He hunts sloppy scientists. He finds a lot of prey.

Are you done hunting scientists for the day?

I don’t have time today. But if I spent a few hours reading the paper, he would probably write 4-5 comments about mistakes in scientific papers. These problems are not hard to find, and they are not hard to find in any institution. If anyone wants to read scientific literature, they can find it all.

What motivates you to take the time to do it?

I’m not an anti-vaxxer or some weird conspiracy theorist. I am a scientist myself and am interested in understanding science correctly.

We’ll focus in part on images that are mislabeled or used twice in a paper, but another piece of evidence is that they’re slowly cut and pasted from one place to another. Is there an easy way to tell if the image is incorrect?

Just look at the photo and read the label. For example, looking at a micrograph of a cell can tell you the location, position, orientation, and shape of the cell. And if you look at another picture of a cell and they’re all in the same position and have the same shape and orientation, you know this is the same image, right? It’s not a complicated process.

We also identified errors in Western blots. what are those?

These are a type of scientific experiment used to identify and quantify specific proteins. Images are important in many scientific papers. The background appears gray with black bands. If you look closely at them, you can usually tell if it’s a copy-and-paste job. These things are not always obvious to someone who doesn’t look into Western blots much.

Let’s move on to Dana-Farber. What inferences do you draw about a prominent institution’s scientific methods after discovering errors in several of its researchers’ papers?

It is important to remember that Dana-Farber researchers have published many papers. However, there are still many errors and they occur over a long period of time. This shows that for a long time people did not pay enough attention to getting the basics right. How many sloppy mistakes can we tolerate from top institutions? Probably not many. I think most people would expect Harvard scientists to not make copy-and-paste mistakes often.