Academic fraud endemic in published research, from photoshopped blots to AI slop

Eliezer Masliah, a prominent neuroscientist and top NIH official steering billions in federal grant money, has "fallen under suspicion" of extensive academic fraud, writes Charles Piller at Science.org. The understated measure of that quote collapses quickly into a basement stuffed with comically overwhelming evidence.

A Science investigation has now found that scores of his lab studies at UCSD and NIA are riddled with apparently falsified Western blots—images used to show the presence of proteins—and micrographs of brain tissue. Numerous images seem to have been inappropriately reused within and across papers, sometimes published years apart in different journals, describing divergent experimental conditions.

He's been gotten rid of already, though the institutions involved aren't talking yet.

Neither Masliah nor the various drug companies, universities, or federal ­agencies that were provided the dossier have so far rejected or challenged any of its examples of possible misconduct despite being given the material more than 2 weeks ago. And today, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) released a statement saying that following an investigation, it had "made findings of research misconduct" against Masliah for "falsification and/or fabrication involving re-use and relabel of figure panels" in two publications. According to the statement, Masliah no longer serves as NIA's neuroscience division director, but NIH declined to further clarify his employment status.

Fraud, so much fraud, writes Derek Lowe.

It seems like a strange thing to take someone with a long and respected career and subject them to what would essentially be a Western blot and photomicrograph audit before offering them a big position. But if the NIH had done that in 2016, they wouldn't be in the position they're in now, would they? How many people do we need to check? How many figures do we have to scrutinize? What a mess.

He's only the latest example, too.

Last year, Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned amid reporting that some of his most high-profile work on Alzheimer's disease was at best inaccurate and at worst manipulated. But the problems around credible science appear to be getting worse. Last week, scientific publisher Wiley decided to shutter 19 scientific journals after retracting 11,300 sham papers. There is a large-scale industry of so-called "paper mills" that sell fictive research, sometimes written by artificial intelligence, to researchers who then publish it in peer-reviewed journals — which are sometimes edited by people who had been placed by those sham groups.

The publish-or-perish academic culture everyone always brings up is only a part of it. There's also the for-profit industry of scientific journals, desperate to be fed, "edited" in whatever bare seconds are left over. There's all the people who think insiders can be managed forever and that outsiders are too stupid to notice in the first place. And now there are AIs, learning language models, all the new forms of superficial productivity.

Maybe this all flows from higher ed being turned into a big business and drawn into the modern culture of everything being a constructively-managed marketplace.

For me, though, these stories evoke the fatalism and opportunism of people who know their specialization is a bust and that nothing of consequence will be achieved in their professional lifetimes. Pour one out for the chemists at pharma companies whose careers end up wasted on snipe hunts for useless molecules—and for the macaques too.