Science relies on honest observation

Elisabeth Bik is getting mad. She has spent the better part of a decade finding examples of scientific fraud, and it seems to be easy pickings.

Although this was eight years ago, I distinctly recall how angry it made me. This was cheating, pure and simple. By editing an image to produce a desired result, a scientist can manufacture proof for a favored hypothesis, or create a signal out of noise. Scientists must rely on and build on one another’s work. Cheating is a transgression against everything that science should be. If scientific papers contain errors or — much worse — fraudulent data and fabricated imagery, other researchers are likely to waste time and grant money chasing theories based on made-up results…..

But were those duplicated images just an isolated case? With little clue about how big this would get, I began searching for suspicious figures in biomedical journals…. By day I went to my job in a lab at Stanford University, but I was soon spending every evening and most weekends looking for suspicious images. In 2016, I published an analysis of 20,621 peer-reviewed papers, discovering problematic images in no fewer than one in 25. Half of these appeared to have been manipulated deliberately — rotated, flipped, stretched or otherwise photoshopped. With a sense of unease about how much bad science might be in journals, I quit my full-time job in 2019 so that I could devote myself to finding and reporting more cases of scientific fraud.

Using my pattern-matching eyes and lots of caffeine, I have analyzed more than 100,000 papers since 2014 and found apparent image duplication in 4,800 and similar evidence of error, cheating or other ethical problems in an additional 1,700. I’ve reported 2,500 of these to their journals’ editors and — after learning the hard way that journals often do not respond to these cases — posted many of those papers along with 3,500 more to PubPeer, a website where scientific literature is discussed in public….

Unfortunately, many scientific journals and academic institutions are slow to respond to evidence of image manipulation — if they take action at all. So far, my work has resulted in 956 corrections and 923 retractions, but a majority of the papers I have reported to the journals remain unaddressed.

I’ve seen some of the fraud reports, and it amazes me how stupid the scientists committing these fakes must be. It’s as if they think jpeg artifacts don’t exist, and can be an obvious fingerprint when chunks of an image are duplicated; they don’t realize that you can reveal cheating by just tweaking a LUT and seeing all the duplicated edges light up. The only reason it’s done is to adjust your data to make it look like you expected it to look, which is an obvious act against the most basic scientific principles: you’re supposed to use science to avoid fooling yourself, not to make it easy to fool others.

This behavior ought to be harshly punished. If image fakery became in issue when one of my peers came up for tenure or promotion, I’d reject them without hesitation. It’s not even a question: this behavior is a deep violation of scientific and ethical principles, and would make all of their work untrustworthy.

Also, this is a problem with the for-profit journal publication system. Those scientists paid money for those pages, how can we possibly enforce honesty? The bad actors wouldn’t pay us for journal articles anymore!

But guess what happens when Elisabeth Bik takes a principled stand?

Most of my fellow detectives remain anonymous, operating under pseudonyms such as Smut Clyde or Cheshire. Criticizing other scientists’ work is often not well received, and concerns about negative career consequences can prevent scientists from speaking out. Image problems I have reported under my full name have resulted in hateful messages, angry videos on social media sites and two lawsuit threats….

Things could be about to get even worse. Artificial intelligence might help detect duplicated data in research, but it can also be used to generate fake data. It is easy nowadays to produce fabricated photos or videos of events that never happened, and A.I.-generated images might have already started to poison the scientific literature. As A.I. technology develops, it will become significantly harder to distinguish fake from real.

Science needs to get serious about research fraud.

How about instantly firing people who do this? Our tenure contracts generally have a moral turpitude clause, you know. This counts.

“Barbie crotch”?

Uh-oh. I’m contributing to the Barbie mania a little more. Sorry.

But this was interesting, and I hadn’t thought about it before! The Vagina Museum posted a thread about the long history of portrayals of the female genitalia, and I was surprised to realize that Greek sculpture did the same thing — Praxiteles was sculpting Aphrodite with a Barbie crotch in the 4th century BCE. It was a whole trend for centuries: male nudes get the anatomically correct treatment, while female nudes get a smooth featureless curve.

This says something about Western cultures different attitudes towards men and women. I wonder what effect this has had on women’s ideas about their bodies.

At least we took a step towards gender equality in 1961 when Mattel castrated Ken and made his crotch identical to that of Barbie.

Barbenheimer will be an improvement over the latest hot conspiracy theory fraud

My wife actually asked me if we could see the Barbie movie, which is opening at our local theater this weekend. Of course we can! I was looking forward to it already. It looks to be trippy and fun.

As the media have frequently mentioned lately, because they do love a contrast, the Oppenheimer movie also opens this weekend (but not at our theater.) Cool, I’d like to see that one, too, even more than Barbie. They’re different movies, there isn’t any real conflict between them. Here’s an article that says ‘Barbie’ and ‘Oppenheimer’ tell the same terrifying story.

