Pete Judo on YouTube posted a 15 minute video summarizing yet another case of blatant scientific fraud uncovered at Harvard. No, not the one from January 2024 involving workers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute that resulted in 31 scientific papers being retracted from numerous publications. That was so two weeks ago.
https://www.bmj.com/content/384/bmj.q249Harvard University’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston is to retract six research articles and ask for corrections of 31 more, many of them by its senior leaders, after a blogger raised concerns about image manipulation.
Sholto David, 32, a molecular biologist based in Pontypridd, Wales, highlighted apparently duplicated images from 30 articles in a 2 January guest post on the website For Better Science.1 The articles’ lead authors were four prominent Dana-Farber scientists, including the institute’s chief executive, Laurie Glimcher, and its chief operating officer, William Hahn.
This case involves a different "scientist", though -- curiously -- the same modus operandi... Submitting scientific papers that support their conclusions not with DOCTORED images, but with images having NOTHING TO DO AT ALL WITH THE RESEARCH BEING DESCRIBED. In essence, this latest case found Khalid Shah used photos lifted from other scientific papers and even stock photos of clumps of cells from commercial web sites and used them to "explain" the biological process he and his team claimed to have discovered.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/2/1/harvard-neuroscientist-research-misconduct/Again, these papers involved research into cancer treatments and again, these papers were supposedly peer reviewed. In fact, the only person that seemed to subject them to serious review was Elisabeth Blik, who publishes a blog called Science Integrity Digest at
vhttps://scienceintegritydigest.com/about/Between 2014 and 2024, Blik has identified over 4,000 potential cases of image-related research fraud. Blik uncovered BOTH of these most recent Harvard frauds. You'd think with a multi-billion dollar endowment, Harvard could create an organization internally to perform the same electronic forensic tests on the research being published by its academics to stop these forgeries from being published and eliminate these corrupt academics from its staff. Why wouldn't an institution like Harvard pursue this? Could it be they believe their financial interests are better served allowing this type of fraud to continue and taking the occassional PR black eye when caught? Does Harvard feel its finances are improved by fostering the illustion of all of this cutting edge "miracle science" being cooked up in its laboratories and spun off into tech startups linked to the university?
Here's the summary of this current case:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wT-Vgtm2KLMAs mentioned previously, it is absolutely clear that for the majority of academic institutions, money is the mission.
WTH
