Science Integrity Digest

Apologies for not posting for a while. Fall 2024 was a busy time for me, with travel to give talks in Australia and Singapore and some events in the US. Instead of trying to catch up with everything that has happened since September, here are some highlights.

Einstein Foundation Award

I’m thrilled to have won the 2024 Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research. The Einstein Foundation Berlin selects three winners each year. The 2024 winners are:

• Early Career Award: Helena Jambor and Christopher Schmied at PixelQuality – Best practices for publishing images. ‘PixelQuality has established guidelines and checklists for publishing clear and reproducible images. It now aims to disseminate and refine them to handle AI-assisted image generation and analysis.’ ‘Research images are the proof of scientific findings, not just visuals. PixelQuality has set new standards for their reproducibility and transparency.’
• Institutional Award: PubPeer – ‘PubPeer has become an essential part of the research communication landscape, with over 300,000 comments logged so far. It is estimated that since 2012, 19 percent of all retractions of papers worldwide in all academic domains had a prior discussion on the site. Beyond identifying flaws and fraud, PubPeer functions as an important tool to jointly improve scientific publications through „liquid feedback“.’
• Individual Award: Elisabeth Bik – ‘Elisabeth Bik’s work in uncovering manipulated images, fraudulent research data and publications has created enormous impact all over the world. Her work has led to heightened awareness of questionable research practices and generated widespread attention to responsible conduct of research in the scientific community.’

The award ceremony will take place in March 2025 in Berlin, Germany.

The Bik Fund

Instead of accepting the Einstein Foundation award money for myself, I’ve decided to put it into ‘The Elisabeth Bik Science Integrity Fund’ – where I hope to help other science sleuths with small grants for e.g., traveling to conferences, buying equipment or software, or training. Our type of work often does not fit into the hypothesis-driven model of government or charity funds, so I hope to help by filling this funding gap.

The Bik Fund will be part of The Center For Scientific Integrity, Retraction Watch’s parent 501(c)3 non-profit organization.

It is my hope that we can make this fund grow, so we can help more integrity warriors in the future – donations to the Bik fund are tax-deductible and very welcome.

Press coverage:

• Announcing the Elisabeth Bik Science Integrity Fund – Retraction Watch
• Renowned scientific integrity investigator endows fund to support fellow sleuths – Microbiologist Elisabeth Bik donates $200,000 to support training, travel – Jeffrey Brainard – Science
• There’s Fraud in Science – A New Fund Seeks To Tackle It – Molly Coddington – Technology Networks

Doctored

Charles Piller’s new book ‘Doctored – Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer’s’ came out earlier this month.

The book describes how Matthew Schrag, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University and a fellow image-sleuth, discovered possibly altered images in a highly-cited paper about amyloid plaques in Alzheimer’s patients and in other papers connected to the biotech company Cassava Sciences (see also below). It also gives a disturbing insight into the amount of fraud in neuroscience and the lack of action by journals, institutions, and government agencies.

Matthew Schrag and other ‘science sleuths’—Kevin Patrick, Mu Yang, and I—worked for two years checking thousands of papers in Alzheimer’s research and related fields for the book, uncovering a concerning number of potential problems in papers by Sylvain Lesné, Berislav Zlokovic, Eliezer Masliah, and others.

Press coverage of Piller’s book:

• How Fraud, Greed and Negligence Have Stymied Alzheimer’s Research and Progress Toward a Cure – Alexis Madrigal – KQED
• The Science We Depend On: Behind Alzheimer’s Disease with Charles Piller – Ivan Oransky – MedCentral
• The Devastating Legacy of Lies in Alzheimer’s Science – Charles Piller – The New York Times
• Have doctors been wrong about how to treat Alzheimer’s disease? – The Economist
• Tariffs, Future of Cancer and Alzheimer’s, Global Debt Cycles | Wall Street Week – Bloomberg

Podcasts with Charles Piller and/or Matthew Schrag (there are many more!)

