Alzheimer's Study Retracted For Manipulation

[Kathianne]

This is sad, it prevented other studies from gaining traction:


https://hotair.com/david-strom/2024/06/07/most-significant-scientific-retraction-ever-n3789789


Most Significant Scientific Retraction Ever?DAVID STROM 12:30 PM | June 07, 2024



Kevin Van Paassen/Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre via AP
It may or may not be the most significant retraction of a scientific paper ever, but it certainly is in the ballpark.


The paper helped create and sustain the theory that amyloid protein buildups caused the symptoms of Alzheimer's Disease and was one of a number of apparently fraudulent papers written by Sylvain Lesné, a professor at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.




All the paper's authors agreed to retract, save Lesné, who has been under investigation for manipulating data.


Authors of a landmark Alzheimer’s disease research paper published in Nature in 2006 have agreed to retract the study in response to allegations of image manipulation. University of Minnesota (UMN) Twin Cities neuroscientist Karen Ashe, the paper’s senior author, acknowledged in a post on the journal discussion site PubPeer that the paper contains doctored images. The study has been cited nearly 2500 times, and would be the most cited paper ever to be retracted, according to Retraction Watch data.


“Although I had no knowledge of any image manipulations in the published paper until it was brought to my attention two years ago,” Ashe wrote on PubPeer, “it is clear that several of the figures in Lesné et al. (2006) have been manipulated … for which I as the senior and corresponding author take ultimate responsibility.”


After initially arguing the paper’s problems could be addressed with a correction, Ashe said in another post last week that all of the authors had agreed to a retraction—with the exception of its first author, UMN neuro-
scientist Sylvain Lesné, a protégé of Ashe’s who was the focus of a 2022 investigation by Science. A Nature spokesperson would not comment on the journal’s plans.


What makes this retraction so significant is that it has driven research into Alzheimer's treatments for nearly two decades, and treatment approaches based on its conclusions have failed to yield results.


If the hypothesis that amyloid protein buildups cause Alzheimer's symptoms is wrong, Lesné is responsible for perhaps billions of wasted research dollars and two decades of scientists following a false lead.


The 2006 paper suggested an amyloid beta (Aβ) protein called Aβ*56 could cause Alzheimer’s. Aβ proteins have long been linked to the disease. The authors reported that Aβ*56 was present in mice genetically engineered to develop an Alzheimer’s-like condition, and that it built up in step with their cognitive decline. The team also reported memory deficits in rats injected with Aβ*56.


For years researchers had tried to improve Alzheimer’s outcomes by stripping amyloid proteins from the brain, but the experimental drugs all failed. Aβ*56 seemed to offer a more specific and promising therapeutic target, and many embraced the finding. Funding for related work rose sharply.


But the Science investigation revealed evidence that the Nature paper and numerous others co-authored by Lesné, some listing Ashe as senior author, appeared to use manipulated data. After the story was published, leading scientists who had cited the paper to support their own experiments questioned whether Aβ*56 could be reliably detected and purified as described by Lesné and Ashe—or even existed. Some said the problems in that paper and others supported fresh doubts about the dominant hypothesis that amyloid drives Alzheimer’s. Others maintained that the hypothesis remains viable.


If it turns out that the entirety of the work was fraudulent--and there appears to be some dispute--I can imagine no punishment harsh enough for Lesné. Alzheimer's is a horrible disease. Creating fraudulent research to enhance one's career when the stakes are so high is sociopathic.


There appear to be quite a number of sociopaths in the biological sciences if recent evidence is any guide, and very few checks and balances to control for this fact.


Researchers, medical professionals, public health officials, and far too many people in the "caring" professions have been very cavalier with people's lives of late. There are far too many stories from the COVID pandemic about doctors harming their patients--some of the stories of patients being put on ventilators when they weren't needed are heartbreaking, and of course the isolation of patients who were dying was unforgivable.


