There's a big range between "grad student loaded the wrong file when making sub-panel 3d" and "explicitly falsified images to support an hypothesis". This article certainly makes it seem like the latter.
Science is a human endeavor and there will always be people trying to game the system The good news is, an awful lot of cheaters get caught these days and it's getting riskier all the time.
Yes, and moreover some of the images were not just swapped out with incorrect images.
When you take a look it seems inescapable some images were first copied then edited with a tool to move around sub-pieces like blocks in a puzzle, then presented as a different image along side the original.
Literally this seems like some kind of Photoshopping rather than misplacing images. Can’t see how this could be done accidentally.
Every endeavor has some grift, but this is extensive malfeasance by high ranking cancer scientists, following shortly after it happened in Alzheimer’s research:
Every first year grad student in the sciences should be introduced to Elizabeth Bix, before they have to submit their first manuscript and feel the temptation to try some slight-of-hand with their figures:
https://twitter.com/microbiomdigest
Those feeling tempted wouldn't care: I've had students insist on 'this is my own written text' when a full page of text was verbatim copied from a patent, with the only student contribution being to replace 'motor' with 'engine'.
- don't say "there is a concern the figure is wrong". Concern is not the salient point - correctness is. Is the data wrong or right?
- why are we focusing on the figures at all? Is the data correct but the figures don't represent? Or is the incorrect data correctly represented by the figures? This is a critical point left unaddressed
“Concern” in this context is an Improper Noun of sorts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32673100 It’s academic speak for ‘I believe this may be incorrect’, and it’s very common to use this word in reviews. The reason “concern” is used over “incorrect” is partly to avoid a direct accusation, which can and sometimes does turn out very bad for the accuser. Note that it was not Semenza who wrote about the “concern”. In addition this word can help establish lack of culpability by the journal and/or publisher after the fact.
There is "Possible duplication of data between some of the figures". So some of the plots contain data from more that the column they're meant to be of.
This could be a fundamental problem with the experiments that possibly could invalidate the conclusions or just a bug when creating figures for the paper. But if it was the latter surely a correction could be made fairly quickly - which suggests it's the former.
Third possibility: they don't have the data on hand anymore to correct the figures with... It was a 2013 paper, after all. In their reaction statement they also provide a new citation which re-ran the experiments:
"Confirmatory experimentation has now been performed and the results can be found in a preprint article posted on bioRxiv, ‘Homeostatic responses to hypoxia by the carotid body and adrenal medulla are based on mutual antagonism between HIF-1α and HIF-2α’"
In many parts of medicine and biology, the data is the figure. The immunoblot assays described as problematic here ("possible duplication of data" in the retraction) are like that.
A lot of scientific communication reads very stilted. Keep in mind those are subject matter experts, not authors of prose or user manuals. Writing doesn't necessarily come easy to them and they might be inexperienced and insecure in it. Unlike many software engineers, researchers (at least in academia) rarely have access to a department of tech writers.
It is hard to reproduce the values returned by various instruments. Using modern technology and analytics tools it’s easier to check for fraud in the western blots, so this is where the fraud is often proven. The problem is that this is ipso facto fraud - you can’t say “ohhh I got mixed up and accidentally made an image that perfectly lined up with my conclusions”. If the authors were willing to fraud there then the entire paper should be seen as fraud and the authors responsible shamed because they are undermining the fundamental scientific process.
Well, this seems to be the first retraction which happened a couple of days ago. Now there will be a more extensive search through all the rest of the papers with the same authors. Who knows if the Nobel prize will be retracted as well, no matter if they find more problematic papers or not.
A bit early to say "it worked" as everything here just happened.
And then your market brand value skyrocket in the universities, because will increase the university rank, even if you are hired to just sit in a chair and play candy crush all day.
So, congratulations to Semenza for hacking the lottery.
Cheat to be a Navy seal? How? Are you talking about the off label viagra usage to pass hell week? Not that I am condoning the practice, but that is not cheating in my books. Desparate yes, dangerous but war is more.
No. I think he means that people just lie about earning that distinction. Flat out lie. I don't think that the people actually do any of the hard stuff that makes the distinction worthy of esteem. They just want to brag.
Who is expressing doubt that some do? Such doubt cannot, for example, be deduced from the lack of a direct accusation over this case, especially given libel laws.
Readit News
https://forbetterscience.com/2020/10/07/gregg-semenza-real-n...
There's a big range between "grad student loaded the wrong file when making sub-panel 3d" and "explicitly falsified images to support an hypothesis". This article certainly makes it seem like the latter.
Science is a human endeavor and there will always be people trying to game the system The good news is, an awful lot of cheaters get caught these days and it's getting riskier all the time.
When you take a look it seems inescapable some images were first copied then edited with a tool to move around sub-pieces like blocks in a puzzle, then presented as a different image along side the original.
Literally this seems like some kind of Photoshopping rather than misplacing images. Can’t see how this could be done accidentally.
Every endeavor has some grift, but this is extensive malfeasance by high ranking cancer scientists, following shortly after it happened in Alzheimer’s research:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32183302
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https://pubpeer.com/search?q=Gregg+Semenza
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PubPeer
- don't say "there is a concern the figure is wrong". Concern is not the salient point - correctness is. Is the data wrong or right?
- why are we focusing on the figures at all? Is the data correct but the figures don't represent? Or is the incorrect data correctly represented by the figures? This is a critical point left unaddressed
> the pseudonymous Claire Francis began pointing out potential image duplications and other manipulations in Semenza’s work on PubPeer
For example:
Retraction: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2213288119 Paper: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1321510111
This could be a fundamental problem with the experiments that possibly could invalidate the conclusions or just a bug when creating figures for the paper. But if it was the latter surely a correction could be made fairly quickly - which suggests it's the former.
"Confirmatory experimentation has now been performed and the results can be found in a preprint article posted on bioRxiv, ‘Homeostatic responses to hypoxia by the carotid body and adrenal medulla are based on mutual antagonism between HIF-1α and HIF-2α’"
A bit early to say "it worked" as everything here just happened.
So, congratulations to Semenza for hacking the lottery.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/30/us/navy-seal-training-dea...
That's officially forbidden by the rules of their training so it's cheating.
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