Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza retracts four papers
retractionwatch.com
retractionwatch.com
https://forbetterscience.com/2020/10/07/gregg-semenza-real-n...
There's a big range between "grad student loaded the wrong file when making sub-panel 3d" and "explicitly falsified images to support an hypothesis". This article certainly makes it seem like the latter.
Science is a human endeavor and there will always be people trying to game the system The good news is, an awful lot of cheaters get caught these days and it's getting riskier all the time.
When you take a look it seems inescapable some images were first copied then edited with a tool to move around sub-pieces like blocks in a puzzle, then presented as a different image along side the original.
Literally this seems like some kind of Photoshopping rather than misplacing images. Can’t see how this could be done accidentally.
Every endeavor has some grift, but this is extensive malfeasance by high ranking cancer scientists, following shortly after it happened in Alzheimer’s research:
- don't say "there is a concern the figure is wrong". Concern is not the salient point - correctness is. Is the data wrong or right?
- why are we focusing on the figures at all? Is the data correct but the figures don't represent? Or is the incorrect data correctly represented by the figures? This is a critical point left unaddressed
For bonus points, identify the use of the passive voice in the previous sentence--not every use of the passive is exonerative, just as you can be exonerative without using the passive.
I don't mean to defend Strunk and White any more than the next guy, but comments like this one make me think the pendulum can also swing back too far. If my pedantry annoys you, please feel free to disregard... I'm cringing at the realization that I just spent the last 5 minutes writing out this comment.
[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/grammar/british-grammar/...
But people like to add some technical detail to their argument, such as stating that the sentence is written in the passive voice, as if that proves their point. Strunk and White (and the countless people that mindlessly copied them) have made the passive voice the perfect candidate for this, to the point where it becomes an accusation, and any accusation of hiding agency is simply called "passive voice."
But the analysis that the actor is missing is also shallow. In scientific communication, the actor often doesn't matter. It's the why, the how, the what a paper need to answer, not the who. The authors take responsibility for the (unconfirmed) fault. In that sense, there's little to critique about the passage, whereas the commenter makes it sound like a cover-up. If (s)he wants to know whose concerns they were, just say so, and state the reason, but don't hide it behind a (wrong) technicality. That just makes it look like the pot calling the kettle black.
But we can get lost in technical subclassification, when saying something is written in the passive voice is not the most precise term, even when it's obvious what is meant. Strunk and White, and the countless people who've used their rules of thumb, have helped popularise common ways of identifying why communication is unsatisfying or vague, and how to fix them.
But you saying pot calling the kettle black is also shallow. In no way was the comment written in the (right and true, or Strunk and White) passive voice, which would be the correct way to deploy that phrase. If you want to disagree, then do so, but don't hide behind a (wrong) idiom. That just makes a hot potato look like a piece of cake.
For example:
Retraction: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2213288119 Paper: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1321510111
This could be a fundamental problem with the experiments that possibly could invalidate the conclusions or just a bug when creating figures for the paper. But if it was the latter surely a correction could be made fairly quickly - which suggests it's the former.
"Confirmatory experimentation has now been performed and the results can be found in a preprint article posted on bioRxiv, ‘Homeostatic responses to hypoxia by the carotid body and adrenal medulla are based on mutual antagonism between HIF-1α and HIF-2α’"
> the pseudonymous Claire Francis began pointing out potential image duplications and other manipulations in Semenza’s work on PubPeer
A bit early to say "it worked" as everything here just happened.
However, the spirit of the prize seems to be around prize-worthy effort or achievement of the past, like discoveries or inventions.
It makes sense that as long as those are truthful, it doesn't get retracted (like the peace prize going to Aung San Suu Kyi in 1991, but later she helped with mass killings of Muslim Rohingya).
But in the case where the discovery/invention was not truthful and instead made up, there should definitely be a retraction as the discovery wasn't made/invention didn't work.
So, congratulations to Semenza for hacking the lottery.
From the NYTimes article: "Many men were coughing up bloody fluid from a condition called swimming-induced pulmonary edema — a potentially life-threatening ailment that is so common among men training in the frigid water at BUD/S that SEALs refer to it casually by the acronym SIPE.
"[...] Seaman Mullen showed up for his second attempt at BUD/S in January with fresh determination and a used car. But by the end of the second week, he was spitting up bloody fluid and struggling to breathe.
"“I said, go to the hospital right away,” his mother recalled. “He said, ‘No, ma, if you want to go to the hospital, they will make you quit first. Besides, it’s just SIPE.’”
"Ms. Mullen said her son, on the advice of other SEAL candidates, started secretly taking the erectile dysfunction drug Viagra, which was against Navy rules but used by SEALs as a potential treatment for SIPE. He recovered enough to keep training.""
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/30/us/navy-seal-training-dea...
> "Sobering read. I really hope steroid use at BUDS isn't as big as this article purports it to be"
>> "It’s pretty accurate, the instructors even make jokes about it “Your roid rage is showing sir”"
>> "How could it not be, anabolics increase performance far outside the natural range and/or let you maintain what you could achieve naturally with far less effort. The effects can last well beyond when you stop taking them. You could take them from 18-21, keep training and join at 22 without testing positive but retaining a large (physical) advantage"
It's also very plausible from the NYTimes's article alone, from the report that the instructors had stopped testing for steroids, so there was no enforcement mechanism to stop the behavior.
> “What am I going to do with guys like that in a place like Afghanistan?” said the leader. “A guy who can do 100 pull-ups but can’t make an ethical decision?”
is joining the US military an ethical decision ?
have the navy seals ever fought in US soil ?
In sports, there is an expectation of fair competition which is violated when someone is using any kind assistance, one type of which are performance enhancing drugs.
In military, on the other hand, there is no expectation of a fair competition, and exploiting any unfair advantage over the opponent is actively desired. There a genuine need to get things done, and the only concern is the impact on health - militaries have historically used all kinds of performance enhancing drugs, e.g. amphetamines as 'go pills' for USA Cold war pilots, Pervitin in WW2, etc.
In the military, one of the values is supposed to be integrity. The value of integrity isn't just idealistic: it's pragmatically important to military strategy to avoid committing war crimes, as it lessens public support for the military action among the citizenry. The public can then vote out the administration, where a future one can scale back the war effort. As evidence this is a value, the Navy SEALs in particular says [0]: "Uncompromising integrity is my standard. My character and honor are steadfast. My word is my bond."
On the health risk to recruits, from the NYTimes article : "It is hard to say what role performance-enhancing drugs played in one death when there are so many other complicating factors, said Dr. Matthew Fedoruk, the chief science officer of the United States Anti-Doping Agency. Even so, he said, the chemicals some sailors are relying on can interfere with the function of the heart, liver and other critical organs that are already under incredible stress from the brutal training.
"If enough people in a community are doping, he said, it spreads risk even to those who are clean, as the level of competition rises and more people are pushed to exhaustion and injury.
"“It makes it that much harder for the people doing the right thing to shine,” he said."
The military can either allow performance-enhancing drugs for all and provide adequate medical monitoring to avoid unnecessary deaths, or enforce the rules as written and test for it. Unnecessary deaths are in no one's interests within the country.
That's officially forbidden by the rules of their training so it's cheating.