When it comes to COVID-19, Ariel Fernandez seems to know what he is talking about. In a short timespan he has published numerous scientific papers on the subject with many more in the making. One of Ariel Fernandez’ papers, one of the most widely read scientific papers, has found a major detractor. His name […]
Our guest today is Dr. Ariel Fernandez, the former Karl F. Hasselmann Chair in Bioengineering at Rice University, now director of the Daruma Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Pharmaceutical Research. Ariel Fernandez authored nearly 500 peer-reviewed professional papers, four books and several biotech patents. He recently turned his attention to COVID-19 for obvious reasons, and […]
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 […]
AI has become unavoidable, essential. It fertilizes/empowers almost every scientific discipline. Drug discovery and development, always pivoting on big data, is surely no exception. Versatile companies and big pharmas are keenly aware of this reality, and are now incorporating AI to their endeavors at breakneck pace. A paragon of this versatility is AF Innovation, a […]
On March 8 2017, James Glanz and Agustin Armendariz published a highly unflattering and damaging article in the New York Times. Their target was Dr. Carlo Croce, a prominent member of the faculty at Ohio State University, in the Department of Cancer Biology and Genetics, and a member of the US National Academy of Sciences. The […]
To make progress, science requires peer review. But the type of peer review that has assisted scientific research for centuries is a far cry from the self-appointed data police organization named Retraction Watch (RW). With its complete lack of accountability and nonexistent scientific credentials, RW only encourages unfiltered denigration. To quote Susan T. Fiske, chaired […]
The reproducibility crisis, especially in the soft sciences, is by no means the only crisis affecting publication of scientific research. As we and others have emphasized, an even greater danger originated with the self-appointed fraud police with its tactics of coercion, bullying and shaming arising with the advent of violent organizations like Retraction Watch. The […]
Science requires peer critiques, cannot do without them. But as we have amply shown, Retraction Watch (RW) only encourages unfiltered denigration. To quote Susan T. Fiske, chaired Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University and former APS president, “the self-appointed data police is volunteering critiques of such personal ferocity and relentlessness that they […]
When it comes to scientific integrity, US research institutions are stuck in a dismal situation. A breed of data thugs bullying institutions and journals, and a mob of angry losers and science dropouts are effectively running the show from the squalor of venues like Retraction Watch. Sadly, a few members of the science establishment – […]
It now turns out that the American biophysicist Michael W. Deem from Rice University was far more involved in the widely condemned “CRISPR babies” experiment than was previously known. STAT learned that Deem was the senior author on a paper entitled “Birth of twins after genome editing for HIV resistance” submitted to Nature in November, 2018. The first […]