Are you finished searching scientists for the day?
I haven’t had time as we speak. But when I spent a few hours studying papers, I’d most likely write 4 or 5 feedback about errors in scientific papers. It’s not onerous to search out these issues, and it’s not onerous to search out them at any establishment. They’re all on the market to search out, if anybody desires to learn the scientific literature.
What motivates you to spend the time to do it?
I’m not an anti-vaxxer, I’m not a crank conspiracist or something like that. I’m a scientist myself, and I care about getting the science proper.
You focus partly on photos which were mislabeled, or used twice in a paper however as proof for various issues, lazily cut-and-pasted from one spot to a different. Is there a easy means so that you can inform that a picture is flawed?
You simply have a look at the image and skim the labels. For instance, if you happen to have a look at a microscopic image of cells, you see the place, location, orientation and form of the cells. And if you happen to have a look at one other image of cells and so they’re all in the identical place, with the identical form and orientation, then you recognize that this the identical picture, proper? It’s not a sophisticated course of.
You’ve additionally recognized errors in western blots. What are these?
These are a kind of scientific experiment used to establish and quantify particular proteins. The pictures are necessary in loads of scientific papers. They give the impression of being grey within the background and have black bands. Whenever you have a look at them very carefully, you possibly can often inform whether or not it’s a copy-and-paste job or not. These items aren’t at all times apparent to individuals who don’t have a look at loads of western blots.
Let’s flip to Dana-Farber. After discovering errors in a number of papers from its researchers, what inference do you draw in regards to the scientific strategies of that pre-eminent establishment?
It’s necessary to keep in mind that Dana-Farber researchers publish loads of papers. However it’s nonetheless loads of errors, and so they’ve occurred over a protracted time period. This tells me that for a very long time folks haven’t paid eclose sufficient consideration to getting the fundamentals proper. What number of sloppy errors are we snug with high establishments making? It’s most likely not many. I feel most individuals anticipate that Harvard scientists aren’t doing copy-and-paste errors usually.
