Dedicated to all blind believers into the "truth" and "science" of every peer-reviewed paper:
"CNN — The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, a prestigious Harvard teaching school, is moving to retract six studies and correct 31 others following allegations of data manipulation.
The steps by the Harvard Medical School affiliate come after a molecular biologist published a blog post earlier this month alleging researchers falsified data by manipulating images.
More than 50 papers are part of the ongoing review by Dana-Farber into four researchers, all of whom have faculty appointments at Harvard Medical School. Four of the papers under review were authored by Dana-Farber CEO Laurie Glimcher.
“We are committed to a culture of accountability and integrity. Therefore, every inquiry is examined fully to ensure the soundness of the scientific literature,” Barrett Rollins, Dana-Farber’s research integrity officer and chief science officer emeritus, said in a statement to CNN on Monday. “Dana-Farber has been swift and decisive in this regard.”
Six manuscripts have retractions underway, 31 have been “identified as warranting corrections” and another one with a reported error “remains under examination,” according to Rollins.
Dana-Farber has not determined whether misconduct has occurred.
The retractions and corrections add to the pressure on Harvard following weeks of scrutiny over how the Ivy League school responded to allegations of plagiarism facing Claudine Gay, who stepped down as the university’s president earlier this month. Gay requested corrections to some of her writings due to what the university described as “inadequate citation.”
Harvard submitted a trove of documents to Congress late last week as part of an investigation from a House committee.
Earlier this month, Sholto David published a blog post titled “Dana-Farberications at Harvard University,” alleging researchers at the cancer institute manipulated images and data. David suggested Adobe Photoshop was used to copy and paste images in some of the papers.
According to Rollins, Dana-Farber said it was already reviewing “potential data errors” in multiple cases that the blog listed and stressed that the issues uncovered do not necessarily amount to misconduct.
“The presence of image discrepancies in a paper is not evidence of an author’s intent to deceive,” Rollins said in the statement. “That conclusion can only be drawn after a careful, fact-based examination which is an integral part of our response. Our experience is that errors are often unintentional and do not rise to the level of misconduct.”
Some allegations raised in the blog against Dana-Farber researchers are “wrong,” while others concern data generated in outside labs, Rollins said."
interesting but I would say on their behalf is it was just the images made and created by photoshop which can easily be incorrect.
Just picture a research scientist who is in the weeds of cancer cells doesn’t know photoshop and is relying on a photoshop so called expert in their organization who doesn’t know crap about tumor micro environment. I can see the communication breakdown. Sure it is up to the researcher to proof the image and im sure that is where the breakdown in finalizing the paper. It’s a researcher visualizing an image of an extremely complex microscopic biological process.
So let’s see what the investigation shows. I myself don’t trust any “harvard nutrition articles “, but Dana Faber has a great reputation and i am betting on it as a mistake.
Justfor_ The use of AI in finding these leads one to believe that over time, more corrections and/or retractions will be forthcoming. Fasten your research-reading seatbelts, as AI begins to comb the annals of research papers for the sort of discrepancies, anomalies, biases, and outright errors that Stanford's John P.A. Ioannidis (Co-Director, Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS)) has been warning about for decades.
The "For Better Science" article is fascinating! A good find and a new source of in-depth reporting for me. Thanks for the post.
Hope all is well with you these days. Ciao - cujoe
I think that we always need to take these studies as a starting point, rather than gospel. The length of studies, size of the cohort and many other variable can impact a study. However, this is no excuse for a publish or die mentality of institutions. They need to have careful peer review of their work.
Problem is they are all vying for the same patients and always want to be on our radar. To many aspects of healthcare and other industries are rushing their work to be competitive. The bigger question is how we change healthcare from a profit center to a patient-focused and outcome based model without stifling innovation. There must be something between toxic capitalism and socialized medicine.
Great reply. I’m in Canada. Healthcare here is crumbling with few options unless you are quite wealthy. Americans used to cite Canadian healthcare as a good standard for delivery to all. Don’t trust anyone ever who uses us a model anymore. It’s absolutely brutal. Wait times are so long for so many things it’s immoral. I’ve watched too many suffer, digress, die while waiting. It serves the system well when we die - one more off the waiting list.
I am sorry that you are in this disfunctional healthcare system. I think the innovative treatment, short wait times and high-quality healthcare versus paying covering these costs is a challenge for both capitalist and socialist-medicine based models. Only dictatorships can force price cuts in wages,etc. but they are still subject to medical equipment technology and drug costs from western countries.
Healthcare is a huge business and until we can find the balance between these aspects, we will continue to fight for better quality an dlower prices!
1- they have been caught and in every institution there is the risk of manipulation and similar (imagine how higher is the risk when you do not have a rigorous application of the scientific method)
2 - there is no “truth” in science, just hypothesis that are true till they are disproven (if ever) That’s what differentiates science and religion. Religion does not have to prove, so cannot be disproven. Of course to verify the hypothesis you need someone in the same branch of knowledge and at the same level. Einstein defended his thesis in front of other physicists, not barbers, hence the importance of peer review (which is not perfect but surely better than a video host on YT). In fact the supposed (for now) forged information were caught by….another scientist.
3- it’s true that there is a publication pressure that is deleterious for science. It generates genuine and not so genuine mistakes. But this happens more with theoretical research, let’s say in vivo and in vitro. With clinical trials it’s different. There are way more people involved and multiple checks.
4- if I consider the technology I am using right now to post this message, who invented it and the amount of peer reviewed papers that are behind it….I am fine with science! 😀😀
Maxone73 has it right. The corrections and retractions are indications that the “process of science” works like it’s supposed to.
With hundred’s of thousands (more?) papers and research articles published, it would be amazing to not find a need for corrections. Papers get retracted all the time. No surprises here at all, nor any surprise at the cynical title “Dana-Farberications…”. That type of clickbait editing also happens all the time, and in this case it’s frankly a punchline that didn’t quite land.
The attempt to throw this into the same bucket as the Claudine Gay incident strikes me as lazy (uh, are they having a slow news day?). Or, it’s part of an agenda to constantly remind us of this crisis of plagiarism threatening the fabric of society…or, at least, being used to discredit higher education.
I’d rather see an ongoing list of corrections and retractions, even at prestigious universities (as if that makes it different), than radio silence. Like I say, that’s why I appreciate the scientific process that involves peer review.
“Appreciating” a process, btw, doesn’t make me a “blind believer”.
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