8 ms·

Star botanist likely made up data about nutritional supplements, new probe finds

241 points by jyunwai 2y ago

ctoth 2y ago
Disclaimer: I don't know anything about this. My narrative detector is going off. The guy found that most supplements didn't actually have real ingredients, which is incredibly believable. The guy is now being discredited. Does this mean Supplements were fine all along? Somehow I doubt this! Sketchy people on both sides--why are so many industries like this? Supplements are an obvious one but have you tried buying a mattress/adjustable bed recently?
- inglor_cz 2y ago
  The article mentions that he has conflicts of interest. Possibly his intent was to discredit some supplements in order to boost others?
- baxtr 2y ago
  > Thompson, now a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, sparked the initial inquiry. As an undergraduate, he and Newmaster co-authored a 2014 paper on forest plant diversity, published in Biodiversity and Conservation. Years later, while completing his Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Thompson began to suspect that Newmaster had repurposed data from a different study by another student. Sounds legit to me. I think this is more likely explanation due to Occams razor.
- shkkmo 2y ago
  > Sketchy people on both sides You can be on the fench about the efficacy of supplements without supporting a fraudster. One side has a whole slate of respected a scientists in the field call the research papers BS. The other side has a single scientist who hid his conflicts of interests and has a well established pattern of lies.
- tqi 2y ago
  So the evidence to support your prior was believable, and the evidence against that that evidence also supports your prior?
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
I don’t really understand what the evidence was that led to others suspecting falsification here. But in general, the review process for studies has a lot that it simply cannot verify. This is why we need a higher degree of skepticism even around peer reviewed studies and also why we need to create incentives for people who try to reproduce findings, rather than only trying to reward new findings.
- nextos 2y ago
  We also need reproducible results and well-annotated data. In life sciences, there are few to no incentives for making things reproducible. Reproducibility has the potential to expose lots of scams, perhaps even during review stage. The typical scenario right now is that you get access to raw data, often through an application, that can take months and requires having an ethics committee to oversee your work. So, unless you are at an academic institution, you can't get access to any raw data that contains personal information. Raw data will be often poorly annotated and you will need to spend weeks to figure things out, and sometimes significant computing resources to preprocess it. Then, good luck running some badly coded scripts to get the results reported in the article. Studies should provide preprocessed data that has been anonymized and can be freely shared, one-click reproducible results from preprocessed data, well-annotated raw data, and simpler procedures to get access to raw data. For example, a tarball with code, preprocessed data, and a makefile to turn preprocessed data into results reported in the article. Bonus points if dependencies are reproducible, with e.g. a Nix flake.
  - Brybry 2y ago
    > Then, good luck running some badly coded scripts to get the results reported in the article. I think even this part is unlikely? My dad was a statistician involved in research and he didn't provide copies of his SAS programs/scripts to authors. I believe the papers would list what tests he performed but there'd be no easy to way to reproduce the exact script for tests (and certainly no easy way to reproduce exact charts/graphs/maps).
    - 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
killjoywashere 2y ago
I'd like to think that Hanlon's Razor applies, but it appears even the original investigators found faults. I sort of wonder if they were operating under a more restrictive mandate? Also, it doesn't seem that his errors are any validation of the supplements industry "Their influential paper in BMC Medicine, and subsequent work based on Newmaster’s approach, found that many supplements lacked ingredients listed on their labels and that toxic contaminants tainted others. Some stores pulled products from their shelves, and several major supplement companies embraced Newmaster’s work, paying large sums for quality testing by companies Newmaster established just prior to the publication of the paper. " So, he basically generated demand for testing through his own companies. I mean, if this guy was selling cleaning products, tires, or perfume, all's fair in love and war. I think the trick is his academic appointment. If a PhD material scientist or chemist at a university said what the average tire or perfume commercial says, she'd probably find an academic investigation coming down on her head too.
- autoexec 2y ago
  I think many companies hire scientists whose research is designed/manipulated/cheery-picked to produce results that lead to press/headlines/commercial claims which ultimately drive people to buy more of the product. The scientists who worked for the tobacco industry so they could convince the public that smoking was harmless didn't become unemployable. They worked for the oil industry to convince people that climate change wasn't real, and are working to convince the government that food additives are harmless. If you're willing to take money to deliver research for a company that wants to hurt people you'll never be out of work. If this guy had hired someone else to create fake science to drive traffic to his testing centers he'd probably be free and clear.
