Science journalism by Leonid Schneider, on research integrity and academic publishing in life sciences and biomedicine
Smut Clyde will take you on a meditative Ayurvedic trip where the most respectable of research institutions and their world-renowned academics were caught dancing with the Guru Deepak Chopra himself. Famous cardiologist and medical writer Eric Topol and the Nobel Prize winner Elizabeth Blackburn were just two most prominent US academics listed on Chopra’s Panchakarma clinical trial.
Louis J. Ignarro knew how to monetize his 1998 Nobel Prize for discovery of nitric oxide as molecular cell signalling agent. He made many millions selling dietary supplement for Herbalife and pomegranate juice for POM Wonderful Company. Some of that found its way (without proper conflict of interest declaration) into Ignarro’s peer reviewed papers. Those, done in collaboration with certain Photoshop artists like Claudio Napoli, contain clearly fabricated data.
Elite journal Nature Cell Biology (NCB) requests deposition of raw data, in particular original scans of western blots and other gel analyses. Spanish star cancer researcher Carlos López-Otín, winner of 2017 Nature Mentoring Award, instead deposited whatever odd gel picture his lab had available, counting that nobody will bother to check. Yet readers did.
Janine Erler is a star of Danish cancer research, funded by ERC. Her earlier research led to the discovery of the key role of the enzyme lysyl oxidase in cancer metastasis and brought the scientist and businesswoman very close to curing cancer. Until some sad envious bad-wishers found duplicated gel bands in Erler papers.
Yesim Cetir was a young woman from Turkey, whose vulnerability the scandal surgeon used to test his plastic trachea (twice),Continue Reading
Gandalf the Wizard has been awarded €75k in cash and Pezcoller-AACR International Award for Extraordinary Achievement in Cancer Research, forContinue Reading
On July 29th 2016, Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) retracted a cardiology paper from 2009 for data manipulations. Only someContinue Reading
My earlier article presented the worrisome research integrity record at the gigantic US cancer research hospital MD Anderson Cancer Center, partContinue Reading
Recent news brought us yet another retraction of the Spanish zombie scientist Susana Gonzalez, formerly famous for her impactful ERC-fundedContinue Reading
The MD Anderson Cancer Center, part of the University of Texas and located in Houston, is a giant hub ofContinue Reading
