Kristian Helin gets the perfect job
ICR London has a new director. The Great Dane Kristian Helin is the perfect successor to continue the ideological line of fictional cancer research.
By Leonid Schneider, on research integrity, biomedical ethics and academic publishing
ICR London has a new director. The Great Dane Kristian Helin is the perfect successor to continue the ideological line of fictional cancer research.
With nobody above him, ICR director Paul Workman was seemingly investigating himself, and found two female colleagues guilty of placing fake data into his papers, primarily the ICR emeritus Ann Jackman. One paper was retracted, another received an outrageous correction. The previous ICR CEO, Alan Ashworth, together with his right-hand man Chris Lord, have their own impressive, but hitherto ignored, record on PubPeer.
Before biology became digital, with its -omics and big data, there were mostly gels and microscopy images. The peak of image use in biomedical papers was reached at the turn of the century, those became the golden times of Photoshop-assisted data manipulation. To celebrate that period, I selected an example of the British cancer researcher Paul Workman, President and CEO of the huge Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) in London.