The underlying premise of all the jokes — that these films come out on the same day but are about hilariously different subjects and have wildly different tones — is misguided. The two movies actually have a fundamental, and disturbing, common ground. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man behind our nuclear age, and Barbie — a toy that takes over three cups of oil to produce before it lingers in landfills around the world — both tell the story of the dawn of our imperiled era.

“Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” each offer a window into the creation of the Anthropocene, the suggested term for our present geological epoch, in which human beings have become the most significant influence on the natural environment at a planetary scale.

That’s an interesting connection: how do we define the anthropocene, by all the piles of plastic or the global dusting of radioactive isotopes?

Either works for me, they all coexist in a narrow slice of time, only a century long. On a geological scale, either one provides a sharp boundary.

Like I said, I’d like to see both movies. Unfortunately, Oppenheimer isn’t booked locally in the near future. Instead, we’re getting served Sound of Freedom after Barbie, a conspiracy-theory fueled abomination of a movie (see Rebecca Watson for why it’s bad). I predict it’ll clean up at the box office in our little corner of Red America.

I always wondered how you can be a university president & on the board of pharmaceutical companies & run a gigantic research lab

I know that guy! That’s Marc Tessier-Lavigne! He’s about my age, and we shared similar interests — we were both interested in axon guidance, and I followed his work avidly some years ago. He was publishing about netrins, signaling molecules that affect the trajectory of growing neurons, while I was studying growing neurons in grasshopper embryos. I met him several times, I attended talks he gave at various meetings, it was hard to avoid Tessier-Lavigne.

Our careers followed very different paths, though. I ended up teaching at a small liberal arts college, while he got a position at UCSF, and then was CSO at Genentech, and then was president of Rockefeller University, was on the boards of various pharmaceutical companies, and finally was president of Stanford University. He was a major go-getter, running gigantic factory-style labs, getting regularly published in Science and Nature and Cell. It was a life that looked horrible to me, just as my life of obscurity and teaching would have looked horrible to him, if ever he had deigned to notice me.

Why would I have disliked the prestigious path he took in science? Because he turned himself into a manager, a guy who was disconnected from the science that was being done in his massively well-funded labs. Ick. I’d rather play at the bench and help students get enthusiastic about doing science.

I may have chosen wisely, because now Tessier-Lavigne has been compelled to resign as an investigation found evidence of fraud in his work. Yikes. This is bad.

The Board of Trustees’ inquiry stopped short of accusing Tessier-Lavigne — who has been Stanford’s president since 2016 — of fraud, saying there’s no evidence he “personally engaged in research misconduct.”

However, it was concluded that five papers on which Tessier-Lavigne was a principal author included work from “some members of labs overseen by Dr. Tessier-Lavigne” who had “either engaged in inappropriate manipulation of research data or engaged in deficient scientific practices, resulting in significant flaws in those papers.”

When the issues emerged, “Tessier-Lavigne took insufficient steps to correct mistakes in the scientific record,” the board’s report said.

This is what happens when you become an over-worked administrator with your fingers in too many pies. That does not excuse him — he has his name on so many papers, and getting an authorship entails significant responsibilities — and it just tells you the kind of peril ambition can put you in.

I’ve been teaching about netrins and robo and neuropilins and all these molecules in neurodevelopment for years. Am I going to have to put an asterisk by the source papers and review their validity now? I’m hoping the descent into sloppiness was a late-career problem that doesn’t call into question all the fundamental stuff he did.

I double-dog dare you to pronounce that name

New movie marketers decided to use the Greek alphabet in their poster, and caused my brain to stutter.

There is no “C” in the Greek alphabet; they should have substituted a Κ, kappa. No “L”, but there is a lambda, Λ. We get a sigma instead of an “e”, which is pronounced like an “s”. Then an omicron, so that part is OK. P is rho, it is pronounced like an “r”. Greek has a perfectly good, familiar letter A, alpha, but they put a delta, Δ, in there. That’s a “d”. Then a tau, Τ, which is a fine “T”, and an “R” character which doesn’t exist and should be a Ρ. Then it ends with another “d”.

I think that whole gemisch is pronounced “??sordt?d,” somehow, and I now have no confidence in the historicity of whatever this movie is.

I wonder if they plan to distribute this movie in Greece with that poster?

Progress in embryo analysis!

Our new development in spider development is pretty basic stuff. We’re dechorionating embryos! That is, stripping off a thin membrane surrounding the embryo, so we can do staining and fixation and various other things. It’s a standard invertebrate technique — it turns out you can remove it by just washing them in bleach. Look, it works! This is a Parasteatoda embryo.