• Inquiring Minds: Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer’s with Charles Piller
• Science Friday: Investigating Fraud At The Heart Of Alzheimer’s Research
• Aging Well Episode 225 | Doctored: The Revealing Truth About Alzheimer’s Research | ft. Charles Piller
• The People’s Pharmacy – Show 1416: Exposing Fraud and Arrogance in Alzheimer’s Research

Cassava Sciences Phase 3 did not work

I have written in the past (here and here) about problematic images in papers by Dr. Hoau-Yan Wang and Cassava Sciences (NASDAQ: $SAVA), a biotech company testing a drug targeting Alzheimer’s disease. These concerns were first spotted by Matthew Schrag and published in a Citizen Petition, in an attempt to halt Cassava’s clinical trials. Despite the apparent problems, the FDA did not stop Cassava’s clinical trials of their Alzheimer’s drug, Simufilam. But Cassava’s stock dropped significantly, upsetting a lot of investors.

For three years, fans of the $SAVA stock harassed the Dr. Wang critics – including me – claiming that the drug would work fine; that all stockholders would be rich as long as they would HODL; and that all our concerns were FUD. They joined forces in a SAVAges Discord app, where they talked about how one day they would all buy Maseratis, Lamborghinis, and even a SAVA island — and how retarded and fraudulent the SAVA-critics were.

The authorities begged to differ, however. In March 2024, Science reported that FDA inspectors had found many problems in Dr. Wang’s lab, ranging from uncalibrated instruments, lack of control samples, and stored data files, to leaving out outliers based on subjective criteria. Another report by the City University of New York (CUNY) to the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), leaked to Science, described ‘egregious misconduct’ in Dr. Wang’s lab. In June last year the Department of Justice announced that Professor Wang had been charged with operating a ‘Multimillion-Dollar Grant Fraud Scheme’.

Meanwhile, lawsuits were filed back-and-forth. Cassava Sciences was suing the people who filed the FDA citizen petition and who set up the website CassavaFraud.com, while stockholders were suing Cassava in a class-action lawsuit for misrepresenting the quality of the experiments performed by Dr. Wang. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged Cassava with misrepresenting clinical trials result, and later settled for $40M. And CUNY, instead of officially announcing their misconduct findings, was investigating who leaked their misconduct investigation report to Science.

Finally, last December the biotech company announced that the Phase 3 trial did not meet the anticipated endpoints. In other words, Simufilam did not halt or improve Alzheimer’s disease. The Cassava Sciences stock immediately dropped to $2-3 dollars, and the SAVAges Discord became a valley of despair. No more SAVA island.

Didier Raoult enters the Retraction Watch Leaderboard

As I’ve written previously, many papers from Professor Didier Raoult, the former director of the IHU Méditerranée Infection in Marseille, France, are problematic.

Some appear to contain manipulated images, while others describe research conducted without proper ethical permits. A number of Raoult’s studies were performed on vulnerable populations, such as homeless people, or on study participants in the Global South, which I [gasp!] dared to label neocolonial science.

As described in this paper by Fabrice Frank et al, the IHU-MI produced a set of 248 studies all with the same IRB approval number, 09–022. Despite sharing the same permit, the publications varied in terms of sample type, demographics, and countries. Other ‘multi-use’ IRB numbers were found too. Typically, an IRB approves one particular study, and researchers are not allowed to reuse this permit for other, unrelated, studies. Dr. Raoult appears to have cared little for such rules, however.

After raising our concerns on PubPeer and social media, and also writing to journal editors, several journals have started to issue Expressions of Concern and retractions.

Fabrice Frank has generated a list of all IHU-MI papers with concerns – there are over 800!

In fact, Raoult has now earned so many retractions (32 as of today) that he has entered the Retraction Watch Leaderboard. The most significant of them is the retraction of the paper that claimed that Hydroxychloroquine could treat COVID-19. I criticized this paper in my blog post in April 2020, days after its publication. It took more than four years to get it retracted.

With over 600 of his papers on PubPeer and 225 EoCs, it seems safe to assume that for Raoult’s position on the Retraction Watch Leaderboard list, the only way is up.