johnsillings 2y ago
these exposés where famous scientists doctor their data are so depressing
quercusa 2y ago
This could trigger some skepticism: Some stores pulled products from their shelves, and several major supplement companies embraced Newmaster’s work, paying large sums for quality testing by companies Newmaster established just prior to the publication of the paper.
- giarc 2y ago
  I don't think that alone is an issue. It could be seen as just commercializing the research he had done in the university setting. He would have to disclose this in publications (and perhaps he didn't). The university would have to approve (and take their cut). The issue is he seems to have fabricated results that prompted large companies to look for testing and certification and he was there with open arms (and pockets). If some other lab had come out and said "these products don't contain what they say they do" and the vitamin companies contracted his lab, then he wouldn't be in this situation.
mekoka 2y ago
> A 2022 Science investigation found evidence of a broader pattern of fabrication and data manipulation in Newmaster’s speeches, teaching, biographical statements, and scholarly writings over 2 decades. Evidence also suggested Newmaster embellished or simply invented findings or accomplishments, as well as claimed credit for work by others. What I find puzzling about this kind of stories is that the pattern of behavior is usually obvious to all who know the person. Yet, it'll take years before they're found out. We all know people like Newmaster. They may not be scientists, but we recognize the more than usual tendency to exaggerate their accomplishments, the padding of the truth, the selective amnesia about giving credits where it's due. Even if you're just getting to know them, hang around just for a bit and you'll see it, even about meaningless stuff. It's what they do. And if you see it even just once with someone, it should be enough to raise your bs alarms about anything they say.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  My pet theory: Nobody wants to go up against a very charismatic phony in what will almost certainly turn into a battle of wits instead of a battle of facts. Our entire society deifies charismatic phonies. They are the ones that get elevated to the highest positions in politics and the C-level business suite. They're always the heroic Main Character. They build up cult followings. They often look so good, speak so smoothly and have those irresistible Ivy League mannerisms. You're supposed to like them and help elevate them even higher. Do you want to expose this person? The Main Character? You better be right, and you better be ready to have the full force of his charm, persuasion, and cult following at your throat forever.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > Nobody wants to go up against a very charismatic phony in what will almost certainly turn into a battle of wits instead of a battle of facts I’ve met some incredibly unlikeable fraudsters. The bottom line is pursuing them would mean giving up months of my life in a tedious process. In many cases, the fraud seems stupid enough that it’s not okay, but just not worth sacrificing life time over.
iLoveOncall 2y ago
A guaranteed, long, prison sentence is the only long term solution to avoid the problem They cost society billions if not trillions of dollars in follow up research, industry investments and consumers spendings. Some of them cost lives. Some thousands if not much more.
- passwordoops 2y ago
  >A guaranteed, long, prison sentence is the only long term solution to avoid the problem I'm leaning towards this solution concerning all breaches of pubic trust (e.g., Boeing, Sacklers, etc)
- letmeinhere 2y ago
  Yes, deterrence does require both sufficient certainty and severity of punishment. But, those can pull against each other and it seems quite likely that universities and individual academics would stonewall if cooperation could lead to a colleague being imprisoned for years. A more fitting punishment is firing and blacklisting from future research posts.
  - iLoveOncall 2y ago
    > it seems quite likely that universities and individual academics would stonewall if cooperation could lead to a colleague being imprisoned for years. Obstruction of justice is a crime too. And I'd argue that if they're willing to protect someone faking research they're no better and should follow them in jail.
- shellfishgene 2y ago
  I'd prefer a system where all experiments are replicated by another independent party. This would prevent fraud but also all other kinds of wrong results through mistakes or incompetence. This would essentially close to double the cost of research, but I think it would be worth it.
JoeAltmaier 2y ago
So, do it again. Was anybody surprised that imported 'supplements' had no ingredients listed?
A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
