Comment on 2015 mRNA paper suggests data re-used in different contexts
66 comments
·January 16, 2025philipwhiuk
dang
Ok, we've changed it. Submitted title was "Same three bands appear in three different presentations with different labels".
picture (the submitter) had the right idea—it's often better to take a subtitle or a representative sentence from the article when an original title isn't suitable for whatever reason, but since in this case it's ambiguous, we can change it.
If there's a better phrase from the article itself, we can change it again.
fabian2k
Even for people familiar with the field this title is a bit hard to parse at first without context. "bands" really needs either gels or gel electrophoresis as context.
null
ActionHank
As someone clueless about music and mRNA I've got to say this wouldn't help me much.
hinkley
“We are no longer called Sonic Death Monkey. We are on the verge of being called Kathleen Turner Overdrive, however this evening we will be Barry Jive, and the Uptown Five.”
null
snowwrestler
There is so little content and context to this link that it is essentially flame war bait in a non-expert forum like HN.
5mk
I've always wondered about gel image fraud -- what's stopping fraudulent researchers from just running a dummy gel for each fake figure? If you just loaded some protein with a similar MW / migration / concentration as the one you're trying to spoof, the bands would look more or less indistinguishable. And because it's a real unique band (just with the wrong protein), you wouldn't be able to tell it's been faked using visual inspection.
Perhaps this is already happening, and we just don't know it... In this way I've always thought gel images were more susceptible to fraud vs. other commonly faked images (NMR / MS spectra etc, which are harder to spoof)
fabian2k
Gel electrophoresis data or Western/Southern/Northern blots are not hard to fake. Nobody seeing the images can tell what you put into each pocket of your gel. And for the blots nobody can tell which kind of antibody you used. It's still not totally effortless to fake as you have to find another protein with the right weight, this is not necessarily something you have just lying around.
I'd also suspect that fraud does not necessarily start at the beginning of the experiments, but might happen at a later stage when someone realizes their results didn't turn out as expected or wanted. At that point you already did the gels and it might be much more convenient to just do image manipulation.
Something like NMR data is certainly much more difficult to fake convincingly, especially if you'd have to provide the original raw datasets at publication (which unfortunately isn't really happening yet).
dylan604
Isn't this the plot for pretty much every movie about science research fraud? When Richard Kimble was chasing his one arm man, it led to the doctor using the same data to make the research look good. I know this is not the only example.
hinkley
You switched the samples! In the pathology reports! Did you kill Lentz too!?
kylebenzle
"Whats stopping?" nothing, and that is why it is happening constantly. A larger and larger portion of scientific literature is riddled with these fake studies. I've seen it myself and it is going to keep increasing as long as the number of papers published is the only way to get ahead.
smusamashah
They have a playlist of 3500 videos showing images like this one
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlXXK20HE_dV8rBa2h-8P9d-0...
null
sega_sai
At least this paper has only 43 citations over last 10 years, which is really nothing for Nature, which means it's basically irrelevant. (Obviously it is still a good idea to identify cheaters)
owlninja
I guess I'll bite - what am I looking at here?
the__alchemist
An (agarose?) gel.
There are partial holes in at at one end. You insert a small amount of dyed DNA (etc) containing solution each. Apply an electrical potential across the gel. DNA gradually moves along. Smaller DNA fragments move faster. So, at a given time, you can coarsely measure fragment size of a given sample. Your absolute scale is given by "standards", aka "ladders" that have samples of multiple, known sizes.
The paper authors cheated (allegedly) by copy + pasting images of the gel. This is what was caught, so it implies they may have made up some or all results in this and other papers.
shpongled
Close - this is a SDS-PAGE gel, and you run it using proteins. The bands in the first two rows are from a western blot (gel is transferred to a membrane), where you use antibodies against those specific proteins to detect them. The Pon S row is Ponceau S, a dye that non-specifically detects all proteins - so it's used as a loading control, to make sure that the same amount of total protein is loaded in each lane of the gel.
doctorpangloss
Is it conceivable that the control was run once because the key result came from the same run? I can see a reviewer asking for it in all three figures, whereas they may drafted it only in one
hummuscience
This is protein on a western blot but the general idea is the same.
owlninja
I love HN - thanks!