Dr John Campbell posted a video last week in which he discussed a brewing scandal in Scotland, where many were put on the DNR list without being consulted--some of whom had pre-existing conditions as minor as hearing loss.




Hearing loss.


WE need to realize that credentials do not confer immunity from scrutiny, nor do they indicate any special status as ethical human beings. They are signifiers of meeting some threshold criteria, and nothing more.


This is an age of scientific scandals. Science is now a multi-billion dollar industry, and one that gets far too little scrutiny. That has to change.

[hjmick]

If the hypothesis that amyloid protein buildups cause Alzheimer's symptoms is wrong, Lesné is responsible for perhaps billions of wasted research dollars and two decades of scientists following a false lead...


Dick.

[fj1200]

How many retractions have we seen lately? Am I wrong in noting the Harvard President resigning being a watershed or had I just not noticed before?

[Kathianne]

How many retractions have we seen lately? Am I wrong in noting the Harvard President resigning being a watershed or had I just not noticed before?

I thought the same. Wasn't just Gay at Harvard either. Seems another biggie in academia, maybe Stanford?

Marc Tessier-Lavigne, who had served as president of Stanford University for seven years, stepped down in 2023 after it was determined that he had co-authored several academic papers that contained manipulated data.

Columbia:
https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2024/04/30/columbia-unviersity-president-targeted-with-plagiarism-allegations/


Columbia University President Targeted with Plagiarism AllegationsJonathan BaileyApril 30, 2024 4 minutes read


Over the past week, Columbia University, along with a slew of other college campuses, has been in the news due to protests supporting Palestinians in Gaza.


As those protests continued, along with the controversy of those protests and how both police and universities responded to them, another headline got some attention: Allegations of plagiarism by Columbia University’s president, Nemat “Minouche” Shafik.


The allegations come from a Yale professor, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, who alleges that Shafik omitted a co-author from a final printing of a 1994 paper that she published in Oxford Economic Papers.


But, while it’s easy to say that this is similar to other plagiarism allegations against college administrators, and some reports have, this case is actually very different from those and deals both with different allegations and different issues.


However, perhaps the biggest difference is that there’s no clear proof of wrongdoing (at least not yet). While I agree that the situation is unusual, it’s not proof of plagiarism by itself.


Understanding the Case
The allegations involve two separate publications of the same research. The first took place in 1992 when Shafik published a working paper entitled Economic Growth and Environmental Quality – Time-Series and Cross-Country Evidence in a publication operated by the World Bank.


With that publication, Sushenjit Bandyopadhyay was listed as a co-author.


The paper was rewritten and then republished in 1994. That publication was in Oxford Economic Papers and featured Shafik as the sole author. Bandyopadhyay was listed in the special thanks section of the paper.


According to Mobarak, this was inappropriate and an attempt to deny credit to Bandyopadhyay. He argues that if Bandyopadhyay did enough work to be an author in the first paper, he should have been included in the second publication. The situation is made more complicated by the fact that Shafik was Bandyopadhyay’s supervisor at the time the research was performed.


However, the case is significantly more nuanced than that. While this is certainly an unusual situation, there’s no real proof of wrongdoing from what we know right now.


A Question of Why
One thing to understand is that a working paper is essentially a draft publication. It’s akin to prepublication prints on sites like arXiv, where one is sharing their work and their findings, but before a draft has been finalized and put through peer review.


So, the similarities between the two works are expected. If we treat the working paper as a rough draft, it’s easy to see why the research and verbiage have so many similarities.


The only question of validity is this: Why was the co-author dropped?


According to Mobarak, the only reason is that Shafik wanted to take credit for herself. However, that is far from a foregone conclusion.


While it is somewhat unusual for a co-author to be dropped like this, there are reasons that it could have happened. First, the inclusion might not have been appropriate the first time, meaning the removal actually addressed rather than created an authorship issue.


Second, the rewriting and additional work on the paper in the two years between publications may have removed or limited Bandyopadhyay’s contributions to the paper. An authorship credit was no longer appropriate.


