<
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/10/29/opinion/science-fraud-image-manipulation-photoshop.html>
"One evening in January 2014, I sat at my computer at home, sifting through
scientific papers. Being a microbiologist, this wasn’t unusual, although I
certainly didn’t expect to find what I did that night.
These particular papers were write-ups of medical research, with many including
photographs of biological samples, like tissue. One picture caught my eye. Was
there something familiar about it? Curious, I quickly scrolled back through
other papers by the same authors, checking their images against each other.
There it was. A section of the same photo being used in two different papers to
represent results from three entirely different experiments.
What’s more, the authors seemed to be deliberately covering their tracks.
Although the photos were of the same sample, one appeared to have been flipped
back-to-front, while the other appeared to have been stretched and cropped
differently.
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."
Via
The RISKS Digest Volume 33 Issue 50:
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/33/50#subj2
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
