An astrophysicist who decapitates birds and wants to infect pregnant women with viruses

Note: this post has been updated on June 4, to include new information that the author was not affiliated with the RIAAM institute at the time of publishing his papers. The RIAAM takes this false affiliation very seriously and distances itself from the author’s views and ideas.

This blog post – again – is based on a Twitter thread (here is the unroll if you like that better). It is about a nuclear physicist who works has previously worked at the Research Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics of Maragha (RIAAM) in Iran.

Update June 4: The RIAAM has personally communicated with me that the physicist indeed worked at that institute in the past, but was not employed anymore at the time these papers were published. The institute does not support the views of the authors in any of the papers mentioned in this blogpost. They will contact the journals to have the false affiliation removed from the papers.

The viXra preprint server

This researcher has published a bunch of white papers on the viXra.org (arXiv.org spelled backwards) preprint server, which is a site that will publish anything. Not surprisingly, there is some very low quality stuff there.

This particular author caught my eye with his list of viXra manuscripts, with strange titles such as “Emergence of Cancer by Exchanging Fields of Microgravity Between Earth’s DNA and Dark Dnas in Extra Dimensions” and “Exploring Extra Dimensions by the Help of Dnas of the Egg Cell and the Earth”.

Some of his viXra preprints appear to be not very scientific. Some others are horrendous.

Two horrendous viXra.org preprint papers

Two of the astrophysicist’s papers on viXra appear to describe horrible animal experiments. In the first, “Emergence of a New Type of Life and Alive Creature from Mixing Cells of Plants and Animals“, he cut open a quail (a bird) and put in a mixture of beans and rice in the wound to create a new type of life. Warning: some disturbing photos in the PDF.

In the second viXra preprint, “The Role of Radiated Non-Linear Electromagnetic Waves from Initial Dnas in Formation of the Little Brain, Neural Circuits and Other Decision Centers: Determining Time of Death by Considering Evolutions of Waves of Death“, he connects two chicken embryos with wires, and cuts off the head of about 400 quails. He then proceeds to put some heads back up again. Warning: more disturbing photos if you click on the PDF.

The author’s conclusion was: “We observe that if removing of head is done eventually, some extra signals are exchanged between brain and the little brain which leads to the stop of life. While, by removing heads suddenly, these signals couldnt be exchanged and life continues.“

I am sure that Marie-Antoinette would disagree. On the other hand, James Salsman @Jsalsman pointed out this story.

In addition to his white papers on viXra, the same author also published 2 papers in World Scientific journals. Note that this publisher is not on Beall’s list, although it bears some characteristics. Their papers are not included in PubMed, SCOPUS, or Web of Science. On the other hand,it publishes the Nobel Lectures, and has co-founded Imperial College Press.

A Mathematical Model for DNA (‘peer reviewed’)

The first “peer-reviewed” paper of note is “A mathematical model for DNA” – published in International Journal of Geometric Methods in Modern Physics.

Peer review appears to have been remarkably fast for this paper – only 6 days. Two of those were in the weekend. Submitted on Thursday, published on Wednesday. That is unusually fast. The paper also has some statements that appear …. different from what I learned in biology class.

The author appears to be confusing women and men. Which of the two had that Y chromosome again? I know this is tough to remember, especially for an astrophysicist, but you would have hoped that a peer reviewer would have noticed this in the couple of days they looked at the paper.

In this paper, the author claims that DNA is some sort of radio transmitter. He also claims that cancer is caused by the loss or acquisition of an atom in the DNA structure, which would alter the DNA’s electromagnetic signals.

And because men and women are sending out opposite signals, their DNA radio transmissions cancel each other out.

Oh – wait. This might actually explain the many older and completely silent couples you often see in restaurants! After 40 years of marriage, there is just no signal left.

The author does not stop here. He continues his bewildering statements by claiming that cancer can be stopped by putting a man with cancer next to a woman with cancer.

It is frightening that this completely flawed paper passed peer review.

Of course, I am not the first person to write about this remarkable paper. Smut Clyde has written about it on his blog Riddled in a post called “Adrift just off the Islets of Langerhans…” in July 2017. Here, Smut wrote: “Sepehri concludes that if a male and female both suffer from cancer, they can prevent the progress of the disease by staying in close proximity — because the EM signatures of their respective XY and XX sex-chromosome pairs will cancel out and rectify each other’s errant frequencies (radiating as they do with opposite signs). I am not making this up.”.

A mathematical model for the Virus Medical Imaging technique (‘peer reviewed’)

For the second paper, the astrophysicist teamed up with someone from Università degli studi Guglielmo Marconi, the Guglielmo Marconi University in Rome. Together these authors wrote: “A mathematical model for the Virus Medical Imaging technique” which was also published in the International Journal of Geometric Methods in Modern Physics.

Submission, editorial processing, and peer review for this World Scientific paper was completed in a whopping 2 days. I am not kidding.

The abstract is enough to give any scientist pause.

The introduction states “In this paper, we will propose a new method which use of the electronic properties of DNAs in viruses and cells.” So I guess it is not about RNA viruses. Then, it argues “radiated waves from DNAs of males and females have opposite signs and cancel the effect of each other in a pair”. The reference listed here, #16, is the author’s own paper that I discussed above, “A mathematical model for DNA”.

The paper continues by stating that there are viruses that cancel out male DNA, and other viruses that cancel out female DNA. I am a microbiologist, but I have never heard of such a thing. Actually, let me put that more clearly: this is complete nonsense.

The text then continues with pages full of impressive looking formulas. People on Twitter pointed out that these were not as impressive as they looked.

After all these formulas, the authors suddenly introduce the “Virus Medical Imaging Machine”. Here is how it works. The proposed Machine can detect the gender of a fetus by infecting a pregnant woman with male or female Influenza virus and hooking her up to electrical wires. Wow. What could possibly go wrong? Warning: don’t try this at home, folks. This is just bleeping dangerous.

The authors conclude that “Thus, this mechanism is one of best methods for medical imaging”. Which I have to disagree with.

OK, so we can laugh here, or shrug, but this is dangerous stuff that is being published under the veil of #PeerReview. Suppose that a person thinks this is a scientific method and tries this on a pregnant woman?

The Guglielmo Marconi University in Rome, Italy, and World Scientific Publishers need to take a real close look at these papers. They are not scientific, appear to be not peer-reviewed, and could become a liability if people actually believe this stuff and try to imitate this.