Finally, it’s possible that Bandyopadhyay requested his name be removed. Perhaps he had a disagreement with the final draft or some other issue.


However, that last one seems unlikely, given what little Bandyopadhyay has said.


The New York Post reached out to him, and he declined to comment. However, Mobarak said he spoke with Bandyopadhyay. According to him, Bandyopadhyay did feel he should have been listed as an author but also didn’t say anything “negative” about Shafik.


In short, we don’t know why the change was made. However, given the evidence, I think it was unlikely a deliberate and malicious attempt to deny Bandyopadhyay credit.


Something Other Than Malice
While there are definitely many things that this could be, it seems unlikely that this was a deliberate attempt to deny Bandyopadhyay credit. There are several reasons for that.


First, Shafik was already the primary author of the paper. There’s simply not much that she gains by becoming the sole author. Collaboration is expected and encouraged in research. Keeping Bandyopadhyay on as a co-author doesn’t really harm her standing in any way.


We see this regularly in research. Most issues of authorship integrity don’t involve removing names that contributed but rather involve adding names that didn’t. Adding other authors doesn’t really dilute the contributions of others, but it can give fake authors an ill-gotten boost.


Second, Shafik didn’t completely remove Bandyopadhyay. He was given a “special thanks” in the paper. While that doesn’t carry nearly the weight of co-authorship, it does give some credit and likely ensures that Bandyopadhyay was aware of the publication.


If one were trying to pull a fast one, omitting the co-author completely would make more sense.


Finally, the final paper was published in Oxford Economic Papers. It’s a well-respected journal. Assuming that the working paper publication was disclosed, which it should have been, the journal was almost certainly made aware of the reasons for the change in authorship. It’s unlikely that it would have published the paper without a valid reason.


So, while it is theoretically possible that Shafik removed her co-author from the final paper, failed to disclose the working paper publication, and did so with the intent of robbing Bandyopadhyay of credit, it doesn’t seem likely. Other reasons simply sound more plausible at this time.


Bottom Line
It’s easy to compare this case to the ones made against other university presidents and administrators. However, this one is different in just about every way. The allegations are from a different source, they deal with different issues and the evidence of wrongdoing is, at this moment, very weak.


Yes, what Mobarak accuses Shafik of doing is at least theoretically possible. But at this time the evidence doesn’t support that and there are still innocent explanations as to what happened.


Shafik, for her part, has not responded to the allegations. However, given events going on at her school and elsewhere, that is hardly a surprise.


It is premature to accuse Shafik of plagiarism or authorship integrity violations without knowing why Bandyopadhyay was dropped as a coauthor. While it is unusual, it’s not, by itself, an indication of plagiarism or other wrongdoing.


This is a classic case of seeing somthing unusual and jumping to the most egregious conclusion. It is technically possible, but we have to eliminate some more mundane explanations first.



Wiley just pulled a bunch of journal articles because of AI:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/16/wiley_journals_ai/




Wiley shuts 19 scholarly journals amid AI paper mill problems
38 comment bubble on white
Fake science challenges academic publishing
iconThomas Claburn
Thu 16 May 2024 // 17:13 UTC
US publishing house Wiley this week discontinued 19 scientific journals overseen by its Hindawi subsidiary, the center of a long-running scholarly publishing scandal.


In December 2023 Wiley announced it would stop using the Hindawi brand, acquired in 2021, following its decision in May 2023 to shut four of its journals "to mitigate against systematic manipulation of the publishing process."


Hindawi's journals were found to be publishing papers from paper mills – organizations or groups of individuals who try to subvert the academic publishing process for financial gain. Over the past two years, a Wiley spokesperson told The Register, the publisher has retracted more than 11,300 papers from its Hindawi portfolio.


As described in a Wiley-authored white paper published last December, "Tackling publication manipulation at scale: Hindawi’s journey and lessons for academic publishing," paper mills rely on various unethical practices – such as the use of AI in manuscript fabrication and image manipulations, and gaming the peer review process.


