I wrote about Amy Wax, who is a flamboyantly villainous evil professor. She’s still employed by UPenn, still has tenure, and despite fierce censure isn’t at real risk for losing her job. It made me think of a less cartoonishly bad person employed at the University of Minnesota.
Back in 2021, a paper was published that flagged a specific molecule, Aβ*56, as a likely causative agent in Alzheimer’s disease. It came out of the lab of Karen Ashe at the University of Minnesota, and the first author was Sylvain Lesne, a junior associate of Ashe’s. Shortly afterwards, people noticed that some of the data figures had been manipulated. It was obvious. It was the kind of thing that can’t happen accidentally — someone had to have intentionally gone in and shifted bands and added data to the figures.
Ashe has said the right thing, I think.
“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.”
I’m willing to believe she didn’t know — I know how PI’s work. She has a team of people who do the actual scientific observations, and they bring images to her, and she trusts them and doesn’t pull up the raw data to scrutinize it with a microscope. But then, if she didn’t do it, who did?
I’m going to guess it wasn’t gremlins scampering about the lab. It wasn’t the custodians maliciously tinkering with the computers while cleaning up late at night. We have to ask who benefits from making the data ‘better,’ and the answer is…Sylvain Lesne. Who is now a full professor at the University of Minnesota. Cool. Although I’d never trust his work after this.
This fraud may not be as damaging as one might fear. I’d guess that the lab already had a fair amount of evidence that Aβ*56 was important; the fraudster wouldn’t invent a new phenomenon out of whole cloth, they’d just make the data they’ve got stronger.
There have been no repercussions to any of the people involved. They all agree (except Lesne, who has been silent) that fraud occurred, that it was done by someone named on the paper, but…nope, nothing has been done.
I find that extremely disturbing, that there is false evidence floating around in the literature, and no culprit has been recognized, and no one is even trying to find out who is responsible. I once found that our distilled water system was producing slightly contaminated water, and I spent days tearing down the still and scrubbing and sterilizing every component to remove the problem, but a taint in the research system? Nah, we can’t do anything about that.
I think it’s a bit unfair to say nothing has been done. Papers have been retracted and Lesne is being investigated.
There’s a bad actor problem in politics as well. Twice in the last half century, the Republican Party has selected an actor from television or the movies as its presidential candidate. Bad things ensued.
Up to 20 Lesné papers are being investigated.
https://www.alzforum.org/news/community-news/sylvain-lesne-who-found-av56-accused-image-manipulation
If you’re not part of the solution, there’s money to be made in prolonging the problem.
How many grants do you think Lesne gets from the pharmaceutical industry?
Its a problem for everyone involved. I know of a scandal involving multiple false papers in palaeontology all leading back to a single researcher. They Covered a diverse array of fossils and were typically written in collaboration with trusting experts in the particular group of fossils. His fakery was detected early on but wasn’t common knowledge and generally spread locally by word of mouth. Meanwhile his “impressive” publication record resulted in research and travel grants which in many cases he used to produce further fabricated papers. By the time he was exposed he had produced hundreds of suspect papers many with acknowledged but unsuspecting experts experts to lend them legitimacy. The result was that many of these had their own work put on hold and funding all but frozen while they were investigated. The researchers own institution had desperately needed funding withdrawn and teaching and research suffered. The perpetrator was promoted and proceeded to take revenge on local researchers who had helped to expose him.
I’ve never been in the position of being head of a large research team, but I like to think I would take the time to check the raw data on any paper that had my name on it, especially if I were one of the senior scientists. It doesn’t mean that bad data couldn’t possibly slip through, but as the Science article you linked to says, this didn’t require checking the photos with a microscope — the manipulation was ‘shockingly blatant’, even to an investigator who did not have access to the original photographs.
I’m not saying this to criticise Ashe. The problem is with the current scientific publish-or-perish environment which makes it easy for fraudulent or self-delusional data to slip past even experienced researchers when volume of published papers is the core metric for career advancement.