Quote:As I understand it, the claims made in the paper are supported by the images. That isn't the problem. The problem is that the images are not totally "original", and in one case the area that is altered is in a location that may have contained a band indicating the presence of a protein that would contradict the paper's conclusions. Reviewing that image very, very carefully would have led to (and did support) the paper's conclusions. Only if one examined the image with special software would it's provenance been in question. It is also probable at the time this data was published that software didn't yet exist. Was there a band there? We don't know.
Not really sure what you're saying here. But some important things A) even "cleaning up" images is bad, important to understand. Not behavior to emulate. And B) in the Cell paper, some conclusions rest on the presence of a certainly falsified band on the Western blot. He was senior author.
Quote:Last week, Bik found another manipulated image in that paper, which she says appears to be “deliberately changing the results” and could indicate data falsification. Cell Press said the “new concerns … warrant a closer look” and it now plans to investigate. The only authors on all three challenged papers are Tessier-Lavigne and a postdoc then at UCSF who apparently hasn’t published a paper since 2012. She did not respond to emails from Science.
From above linked Science editorial.
MTL is not innocent here, that much is really beyond dispute. It's just a matter of how guilty.