Gregg Semenza shared the 2019 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for discovering how human cells sense and adapt to different oxygen levels. He surely must have known better days. His work is now being avidly scrutinized by journals where it got published. Serious concerns have been raised about the validity of his reported data, […]
Frances Arnold won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2018. She also retracted a paper in January, 2020. The paper was authored by Inha Cho, Zhi-Jun Jia and Arnold, all from Arnold’s research group at the California Institute of Technology and involved a study that was published in the journal Science in May of 2019. The retraction statement published by Science […]
Robert Weinberg, Carlo Croce and Olivier Voinnet are extremely gifted scientists. They have spent long hours in the lab and their amazing drive and talent have turned them into towering figures in their respective fields. Their achievements are widely recognized and have earned them solid reputations in Cancer Genetics, Cancer Biology and Plant Biology, their […]
The New York Times wants to make us aware there is a reproducibility crisis in science. This is hardly news at all. There surely is a problem and has been there ever since science began to be run like a business, with its system of gratification and punishment, with the explosion in the number of […]
PAUL S. THALER is Managing Partner at Cohen Seglias Pallas Greenhall & Furman PC, a law firm with offices in Washington, D.C. One of his main areas of practice is scientific misconduct. He has successfully defended clients accused of research misconduct, becoming a towering figure in this aspect of civil litigation. In addition, his firm provides a peerless […]
As the peer review system appears to be failing and bogus research keeps surfacing, post publication peer review (PPPR) is becoming a necessity. The problem is who conducts PPPR (*). Certainly an indiscriminate blog run by nonscientists nudging journals into reaction, where anyone can voice their opinion or make misconduct allegations is not the way […]
_______________________________________ Public!, take note: There is fake science! And who will handle the crisis? Scientists’s peers let’s hope, or we slide into hysteria. ________________________________________ RELATED READING Nature June 2, 2015 editorial Misplaced Faith: The public trusts scientists much more than scientists think. But should it? New York Times June 1, 2015 editorial Scientists who cheat.
According to a recent investigation, surgeon Paolo Macchiarini from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm has allegedly committed scientific misconduct in his reporting of results from patient transplants of synthetic tracheas seeded with stem cells. The misconduct investigation 39-page report drafted by Bengt Gerdin, a professor at Uppsala University, reveals that in six published papers, author Paolo Macchiarini had deliberately and knowingly misrepresented […]
It is hard to justify the sheer existence of Retraction Watch, a blog run by people with no visible credentials in the sciences who are seeking notoriety in a context where anybody is basically allowed to say anything. The information that Retraction Watch provides is redundant at best. And this redundancy will now be multiplied, […]
We are often forced to highlight the toxicity of Retraction Watch, a blog that professes to cover scientific mishaps. Retraction Watch has turned into a beacon of junk scientific journalism, fit for the Wild Web. At Retraction Watch there is no publication barrier but there surely is an agenda: anybody says whatever he/she wants and […]
