Science journalism by Leonid Schneider, on research integrity and academic publishing in life sciences and biomedicine
Liverpool professor Patricia Murray continues investigating shady dealings of the regmed company Celixir, owned by struck-off dentist Ajan Reginald and Nobelist Sir Martin Evans
Patricia Murray uncovers the business secrets of the Nobelist Martin Evans and his partner Ajan Reginald. It seems the magic iMP cells used to treat patients in Greece were drawn from the blood of patients in Swansea, for the purpose of a secret PhD thesis. There is no serious science behind it, only serious investor money and a fraudulent patent.
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.
Dentistry professors at UCLA published manipulated data in top-level journals. When a colleague reported them, the university retaliated against the whistleblower.
Sir Martin Evans, winner of Nobel prize 2007, founded in 2009 the stem cell start-up Celixir, together with a struck-off dentist Ajan Reginald. With the help of the British heart surgeon Stephen Westaby, they ran a very profitable clinical trial in Greece, which now moved into UK.
The 2008 Lancet paper of Paolo Macchiarini and Martin Birchall about the world first trachea transplant might end up retracted. Until recently, the journal’s editor Richard Horton used to ignore and suppress “non peer-reviewed” evidence, but due to combined pressure of activism, media and politics, things started to move.
In yet another investigation, UCL whitewashed Martin Birchall of all responsibilities. I publish here the confidential report and excerpts from a secret PhD thesis, which the UCL committee carefully avoided to read.
The trachea-transplanting company Videregen, based in Liverpool, got another £2 million grant from UK governmental agency Innovate UK, to advance their tracheal replacement technology.
A decision was announced by the Swedish Prosecution Authority in Gothenburg on the Paolo Macchiarini case today. The issue are plastic trachea transplants the scandal surgeon performed at the hospital of the Karolinska Institutet (KI) in Stockholm, Sweden. The earlier decision by state prosecutor was changed in part and the preliminary investigation will be reopened
Paediatric surgeon Paolo De Coppi claims to grow all possible internal organs in his lab at UCL. Though his career started with his association with Macchiarini, and their regenerative medicine ideas sound strangely similar, De Coppi is celebrated as a modest genius poised to save lives of uncounted children, and the funding money flows.
