[jonnyss]

Excellent post that summarizes better than I could what matters in all this. It's untenable for him to be an example of scientific leadership and it's baffling to me that apparently most of the BOT doesn't grasp that.

I guess my reaction is a bit different. Does anybody seriously believe that the senior author on the vast majority of scientific publications has verified the provenance of all (actually any of) the data contained therein? They are not in the lab physically watching all the experiments that are done. In many cases they are collaborating with colleagues that are not even at the same institution. Some of the larger labs have 70 or 80 graduate students who are working under supervision of post-docs that the PI actually doesn't know all that well. While some may operate in the fantasy world where all the PIs are intimately involved in every experiment and actually know what is going on in all aspects of their labs, that is simply not how it is. I think in many cases the best one can hope for is that the PI has actually read the paper before it was submitted :-).

It isn't a good system in many ways, but it is the system we have. It relies on the honesty of a lot of people. In point of fact, artifacts are sometimes the basis of some paper's data. There are so many papers published that contain data that will never be important enough to reproduce that many such thing go unnoticed for years. I think there are probably more honest errors than fraud. How many papers are published that are the result of something finally "working" after many failures? How many PIs insist on the data being reliably reproducible?

sure, unnoticed by some busy scientists. but, if i understand the chronology, mtl had previously self-reported to a journal errors in images in one of his articles. i would certainly expect him to be vigilant for such errors in the future. that he was not seems quite problematic. to me, it looks like, when the first journal said, "don't worry about it," he felt emboldened either to allow falsification in the future or at least to look the other way.

elizabeth holmes also tried the "someone else was responsible for data integrity" strategy.

[jonnyss]

Excellent post that summarizes better than I could what matters in all this. It's untenable for him to be an example of scientific leadership and it's baffling to me that apparently most of the BOT doesn't grasp that.

I guess my reaction is a bit different. Does anybody seriously believe that the senior author on the vast majority of scientific publications has verified the provenance of all (actually any of) the data contained therein? They are not in the lab physically watching all the experiments that are done. In many cases they are collaborating with colleagues that are not even at the same institution. Some of the larger labs have 70 or 80 graduate students who are working under supervision of post-docs that the PI actually doesn't know all that well. While some may operate in the fantasy world where all the PIs are intimately involved in every experiment and actually know what is going on in all aspects of their labs, that is simply not how it is. I think in many cases the best one can hope for is that the PI has actually read the paper before it was submitted :-).

It isn't a good system in many ways, but it is the system we have. It relies on the honesty of a lot of people. In point of fact, artifacts are sometimes the basis of some paper's data. There are so many papers published that contain data that will never be important enough to reproduce that many such thing go unnoticed for years. I think there are probably more honest errors than fraud. How many papers are published that are the result of something finally "working" after many failures? How many PIs insist on the data being reliably reproducible?

sure, unnoticed by some busy scientists. but, if i understand the chronology, mtl had previously self-reported to a journal errors in images in one of his articles. i would certainly expect him to be vigilant for such errors in the future. that he was not seems quite problematic. to me, it looks like, when the first journal said, "don't worry about it," he felt emboldened either to allow falsification in the future or at least to look the other way.

elizabeth holmes also tried the "someone else was responsible for data integrity" strategy.