More Scandal at Harvard

Taking this from a youtube channel that has detailed a lot of academic stuff in the past, Pete Judo. YouTube 15 minutes

One of the take home points from the issues below is that peer review is pretty much broken and I consider it to be garbage. It's a terrible system and it needs a total overhaul.

Harvard's cancer lab, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, has some issues. Before going further, I want to point out that these types of issues are rampant throughout the research universe. If you visit sites like Retraction Watch or Pub Peer, you'll see this stuff is far more common than you ever imagined. Not only is this a "simple" integrity issue, bad research costs us money and time, and in a clinical context, those are obviously precious resources. We already have a lot of barriers to progress, for example the American Cancer Institute has estimated that it costs us $50M per year because we don't preserve specimens so they can be looked at later as investigative techniques get better and so forth (yes I have a plan for that). Fraud and similar behavior just makes things far worse.

Back to Harvard...this latest scandal at the cancer institute seems to revolve around 4 researchers, and has caused 31 corrections and 6 retractions.

Oh but there's more. Khalid Shah is a researcher at Harvard at the med school. Dozens of allegations for research misconduct. He's a cancer researcher, particularly stem cell therapy.

In a lot of research you do a western blot or a stain of some sort and essentially you get a result that is an image - like a picture that shows density of some substance, or the drift of something through gel based on reactivity or weight or some factor etc etc etc. Image manipulation is rampant in research.

Shah and a lot of co-authors published a paper suggesting they'd invented / created a cell line that could be injected in the area of a tumor, it would kill the tumor then with programmed cell death, it would go away. Pretty big breakthrough if true.

Pet Judo shows how an image was taken from a separate paper and pasted into this Shah paper discussed above.
The image below is from the video - the paper on the right is Shah's paper. You can see he highlights another paper where the image was lifted from. This happened multiple times.

Shah seems to have also lifted images from other papers he published and put them in that paper. In other portions, Shah used product photos from the web (products being cell lines) and inserted them into the paper.

Image issues were present in more than just this Shah paper. Pete Judo also covers the Stanford president and a Nobel winner who had image issues related to western blot analysis.

Pete Judo interviews a woman that has been responsible for finding a lot of these image issues. She mentions software that is helpful - I bring this up because that billionaire that has declared war on these faculty members at places like Harvard - you can imagine the team of people and software that he can buy, and what he can expose if he chooses to do so.

Academia really is broken.