Falsification: Haruko Obokata case

STAP treatment papers

Haruko Obokata was a researcher and laboratory head at the Japanese Riken Center for Developmental Biology. In 2014, she published 2 Nature papers (here and here) in which she described an acid treatment to turn somatic cells (mouse blood cells) into pluripotent stem cells, a method that she named “stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency” or STAP.

Hours after publication, serious doubts about the validity of the paper were raised on Paul Knoepfler’s blog and PubPeer. Soon, people noticed similarities between photos in the Nature papers and those found in Obokata’s PhD thesis, in which these photos represented different experiments than those described in the Nature papers. In addition, no one was able to reproduce the STAP treatment, which just sounded too simple to be true.

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SkeptiCalCon 2019

A warm welcome on a warm day. Photo: Elisabeth Bik.

Sunday June 9, 2019, I attended the 10th SkeptiCalCon, a 1-day conference on science and skepticism. The event was sponsored by the Bay Area Skeptics (BAS) and the Sacramento Area Skeptics (SAS).

BAS and SAS remain focused on what (Carl) Sagan called “extraordinary claims” (which require “extraordinary evidence,” as his adage reminds us) but we also seek to improve the general public understanding of science and critical thinking. Scientific skepticism is independent of other movements which sometime also claim the term “skeptic.” Scientific skepticism can be embraced by all, whether religious or non-religious, trained in science or new to the scientific method, or anyone interested in better understanding truth and reality.

From the SkeptiCalCon website. Source: http://www.skepticalcon.com/about-skeptical

The event was held in the Hyatt Regency hotel next to San Francisco International Airport. It was an unusually hot day and temperatures got pretty toasty in the Garden Pavilion. But it was a great conference.

The conference was held in the Garden Pavilion at the Hyatt Regency near SFO airport, just South of San Francisco. Photo: Elisabeth Bik.

Here is a summary of all the talks and activities. You can also read about it on Twitter using the hashtags #SkeptiCalCon or #SkeptiCal2019.

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False affiliations and fake authors

In this blog post I will talk about scientific papers that use false affiliations or fake authors.

What is an affiliation?

In scientific papers, the “affiliation” is the institute that each author belongs to. It is usually listed below the author names, as the “department, university” of the institute each authors worked at during the time that the study was conducted.

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The Sexpert papers

This blog post is not intended to be an allegation of misconduct. I am just wondering about unclear affiliations, findings, and ethics approval. Be aware that this post contains links to articles about sexual activities and suicide. These links are intended for mature audiences only and might contain sensitive material that is NSFW.

A Gizmodo article by Jennings Brown, published in March 2019, describes the curious case of The Fake Sex Doctor Who Conned the Media Into Publicizing His Bizarre Research on Suicide, Butt-Fisting, and Bestiality.

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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.

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Surfing the water-DNA waves

A post about another “peer reviewed” paper published by World Scientific publishers (not included in any predatory publisher list that I could find). Based on this Twitter thread.

This paper is written by the same first author on the pregnancy/virus model from my previous post, a cardiology doctor from Rome. According to his website he “graduated with honors in Medicine and Surgery from the University of Rome “La Sapienza” and is now publishing under the affiliation of the Guglielmo Marconi University in Rome. 

The paper was published in the International Journal of Geometric Methods in Modern Physics – which seem to have a consistent problem with the quality of their peer review.

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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.

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Weekly Digest, June 1, 2019

Here is a weekly digest of science integrity related articles. Also, check out Retraction Watch‘s Weekend Reads!

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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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What is Research Misconduct? Part 3: Fabrication

This is Part 3 of a series of 3, which also includes Part 1: Plagiarism, and Part 2: Falsification.

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, I showed some examples of plagiarism and falsification in scientific papers, which the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) considers two of the three forms of Research Misconduct. Here, we will look at the third type of misconduct, fabrication. ORI defines fabrication as follows:

“Fabrication is making up data or results and recording or reporting them.”

Office of Research Integrity: Definition of Research Misconduct
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