Fraud, So Much Fraud
September 27th, 2024Hmm, I wonder what other aspects of medical research are subject to, “Multiple, widespread, blatant instances of fraud”…
Get your boosters, though. *snort*
Via: Science:
It’s about Eliezer Masliah, who since 2016 has been the head of the Division of Neuroscience in the National Institute on Aging (NIA), and whose scientific publication record over at least the past 25 years shows multiple, widespread, blatant instances of fraud. There it is in about as few words as possible.
As is so often the case, image manipulation is at the heart of the scandal. Readers here will be all too familiar with the techniques of cutting and pasting Western blots in order to make them tell the story the authors want told, and of re-using images and parts of images over and over even when they’re supposed to be produced from different experiments at different times. That’s what we’re seeing here, and a 300-page dossier has been assembled with examples of it. Splicing, cloning, overlaying, copy-and-pasting, duplication of the same image with different captions about different research in different journals: a great deal of effort seems to have gone into carefully doctoring, cleaning, beautifying, and spicing up these papers digitally. After looking over examples, I find the evidence convincing and impossible to explain (at least in my mind) as anything other than sustained, deliberate acts of deception lasting for decades. Hundreds of them. Again and again. The dossier references 132 papers with apparent problems. Unfortunately, these include many highly cited papers on mechanisms of synaptic damage (Masliah specialized in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s mechanisms, particularly around the alpha-synuclein protein).
