Remember when everything we know about Alzheimer's disease got thrown in the trash because an investigator discovered that the original researchers photoshopped their evidence?
While the criminal investigation related to that revelation remains ongoing, a new sport in academic research has begun.
Hobbyists have begun combing through medical research looking for manipulated images used to support claims.
The hobbyists use large monitors, software looking for data manipulation, and their own eagle eyes to sift through images in publications, looking for pixel discrepancies.
Sholto David, who holds a PhD in biology, found 37 research projects out of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI), a Harvard Medical affiliate, that showed signs of manipulated pictures in order to show results favorable to their research.
The allegations were posted by David and others on the website PubPeer.
Mike Rossner, the president of Image Data Integrity, said the allegations "had merit."
'The data are questionable enough that if I were a journal editor, or if I were a research integrity officer, I would want to see the source data for comparison for the published data,' Rossner said.
Six publications that David flagged have been recalled, and the other 31 have been returned for corrections to the researchers.
In response to the allegations, DFCI spokesperson Ellen Berlin wrote that Dana-Farber is,
'fully committed to rigorously maintaining the integrity of research under its oversight,' and allegations of errors are 'reviewed thoroughly and authors are supported in submitting corrections, when necessary.'
California microbiologist Elisabeth Bik has flagged thousands of articles: 1,133 articles retracted, 1,017 corrected, and 153 printed expressions of concern.
'Science should be about finding the truth,' Bik told The Associated Press. She published an analysis in the American Society for Microbiology in 2016: Of more than 20,000 peer-reviewed papers, nearly 4% had image problems, about half where the manipulation seemed intentional.
That half is the really problematic part.
Especially if a decade and 100s of millions of dollars of research were wasted as they were in the falsified Alzheimer's research.
But when research schools like Harvard are turning into activism hubs, where professors actively encourage their students to subvert the truth to achieve results in social change, why wouldn't those lessons carry over to academic and medical research?
Dr. Guevara would be so proud.
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