This is definitive proof that science as practiced today is comprehensively broken. After identyfying egregious fraud in a paper, the well known doctor who has already prominently found extensive fraud elsewhere, Dr. Sholto David emailed everyone involved: all the paper authors, the publication, the university, the reviewers. And what was the result? Silence for over a year, with only the publication chief editor originally emailing back that they’ll look into it, but it takes time. It’s been over a year, and crickets. As he said, they intend to bury it by dragging their feet. Meanwhile the fraudulent paper has already been cited over 500 times.
The authors are all vey prominent researchers and university, NIH, and Pfizer involved. One if the authors has a career long history of fraud. But there is too much prestige and money involved for the parties to wish to unravel this mess. And so it continues. RIP science.
Sholto David has his own yt channel and he talks about this paper.
Identyfying Image Fraud in a Nature Neuroscience Paper (via Sholto David)
No, this is just on his yt channel - he’s trying this mode of communication to see if it’s effective.
Sure progress can be made. But the question is: how do you know that any - any - given paper can be trusted, if you are just a reader (as most of us here are) rather than a researcher with his own lab doing replication studies. The impact on science is catastrophic as the fraud gets spread through citations. This is at crisis level right now.
I do not understand, how a “scientist” who provably engages in fraud - as in this example - continues to have a career and lucrative positions as CEO of biotech companies - these are often pump and dump schemes designed from the get go to fleece investors with outsize claims for the IPO, which of course is nothing but deliberate fraud.
Regarding investigation of fraud in science I can really recommend the Webpage from Leonid Schneider https://forbetterscience.com/
Shloto David also contributes to this site. The articles are always very funny but very brutal regarding the fraud detected. Especially the field of biogerontology unfortunately has issues.
Not just the paper should be retracted and trashed, the people involved should all be fired. We have enough trouble without doing it wrong on purpose. If we don’t clean it up it will get much worse.
