract some papers as others took the blame. Yet Smut Clyde found so many fraudulent works signed by Bonavida that one wonders if this cancer researcher is a victim or rather the perpetrator here.
Irina Stancheva was investigated in Edinburgh for fraud at least twice, in 2009 and 2017, yet retraction and correction decisions were not implemented. Apparently to protect the reputation of Nobel Prize candidate Sir Adrian Bird and his male mentees, primarily Richard Meehan. One wonders: how much of Bird research in past two decades was actually fabricated by Stancheva?