IshKebab
Faked scientific results.
sergiotapia
what happens to people who do this? are they shunned forever from scientific endeavors? isn't this the ultimate betrayal of what a scientist is supposed to do?
Palomides
if caught and it's unignorable, usually they say "oops, we made a minor unintentional mistake while preparing the data for publication, but the conclusion is still totally valid"
generally, no consequences
f1shy
This guy made some videos about it
doodda
Here's me, clicking and expecting to read about someone fleecing Spotify by setting up fake bands.
philipwhiuk
Whereas actually Spotify funds artificial bands because they're more profitable
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...
lxe
Not just same bands, but same noise and artifacts too. They copypasted the data?
w10-1
The opportunity here is to automate detection of fake data used in papers.
I could be hard to do without access to data and costly integration. And like shorting, the difficulty is how to monetize. It could also be easy to game. Still...
The nice thing about the business is that market (publishing) is flourishing. Not sure about state of the art or availability of such services.
For sales: run it on recent publications, and quietly ping the editors with findings and a reasonable price.
Unclear though whether to brand in a user-visible way (i.e., where the journal would report to readers that you validate their stuff). It could drive uptake, but a glaring false negative would be a risk.
Structurally, perhaps should be a non-profit (which of course can accumulate profits at will). Does YC do deals without ownership, e.g., with profit-sharing agreements?
captn3m0
Elizabeth Bik (who is known for submitting such reports to journals) has a nice interview about this problem[0], which covers software as well.
> After I raised my concerns about 4% of papers having image problems, some other journals upped their game and have hired people to look for these things. This is still mainly being done I believe by humans, but there is now software on the market that is being tested by some publishers to screen all incoming manuscripts. The software will search for duplications but can also search for duplicated elements of photos against a database of many papers, so it’s not just screening within a paper or across two papers or so, but it is working with a database to potentially find many more examples of duplications. I believe one of the software packages that is being tested is Proofig.
Proofig makes a lot of claims but they also list a lot of journals: https://www.proofig.com/
[0]: https://thepublicationplan.com/2022/11/29/spotting-fake-imag...
barbazoo
Would this imply that someone faked data in a paper they published?
UltraSane
Hard to explain how else it could happen.
emeraldd
Could this be a repeat of the Xerox image duplication bug? https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres...
jldugger
In different documents?
boogieknite
any reason hanlons razor doesnt apply here? honest question, im just a regular 4 year degree off to work guy
the__alchemist
There are perverse incentives in scientific publishing, and there are not many alternative explanations.
o11c
"Adequately" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in Hanlon's Razor. A good corollary to keep in mind is "Never attribute to stupidity what is better explained by malice." I usually apply this to politics, but science publishing is 90% politics, so it still fits.
Lammy
So sick of Hanlon's Razor. It's just a gift to the actually-malicious. If the outcome is the same then intentions don't matter.
readthenotes1
Here's how the razor applies: There is no real malice behind all the fraud in science publications. The authors aren't usually out to specifically harm others.
However, in the long run it is stupid because of two and a half reasons:
- it reduces people's trust in science because it is obvious we cannot trust the scientists which in the long run will reduce public funding for The grift
- it causes misallocation of funds by people misled by the grift and this may lead you actual harm (e.g., what if you catch Alzheimer's but there is no cure because you lied about the causes 20 years ago?)
1/2- there is a chance that you will get caught, and like the former president of Stanford, not be allowed to continue bilking the gullible. This only gets half a point because the repercussions are generally not immediate and definitely not devastating to those who do it skillfully.
cosmojg
Ooh, I love that this website exists, and major props to whoever made that visualization!
bdangubic
damn you spotify … :)
Can someone change the title to:
"Comment on Nature paper on 2015 mRNA paper suggests data re-used in different contexts"
The current title would suggest music to most lay-people.