We’re still tinkering with the timing of the treatment. Five minutes is way too long, which basically dissolved the whole embryo. All it takes is a brief wash to break the chorion down. We’re also working out methods for manipulating them — they’re tiny! Just pipetting them into a solution is a great way to lose them. We’re now using a cut off microfuge tube to make a cylinder that we cap with a sheet of fine nylon mesh, to lower them into the solution. Of course, then we have to separate the embryos from the mesh. Fortunately, we opened up one egg sac and 140 embryos rolled out, so we have lots of material to experiment on.

The next question is whether they survive our abuse. We’ve got some of them sitting under a microscope, time-lapsing their response. We’ll see if they grow…or die and fall apart.

Ending the legacies!

Conservatives cheered the Supreme Court decision to eliminate consideration of race in university admissions. I have to wonder if they’ll be so happy about this other change at the University of Minnesota.

Admissions officers working on the U’s Twin Cities campus, which typically enrolls about 55,000 students, say they have long used a “holistic review” process that places the greatest weight on an applicant’s academic track record. But it also allowed them to report 10 additional attributes that were sometimes used to distinguish between otherwise similar candidates.

The university announced late last week that it would stop considering an applicant’s race, ethnicity or ties to U alumni or faculty — though it would still ask “for this optional information for recruitment and communication purposes about programs and services offered.”

Undergraduate student government leaders said Tuesday that they welcomed the effort to eliminate legacy admissions, noting some other colleges had already done so. But they wanted to know more about the plan to stop considering race and ethnicity, saying they believe it’s crucial to have a diverse campus.

Oh god yes. End the legacy admissions. If you’re going to eliminate biases in admissions, the first place you should start is ending the privileges that give preferential status to children of alumni. The only reason to benefit them is the hope that alumni will give them more money.

I don’t think Republican businesspeople and professionals realized how much of an advantage they’ve had, and now it’s going to be gone (optimistically — I don’t believe someone who donates money for a building on campus is going to find their kids rejected, not matter how unqualified they are. After all, our appointed interim president brings nothing to the school except his affiliation with Hormel.)

It’ll be interesting to see how this works out.

Gosh, I sure hope Marjorie Taylor Greene keeps working for the Biden campaign

I worried that this ad by Joe Biden that quotes Marjorie Taylor Greene saying favorable things about him was a quote mine. I’m so used to creationists pulling out short quotes that mean something completely different from what the author intended that I was afraid the Democrats might be pulling the same dishonest stunt, because we know she hates him. But MTG words do make a pretty good campaign ad.

So I looked a little deeper. She actually said those things in a speech to TPUSA; she actually thought these things are bad for the country.

“Joe Biden had the largest public investment in social infrastructure and environmental programs,” Greene says in the ad, while images of the president smiling in various locations are shown as upbeat music plays. “That is actually finishing what FDR started, that LBJ expanded on and Joe Biden is attempting to complete.”

“Programs to address education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, transportation, Medicare, Medicaid. And he is still working on it,” she continues just before a Biden/Harris campaign logo appears on screen to end the video.

WTF? “education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, transportation, Medicare, Medicaid” are unpopular, awful programs for a president to promote, so she seeks to saddle him with that? FDR was one of our greatest presidents, and that’s a comparison she wants to make? That’s nuts, but it’s actually what she thinks.

Clinching it, MJT posted a response to Biden’s ad, and it’s a different excerpt from her TPUSA speech, filling in the gaps in Biden’s thoroughly edited version. What she was trying to communicate, poorly, was that Biden is a big fat socialist.

Lyndon B. Johnson is very similar to Joe Biden. How are they the same?

They’re both Democrat Socialists.

Lyndon B. Johnson was the majority leader in the Senate. Does that sound familiar?

He was Vice President to Kennedy. Joe was Vice President to Obama.

He was appointed as the president after JFK was assassinated, then he was elected.

His big socialist programs were the Great Society.

The Great Society were big government programs to address education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, transportation, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and welfare, the Office of Economic Opportunity, and big labor and labor unions.

Now, LBJ had the Great Society, but Joe Biden had Build Back Better, and he still is working on it.

The largest public investment in social infrastructure and environmental programs that is actually finishing what FDR started that LBJ expanded on, and Joe Biden is attempting to complete, socialism.

Biden is not a socialist, not even a Democrat Socialist. He is not trying to complete socialism, whatever that means. If the Great Society programs were socialism, then hooray for socialism, give us more of that, please.

Clearly, MTG was trying to put down Biden by chanting socialism, socialism, socialism at him, but by spelling out what socialism means to her, she’s basically educating everyone on what a good thing socialism can be.

Pay attention, Biden. Greene is actually telling you what works.