16 years of Alzheimer's research possibly down the toilet

Invisible Fan · Jun 9, 2024

B-Bob said: ↑

This is such a naive statement and probably (I hope) taken out of context from a much longer comment.

Every scientist "manipulates" their images, and I don't mean that as a hot take or an anti-science take. If you take a photo and want to highlight some feature of the content, do you manipulate images? Probably, right?

A scientist can add a color scale to heighten certain features. Tweak the contrast. Crop the margins. Etc. It's basically framing which all humans do every durn time they try to communicate something.

The question is what is unethical or misleading manipulation. Most scientists don't have a great and clear answer to that. If you ask most of us, we say, "well, I know unethical conduct when I see it." Now mix in a few miserable grad. students or post-docs who desperately want their big story at a high-profile journal. Then you've got some case like this, where somebody presumably went "too far" and made sketchy, misleading alterations. So I hear people wanting jail time, but I would bet dollars to donuts, there was a grad student or postdoc involved who literally thought they weren't doing anything wrong. Just trying to make the big boss happy and establish career credentials.
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Ethical fraud and abuse has become too pervasive for researchers to be allowed that benefit of the doubt.

With digital storage now extra cheap, a requirement for any top paper should be to include the original images as an addendum. This should delineate clearly between grad slave oopsies and wink wink make it look good shenanigans.

Or maybe wait ten-twenty more years for ai to magically figure stuff out in their black boxes.

Amiga · Jun 9, 2024

B-Bob said: ↑

This is such a naive statement and probably (I hope) taken out of context from a much longer comment.

Every scientist "manipulates" their images, and I don't mean that as a hot take or an anti-science take. If you take a photo and want to highlight some feature of the content, do you manipulate images? Probably, right?

A scientist can add a color scale to heighten certain features. Tweak the contrast. Crop the margins. Etc. It's basically framing which all humans do every durn time they try to communicate something.

The question is what is unethical or misleading manipulation. Most scientists don't have a great and clear answer to that. If you ask most of us, we say, "well, I know unethical conduct when I see it." Now mix in a few miserable grad. students or post-docs who desperately want their big story at a high-profile journal. Then you've got some case like this, where somebody presumably went "too far" and made sketchy, misleading alterations. So I hear people wanting jail time, but I would bet dollars to donuts, there was a grad student or postdoc involved who literally thought they weren't doing anything wrong. Just trying to make the big boss happy and establish career credentials.
Click to expand...

I probably wouldn't understand the context even if it was spelled out. I do get emphasizing to make a point clearer or to focus on some area. But changing data and combining different parts from different experiments? If that still is true, I sure hope that's not what every scientist does.

Original report from 2 years ago (and I'm not sure if this still holds):

The authors “appeared to have composed figures by piecing together parts of photos from different experiments,” says Elisabeth Bik, a molecular biologist and well-known forensic image consultant. “The obtained experimental results might not have been the desired results, and that data might have been changed to … better fit a hypothesis.”

B-Bob · Jun 10, 2024

Invisible Fan said: ↑

Ethical fraud and abuse has become too pervasive for researchers to be allowed that benefit of the doubt.

With digital storage now extra cheap, a requirement for any top paper should be to include the original images as an addendum. This should delineate clearly between grad slave oopsies and wink wink make it look good shenanigans.

Or maybe wait ten-twenty more years for ai to magically figure stuff out in their black boxes.
Click to expand...

To be as clear as possible: I'm not asking for any benefit of the doubt. I'm describing a reality I see every day. And mix in a young researcher born in a very different culture and try to explain the difference between "oopsies" and "shenanigans," while applying incredible pressure to over-perform, create incredible discoveries out of hazy data, and we're going to keep seeing problems.

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16 years of Alzheimer's research possibly down the toilet

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16 years of Alzheimer's research possibly down the toilet

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B-Bob "94-year-old self-described dreamer"
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