The Hindawi affair coincided with the departure of Wiley president and CEO Brian Napack in October, 2023. In its fiscal Q2 2024 earnings report [PDF] last December, Wiley admitted its $18 million decline in research publishing revenue was "mainly due to the Hindawi publishing disruption."


In January, Wiley signed on to United2Act – an industry initiative to combat paper mills.


But the concern over scholarly research integrity isn't confined to Wiley publications. A study published in Nature last July suggests as many as a quarter of clinical trials are problematic or entirely fabricated.


The increasing availability and sophistication of generative AI is not the only factor contributing to the academic publishing crisis, but AI tools make fakery easier.


"The industry recognizes that AI is utilized by paper mills to generate fraudulent content," Wiley's spokesperson told us. "We've recently introduced a new screening technology that helps identify papers with potential misuse of generative AI before the point of publication."


According to a preprint paper released in February, the volume of papers submitted to ArXiv increased considerably in the top three categories between 2019 and 2023 – a period that roughly coincides with the debut of tools like ChatGPT. Computer science papers increased by 200 percent during these four years, followed by physics papers (45 percent) and mathematics (22 percent).


OpenAI says natively multimodal GPT-4o eats text, visuals, sound – and emits the same
Prof asks court to protect his Unfollow Everything 2.0 extension from Facebook's ire
Microsoft teases deepfake AI that's too powerful to release
H-1B visa fraud alive and well amid efforts to crack down on abuse
Academic publishers, however, appear to want the benefits of AI writing assistance without the downsides. Springer Nature, for example, last October launched Curie – an AI-powered writing assistant intended to help scientists whose first language is not English. Hence calls for better tools [PDF] to detect generative AI output – a call answered by recent efforts to improve AI content watermarking – which some researchers argue won't work.


A Wiley spokesperson characterized the decision to shut the 19 journals as part of its previously announced plan to integrate the Hindawi and Wiley portfolios, and distinct from the paper mill issue.


"As part of this integration, and as is standard practice, we reviewed our journal portfolio and decided to close 19 Hindawi journals that no longer serve their communities," the spokesperson told The Register.


"It is important to draw a distinction between the journal closures occurring now as part of our portfolio integration and the four journals closed in May 2023. The journals closed in May 2023 were heavily impacted by paper mills to such an extent it was in the best interest of the scholarly community to discontinue them immediately."


Meanwhile, in Wiley's fiscal Q3 2024 earnings report, the publisher noted that revenue for its learning division is expected to be toward the higher end of projections due to "Q4 content rights deals for training AI models." ®

[fj1200]

I thought the same. Wasn't just Gay at Harvard either. Seems another biggie in academia, maybe Stanford?
Wiley just pulled a bunch of journal articles because of AI:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/16/wiley_journals_ai/

Reason Magazine just did a thing on it but I can't find the video. They've got a guy there that breaks down bad studies because of reliance on dubious statistics. He explains things extremely well. Found it.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mukuxnQxBU4

Other articles on paper mills as you mention etc.

[Kathianne]

Reason Magazine just did a thing on it but I can't find the video. They've got a guy there that breaks down bad studies because of reliance on dubious statistics. He explains things extremely well. Found it.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mukuxnQxBU4

Other articles on paper mills as you mention etc.
Pretty sure that's the issue with Wiley. I can't find it, but know I saw something about 1000s of articles from another country. Wiley publishes the most journals by far.

[Gunny]

This is sad, it prevented other studies from gaining traction:


https://hotair.com/david-strom/2024/06/07/most-significant-scientific-retraction-ever-n3789789People and their money. Altruism at its finest:smoke:

[Kathianne]

Wow, one article 2 points. Note you need to go to site to get full story:

1. Adds to fj and my discussion on what's being published and pulled. Science?

2. If I'm following right, the journal article basically is blaming the likes of rev for so much angst! In a journal article. For medicine. Unreal.


https://hotair.com/david-strom/2024/06/07/how-far-have-medical-journals-fallen-this-far-n3789831


How Far Have Medical Journals Fallen? This FarDAVID STROM 5:20 PM | June 07, 2024



Salvatore Di Nolfi/Keystone via AP
It's not just medical journals, actually, but the decline in medical journals matters perhaps more than that of any other kind of scientific publication.


