Science Integrity in the News – Science Integrity Digest

Cassava Sciences: Of Posters and Spaghetti Plots

In a previous blog post, I took a look at Western blots in papers from the lab of Dr. Hoau-Yan Wang at City University of New York (CUNY), mostly related to Cassava Sciences (Nasdaq: $SAVA), its predecessor Pain Therapeutics INC, and its flagship Alzheimer’s Disease drug candidate Simufilam.

While those papers were mainly about the preclinical Simufilam data, here I will review a conference poster reporting on Phase 2 data obtained by Cassava Sciences.

Science paper from Dutch top-institute retracted

A 2007 paper published in Science — in which I found image irregularities back in 2015 — has finally been retracted. For five long years, the journal took no action. But after I tweeted about the case, it eventually acted.

Dr. Ai Fen, 艾芬, the Wuhan Whistle

Dr. 艾芬 (Ai Fen) has played a key role in ringing the alarm in the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak. But blog posts about Dr. Ai Fen ‘s role in the COVID-19 outbreak have been mysteriously disappearing. This post is my contribution to make sure that the Internet Never Forgets.

Concerns about a top immunology lab

This post is not an accusation of misconduct.

Five years ago, in 2014, I reported three papers from the same lab with possible image duplications to the journals in which they had been published. One of these papers has since then been corrected – although I argued in a previous post about this paper that a retraction might have been a better decision. The other two papers are still untouched, unfortunately.

Since the journals and authors had had 5 years to respond, I posted my concerns about these three papers on PubPeer, so that at least researchers with the PubPeer extension can see that they have been “flagged”. I also found a couple more papers from this lab – headed by Dr. Xuetao Cao – that appeared to have problems and I posted these as well.

And then someone pointed out that the senior author on these papers was one of the top immunologists in China.

John Maddox Prize 2019

Earlier this week, the John Maddox Prize was awarded in a lovely ceremony in the Wellcome Collection in London. The Maddox Prize “recognises the work of individuals who promote science and evidence, advancing the public discussion around difficult topics despite challenges or hostility.”

From the Sense About Science website: “The prize is a joint initiative of Sense about Science and the science journal Nature. The late Sir John Maddox, FRS, was editor of Nature for 22 years and a founding trustee of Sense about Science. His daughter Bronwen Maddox is the patron of the prize. The Maddox Prize is funded by the work of the organisations concerned and by public donations.”

Annamalai University papers in the news

A quick post about some news articles that came out yesterday that report about the set of 200 papers from Annamalai University that I wrote about earlier here and here.

Annamalai University accused of plagiarism, data manipulation in over 200 research papers – Mohana Basu and Sandhya Ramesh – The Print
Research fraud in over 200 Annamalai University papers, alleges US scholar – Megha Kaveri – The News Minute
200+ Papers by Annamalai Univ Scientists Contain Plagiarism, Manipulation – The Wire

Gemma Milne writes about science integrity work

While I was in Scotland last month to give a talk, I had the pleasure to meet with the wonderful Gemma Milne. She is a Science and Technology Journalist and founder of Science: Disrupt.

She has the gift to turn lovely breakfast chatter about science misconduct into beautiful written words. Here are two recent articles Gemma wrote about the work that we science “sleuths” are doing.

World Conference on Research Integrity

The 6h World Conference on Research Integrity is currently happening in Hong Kong. You can follow all the tweets using the hashtag #WCRI2019. Thanks to many nice people who are live-tweeting from the conference, all of us who could not be there can still follow the conference from a distance.

BuzzFeed article about the “YXQ-EQ” papers

Just a quick post: Stephanie M. Lee, a science reporter at BuzzFeed posted an article today about the “YXQ-EQ” papers that I discussed on Twitter and in a recent post. It’s a nice story on the concerns that several scientists have about the invisible life force that might kill cancer cells – but that can only be emitted by one researcher.

“A Scientist Keeps Claiming His Life Force Can Somehow Kill Cancer Cells, And Researchers Are Calling Him Out” – Stephanie M. Lee – BuzzFeed – May 30, 2019

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