Done chasing scientists for the day?
I didn’t make it today. But if I spent a few hours reading papers, I’d probably write four or five comments about errors in scientific papers. These problems are not hard to find, and they are not hard to find in any institution. They are all out there to be found if one cares to read the scientific literature.
What motivates you to take the time to do it?
I’m not anti-German, I’m not a conspiracy theorist or anything like that. I’m a scientist myself and I care about doing science right.
You focus in part on images that have been mislabeled or used twice in one paper but as evidence for different things, lazily cut and pasted from one point to another. Is there a simple way to tell if an image is wrong?
You just look at the picture and read the labels. For example, if you look at a thumbnail image of cells, you see the position, position, orientation, and shape of the cells. And if you look at another image of cells and they’re all in the same place, with the same shape and orientation, then you know that’s the same image, right? It’s not a complicated process.
You have also found errors in the western blots. What are these?
This is a type of scientific experiment used to identify and quantify specific proteins. Images are important in many scientific tasks. They appear gray in the background and have black bands. When you look at them very closely, you can usually tell if it’s a copy and paste job or not. These things aren’t always obvious to people who don’t see a lot of western blots.
Let’s turn to Dana-Farber. After finding errors in multiple papers by its researchers, what do you conclude about the scientific methods of this prominent institution?
It is important to remember that Dana-Farber researchers publish many papers. But there are still many mistakes, and they have been for a long time. This tells me that for too long people have not paid enough attention to getting the basics right. How many sloppy mistakes are we comfortable with top institutions? Probably not a lot. I think most people expect that Harvard scientists don’t often make copy and paste mistakes.