Earlier today, I wrote about the retraction of an enormously influential paper on Alzheimer's disease in the journal Nature. That paper revolutionized research into how Alzheimer's might be cured, and the fact that it was fraudulent means that 15 years of research and billions of dollars have probably been wasted.


Perhaps in that case, Nature might be forgiven because it was a case of fraud. But how does one explain the publication of this article in The Lancet?




It is a screed, pure and simple—an expression of rage against ordinary people who don't bow down to the failed World Health Organization. It has no argument, presents no facts, and imparts nothing new or worth considering. It is the sort of thing one might be subjected to by a leftist uncle at a Thanksgiving dinner: tedious, tendentious, and probably fueled by a bit too much alcohol.


The prospects for this failing system look bleak. Donald Trump again as US President? The far right making electoral gains across Europe? Murderous political leaders able to act with impunity? Purveyors of disinformation, working under the rubric of The Geneva Project, who proclaim that, “We, people of the world, no longer abide by the tyrannical rule of unelected global officials and their vision of the future”? A collection of anti-vaxxers, right-wing activists, and conspiracy theorists gathered at the World Health Assembly on June 1 to declare their opposition to WHO's efforts to negotiate a pandemic agreement. What is the cause of this breakdown of belief in an international community? There are many possible culprits. Racism. Populism. Nationalism. But I think it was Dr Ghada who identified one especially important root cause: the loss of our humanity. The system is failing because our humanity—our compassion towards each other—has been eroded and, in some instances, erased. We are numb to one another's pain. We refuse to see the distress of our neighbour. We turn away from the misery of others. We seem to be hardly human anymore.


There are so many things wrong with this screed, not the least of which is that it is utterly ahistorical. It ignores not only the past five years, in which the WHO and the entire public health establishment got nearly every single thing wrong but also the history of humanity in itself.


Are we more racist than in the past? Hardly. More populist? Well, perhaps more than 20 years ago, but not more than 70. Populism arises when elites fail, so if populism has risen it is due to the failures of people like him. Today's populism is a result of the 2008 financial crisis and everything that followed, culminating in the conspiracy of the elites against ordinary people we experienced during COVID.


Nationalism? Oh, come on! Compared to when? Again, whatever minor bump in nationalism exists is due to the mass importation of migrants from the Third World into Western countries. It is a reaction to the anti-nationalism of the elites who have contempt for our societies.


This was a cri de coeur written by a person whose attachment to humanity extends all the way from billionaires to bureaucrats, excluding anybody whose income is below six figures.


That this appeared in a medical journal tells you exactly how much you should trust our current scientific elite: they don't care about you and me. They demand power, wealth, submission, and, above all, respect from normies.


Humanity? It is not we who have lost it. Look in the mirror, sociopath.

[revelarts]

Wow, one article 2 points. Note you need to go to site to get full story:

1. Adds to fj and my discussion on what's being published and pulled. Science?

2. If I'm following right, the journal article basically is blaming the likes of rev for so much angst! In a journal article. For medicine. Unreal.


https://hotair.com/david-strom/2024/06/07/how-far-have-medical-journals-fallen-this-far-n3789831

"the likes of rev"
I told you they were after me.

:coffee:

:cool:

[Kathianne]

"the likes of rev"
I told you they were after me.

:coffee:

:cool:


Yeah, you may be a peacenik! But you're our peacenik! LOL! Seriously, I get your hopes, I just disagree on the reality. Good people can disagree.

[revelarts]

the theme of "science" explored
http://www.debatepolicy.com/showthread.php?41835-Science-is-Dogma