The notion that DNA barcoding could have been used to identify supplement ingredients at scale was always very unlikely. To make 1kg of a common type of gingko extract, you take 20kg of dry plant matter, grind it all to a very fine powder, extract it in a boiling solvent (often hexane or methanol), filter it under pressure, boil off as much of the solvent as you can, and then you spray-dry or freeze-dry it. This process would leave essentially no intact DNA. I think that the "DNA barcoding" notion was formulated by somebody who didn't understand how extracts are made, and the media just ran with it. What's funny is that rice flour is used as a common filler ingredient in supplements. Imagine barcoding a gingko product and getting "100% Rice" in your DNA report. And yet that would have been possible with even the most scrupulously honest products.
sircastor 2y ago
My mom is an alternative medicine advocate and doctor. While I believe that some of the things she advocates for might have some merit (acupuncture) some things are total bunk (homeopathy). I have always leaned hard on "show me a study from a reputable journal about this" and occasionally she'd send me something from some source that mostly looked like a published paper. The thing that is killing me is that the "good science" done by "good scientists" is increasingly being found to be bunk science done by people who have incentives misaligned with their actual studies. I'm rapidly losing faith in the reliability of published studies and their authors because more and more "good" work is being debunked.
- EnigmaFlare 2y ago
  Individual papers are never supposed to be reliable truth so it's good to lack faith in them. It's a pity so many are fraudulent but even when they're not, they're still often wrong. They're there for researchers to communicate between each other, not for the general public to make personal life choices from, nor for companies to remove their products from sale because of.
- somenameforme 2y ago
  In medicine there is billions of dollars to be made by having studies turning out one way, and millions of dollars to be lost by having them turn out the other way. Wiki has a limited section on medicine on their page [1] on the replication crisis, including: --- In a 2012 paper, C. Glenn Begley, a biotech consultant working at Amgen, and Lee Ellis, a medical researcher at the University of Texas, found that only 11% of 53 pre-clinical cancer studies had replications that could confirm conclusions from the original studies.[79] In late 2021, The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology examined 53 top papers about cancer published between 2010 and 2012 and showed that among studies that provided sufficient information to be redone, the effect sizes were 85% smaller on average than the original findings. --- One of the most interesting things in modern times is that China now has a higher life expectancy than the US, yet working conditions can be difficult, Traditional Chinese Medicine is still widely practiced, there is extremely widespread poverty, and access to modern healthcare is relatively limited. I'm certainly not appealing to that traditional medicine, homeopathy or anything of the like. Rather I'm appealing to some sort of nihilism - that I think we know far less than we think we do. SSRIs would be the best example of this - as the actual experimental evidence for their efficacy leaves them comparable to placebos, yet people treat them as the bleeding edge of treatment for the plethora of disorders they're proscribed for, to say nothing of their tremendous side effects. When we look back in time at all the stupid things people did, we often forget that those things were also seen as the bleeding edge of expert treatment at the time. No less than JFK's sister [2] was lobotomized as was the latest treatment for psychological issues at the time, with the result one could expect. And that was scarcely ~80 years ago. It seems quite arrogant to imagine people 80 years from now will not be looking back at us with similar bemusement. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_medicine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_medicine [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy
verisimi 2y ago
'Shocking new study reveals the scientists are people too!'
letmeinhere 2y ago
This is a remarkable fraudster/whistleblower pair: > Their influential paper in BMC Medicine, and subsequent work based on Newmaster’s approach, found that many supplements lacked ingredients listed on their labels and that toxic contaminants tainted others. Some stores pulled products from their shelves, and several major supplement companies embraced Newmaster’s work, paying large sums for quality testing by companies Newmaster established just prior to the publication of the paper. Damn, this guy didn't just defraud for the citations or clout or speaking or even consulting fees; he used it to kickstart his own business empire. > Thompson, now a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, sparked the initial inquiry. As an undergraduate, he and Newmaster co-authored a 2014 paper on forest plant diversity, published in Biodiversity and Conservation. Years later, while completing his Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Thompson began to suspect that Newmaster had repurposed data from a different study by another student. He asked that the paper be retracted, and the journal did so in 2021. And the guy who exposed him wasn't a spectator or a spurned rival, but an untenured academic who opted to torch one of his own early and well-cited papers on principle.
arrrtem 2y ago
The most surprising thing here is that there is a person who can be called a "star botanist"

