Karin Dahlman-Wright director of KI’s new research infrastructure organisation Karolinska Institutet has appointed Professor Karin Dahlman-Wright as director of KI’s new research infrastructure organisation, RIKI, with effect from 1 April. RIKI provides the tools, methods, techn...

Former Rector Karin Dahlman-Wright, who was foind guilty of research fraud and sued to avoid sacking, triumphantly returns to @ki.se !
news.ki.se/karin-dahlma...

A Researcher's Sleuthing Journey and How It Led to a $15M Case · Luma A couple months ago, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute agreed to pay $15 million to settle fraud allegations tied to manipulated research images in NIH-funded…

I will chat to Patrick from ImageTwin this week. If you have any questions about the case or analysing images in scientific papers feel free to join. luma.com/0c2016n8

Billionaire with deep pockets I suppose.

Previously featured on ForBetterScience: forbetterscience.com/2025/02/26/t...

Quite how he is allowed to torture mice like this is mysterious to me, but perhaps we will be entertained with a new paper eventually. aacrjournals.org/cancerres/ar...

Lorenzo Cohen at MD Anderson presented "Biofield Therapy" results at AACR last week. "Biofield Therapy" sounds scientific but is just a fancy name for telekinesis - AKA staring at mice. Actual photo from his lab below, now deceased psychic staring at mice. Not clear who does the staring these days.

Chris Gaffe: “Scientific Reports has an in-house team who are dedicated to ensuring that the journal operates with integrity. They are an excellent team who care enormously about the journal and the research it publishes."

"oxygenaonol", "cen̈rifiugation", "Cos aspe-9"

pubpeer.com/publications...

The Trivedi Effect “Mahendrakumar Trivedi does not need a Potion to make you fatter and more delicious; his psychic emanations are enough.”- Smut Clyde

forbetterscience.com/2026/04/07/t...

Yawn. It's not political. Before you bother with another lecture go read the settlement.

The case was filed under the Biden administration. It's not political.

I Sued the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute for Research Fraud and Won $2.6 Million Dollars YouTube video by Sholto David

Now that I have finally been paid I made a video about the Dana-Farber legal case from my own perspective: youtu.be/ioRtnMEV46Y

Gorilla Troops Optimizer!

Obviously, this is not the only great use case of this tortured phrase. See here, in the context of embryo cryopreservation: doi.org/10.31674/boo...

Ahahahahaha. @bmj.com first issued a correction to remove the English guys, Anthony Mathur and Sheik Dowlut, as innocent victims of impersonation.
Only then did BMJ retract that Iranian papermill fraud!
forbetterscience.com/2025/11/05/b...

Brilliant, I was really dumbfounded.

Oh nothing, just a peer reviewed paper my colleagues found...
doi.org/10.1016/j.ma...
"1 mL of the mass killing of an ethnic group was opposed to 20 mL of the skin sample and unprotected to light for 7 min."

Even AI knows what's wrong here, but @elsevierconnect.bsky.social doesn't.

Perfect Blots “A coordinated review of the cited publications and underlying data is currently underway” – Hiroki Kuniyasu

I have been blogging again at For Better Science, this time a case of an epic image fraud from a Japanese lab: forbetterscience.com/2026/03/24/p...

There are some differences; mostly in vertical stretch, quality, brightness and contrast, the image on PubPeer is quite large and the similarities should be clear: pubpeer.com/publications...

The same western blot image used 23 times in 14 different papers by one Japanese team. The image has been labelled as representing a range of experiments and proteins. This is the most I have ever seen. Perhaps it is a record?

Attack is the best form of defence.

In retrospect it was a bad idea to train the LLM on dialog from Tarzan movies.

Scientific Reports 2025: A Year in Review “In this blog I write about papers published by Scientific Reports in 2025, so we could consider it to be a sort of “wrap-up” of highlights and special achievements in the world&#…

Scientific Reports is not a serious journal: forbetterscience.com/2026/01/06/s...

I'm not even convinced that the text was produced by an honest researcher writing in a second language. It appears to be some kind of language transformation, perhaps English into Chinese into English as suggested above. In any case, if you can't read your own paper, you simply shouldn't submit it.

Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science. Evidence of critical issues affecting established journals Probabilistic text generators have been used to produce fake scientific papers for more than a decade. Such nonsensical papers are easily detected by both human and machine. Now more complex AI-powere...

A good observation, this might even be how it was generated, it's not the usual thesaurus type method of traditional tortured phrases: arxiv.org/abs/2107.06751

The rest of the paper is normal?

Just read the abstract 🫠 via Alexander Magazinov. I don't believe he is on Bluesky.

Many papers do not (truthfully) state where they got their cells from. "Acquired from the ATCC seems" like more of an aspirational statement, often papers claim this even when cell lines have never been sold by the ATCC.

This seems to indicate the widespread use of either contaminated cell lines or non-specific antibodies (or worse). Of course since so few papers actually specify what antibodies they used it is quite difficult to pick these things part.

There are a number of cell lines with documented genetic deficiencies: PC-3 cannot express PTEN (PMID: 9661880), A549 cannot express STK11 (LKB1) (10.1038/sj.onc.1207502)... Still, just scrolling through google images you can find recent papers uncritically presenting contradictory results.