[chimera]

so what do folks think of chimera's post that, when she worked in a similar lab, the pi and junior scientists and techs met for hours looking at their images and debating whether the results were significant? 

these images are not like graphs or figures representing the data. these are the data.

i, for one, trust her personal experience that neuroscientists don't just publish these images without reviewing them very very carefully.

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.

If one looks at the lab notebooks kept by most graduate students, there are lots of things missing that should be there. They still get signed. Even if one looks at the lab notebooks of most biotech companies there are plenty of things not done perfectly or completely. Only things that are going to be externally audited are going to be a priority to get right. It is also often true that the things one wants to know retrospectively about a certain experiment were not recorded because it wasn't at all obvious they mattered. People end up interrogating the technicians hoping they recall the missing pieces. These things happen even when everybody is doing their best. If somebody is photoshopping, the odds of getting caught aren't all that great.

I worked for many years in a lab and did a whole lot of Western blots (and a bunch of other types, oh the blots, always with the blots).  I looked carefully at the images that were in the stories and to me it looked reasonably obvious that some images were re-used and portions of some images had been manipulated.  Maybe I am wrong about that because I know something is off so I am looking in a way I would not be if I did not already know that.  But sure looked to me that the problems in some of those images would have been something that a PI who was looking carefully at all the images in the paper and who was reasonably familiar with the work being done would have noticed (as I would hope someone with authorship would be even if the work was done in another lab).  We used to ask for and get pics of the work done in other labs so we could see what they chose to include in the paper out of what they had in regards to a specific figure or image, especially stuff like blots that they probably did a lot of.  Blots are easy to evaluate.  They are also easy to mis-use and manipulate.

[chimera]

so what do folks think of chimera's post that, when she worked in a similar lab, the pi and junior scientists and techs met for hours looking at their images and debating whether the results were significant? 

these images are not like graphs or figures representing the data. these are the data.

i, for one, trust her personal experience that neuroscientists don't just publish these images without reviewing them very very carefully.

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.

If one looks at the lab notebooks kept by most graduate students, there are lots of things missing that should be there. They still get signed. Even if one looks at the lab notebooks of most biotech companies there are plenty of things not done perfectly or completely. Only things that are going to be externally audited are going to be a priority to get right. It is also often true that the things one wants to know retrospectively about a certain experiment were not recorded because it wasn't at all obvious they mattered. People end up interrogating the technicians hoping they recall the missing pieces. These things happen even when everybody is doing their best. If somebody is photoshopping, the odds of getting caught aren't all that great.

I worked for many years in a lab and did a whole lot of Western blots (and a bunch of other types, oh the blots, always with the blots).  I looked carefully at the images that were in the stories and to me it looked reasonably obvious that some images were re-used and portions of some images had been manipulated.  Maybe I am wrong about that because I know something is off so I am looking in a way I would not be if I did not already know that.  But sure looked to me that the problems in some of those images would have been something that a PI who was looking carefully at all the images in the paper and who was reasonably familiar with the work being done would have noticed (as I would hope someone with authorship would be even if the work was done in another lab).  We used to ask for and get pics of the work done in other labs so we could see what they chose to include in the paper out of what they had in regards to a specific figure or image, especially stuff like blots that they probably did a lot of.  Blots are easy to evaluate.  They are also easy to mis-use and manipulate.