By Ariel Fernández By now, many of us have heard of Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, the company awarded a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant that subcontracted to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China. Like Anthony Fauci, his boss at NIH, Daszak vociferously denied he had any responsibility in the […]
The genetic editing of human embryos through a molecular biology manipulation known as CRISPR surely sent shock waves across the globe. Many felt that He Jiankui, the Chinese scientist who carried out the experiments had opened Pandora’s box. Yet, as people had now some time to ponder over the events, the scientific establishment has […]
Last week The New York Times published a front-page story entitled “Years of Ethics Charges but Star Cancer Researcher Gets a Pass“. The article grossly disparages Prof. Carlo Croce, a towering figure in cancer biology and genetics, and his home institution, The Ohio State University. It describes in some detail multiple accusations of misconduct and […]
Hilda Bastian is an NIH contractor for PubMed Health and PubMed Commons at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM). She also seems to be a prolific science writer. Bastian recently informed the blog Retraction Watch that the NLM is planning a prominent display of Expressions of Concern (EoC) published by […]
It is well known that Chinese people have a practical and pragmatic bent. I recall having asked a successful professor what it would take to publish in Nature. He replied: “You need to do very good work, make a lot of friends in your field and, above all, make sure to befriend the editors. To […]
In a striking analysis published in Nature, Stanford University researcher John Ioannidis, the expert on metadata investigation at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, has seriously questioned the way the National Institutes of Health fund research proposals. He and his colleague Joshua Nicholson have argued in what seems like a rousing condemnation of the status quo that peer-review, the process by which study sections […]
“Residents and interns worked a lot of hours, and I wrote honestly about what it was like to be an intern. One of the deans wasn’t crazy about that. It reminded me that my core identity is as a journalist, constantly challenging things…Blogs are powerful and lower the publishing barrier.” Ivan Oransky This post constitutes […]
As a glance at his CV reveals, Dr. Ariel Fernandez (阿列尔·费尔南德斯), the discoverer of the dehydron (脱水元), is a very creative physical chemist and mathematician, a key player in the recent biotechnology transformation. His research has been heralded in auspicious terms, as illustrated for example in this review published in Scientific American. The breadth of research accomplishments of Ariel Fernandez, ranging […]
We would like to believe that people associated with the practice of science regard the process of tracking down corruption in research as a worthy undertaking. We better be careful with what exactly we wish for because the emerging picture, as it stands today, is looking ugly and getting uglier: Corruption is far more frequent […]
While most scientists were skeptical from the start, some science writers heralded the self-published blog Retraction Watch as a beacon for scientific transparency. They were wrong. Without any solid standards for scientific critique, the blog degenerated in no time into a grisly predator of scientific misfortune. As the saying goes, the road to hell is […]