241 points by jyunwai 2y ago

Disclaimer: I don't know anything about this. My narrative detector is going off. The guy found that most supplements didn't actually have real ingredients, which is incredibly believable. The guy is now being discredited. Does this mean Supplements were fine all along? Somehow I doubt this! Sketchy people on both sides--why are so many industries like this? Supplements are an obvious one but have you tried buying a mattress/adjustable bed recently?

inglor_cz 2y ago
The article mentions that he has conflicts of interest. Possibly his intent was to discredit some supplements in order to boost others?
baxtr 2y ago
> Thompson, now a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, sparked the initial inquiry. As an undergraduate, he and Newmaster co-authored a 2014 paper on forest plant diversity, published in Biodiversity and Conservation. Years later, while completing his Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Thompson began to suspect that Newmaster had repurposed data from a different study by another student. Sounds legit to me. I think this is more likely explanation due to Occams razor.
shkkmo 2y ago
> Sketchy people on both sides You can be on the fench about the efficacy of supplements without supporting a fraudster. One side has a whole slate of respected a scientists in the field call the research papers BS. The other side has a single scientist who hid his conflicts of interests and has a well established pattern of lies.
tqi 2y ago
So the evidence to support your prior was believable, and the evidence against that that evidence also supports your prior?

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

I don’t really understand what the evidence was that led to others suspecting falsification here. But in general, the review process for studies has a lot that it simply cannot verify. This is why we need a higher degree of skepticism even around peer reviewed studies and also why we need to create incentives for people who try to reproduce findings, rather than only trying to reward new findings.

nextos 2y ago
We also need reproducible results and well-annotated data. In life sciences, there are few to no incentives for making things reproducible. Reproducibility has the potential to expose lots of scams, perhaps even during review stage. The typical scenario right now is that you get access to raw data, often through an application, that can take months and requires having an ethics committee to oversee your work. So, unless you are at an academic institution, you can't get access to any raw data that contains personal information. Raw data will be often poorly annotated and you will need to spend weeks to figure things out, and sometimes significant computing resources to preprocess it. Then, good luck running some badly coded scripts to get the results reported in the article. Studies should provide preprocessed data that has been anonymized and can be freely shared, one-click reproducible results from preprocessed data, well-annotated raw data, and simpler procedures to get access to raw data. For example, a tarball with code, preprocessed data, and a makefile to turn preprocessed data into results reported in the article. Bonus points if dependencies are reproducible, with e.g. a Nix flake.
- Brybry 2y ago
  > Then, good luck running some badly coded scripts to get the results reported in the article. I think even this part is unlikely? My dad was a statistician involved in research and he didn't provide copies of his SAS programs/scripts to authors. I believe the papers would list what tests he performed but there'd be no easy to way to reproduce the exact script for tests (and certainly no easy way to reproduce exact charts/graphs/maps).
  - 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

killjoywashere 2y ago

I'd like to think that Hanlon's Razor applies, but it appears even the original investigators found faults. I sort of wonder if they were operating under a more restrictive mandate? Also, it doesn't seem that his errors are any validation of the supplements industry "Their influential paper in BMC Medicine, and subsequent work based on Newmaster’s approach, found that many supplements lacked ingredients listed on their labels and that toxic contaminants tainted others. Some stores pulled products from their shelves, and several major supplement companies embraced Newmaster’s work, paying large sums for quality testing by companies Newmaster established just prior to the publication of the paper. " So, he basically generated demand for testing through his own companies. I mean, if this guy was selling cleaning products, tires, or perfume, all's fair in love and war. I think the trick is his academic appointment. If a PhD material scientist or chemist at a university said what the average tire or perfume commercial says, she'd probably find an academic investigation coming down on her head too.

autoexec 2y ago
I think many companies hire scientists whose research is designed/manipulated/cheery-picked to produce results that lead to press/headlines/commercial claims which ultimately drive people to buy more of the product. The scientists who worked for the tobacco industry so they could convince the public that smoking was harmless didn't become unemployable. They worked for the oil industry to convince people that climate change wasn't real, and are working to convince the government that food additives are harmless. If you're willing to take money to deliver research for a company that wants to hurt people you'll never be out of work. If this guy had hired someone else to create fake science to drive traffic to his testing centers he'd probably be free and clear.

johnsillings 2y ago

these exposés where famous scientists doctor their data are so depressing

quercusa 2y ago

This could trigger some skepticism: Some stores pulled products from their shelves, and several major supplement companies embraced Newmaster’s work, paying large sums for quality testing by companies Newmaster established just prior to the publication of the paper.

giarc 2y ago
I don't think that alone is an issue. It could be seen as just commercializing the research he had done in the university setting. He would have to disclose this in publications (and perhaps he didn't). The university would have to approve (and take their cut). The issue is he seems to have fabricated results that prompted large companies to look for testing and certification and he was there with open arms (and pockets). If some other lab had come out and said "these products don't contain what they say they do" and the vitamin companies contracted his lab, then he wouldn't be in this situation.

mekoka 2y ago

> A 2022 Science investigation found evidence of a broader pattern of fabrication and data manipulation in Newmaster’s speeches, teaching, biographical statements, and scholarly writings over 2 decades. Evidence also suggested Newmaster embellished or simply invented findings or accomplishments, as well as claimed credit for work by others. What I find puzzling about this kind of stories is that the pattern of behavior is usually obvious to all who know the person. Yet, it'll take years before they're found out. We all know people like Newmaster. They may not be scientists, but we recognize the more than usual tendency to exaggerate their accomplishments, the padding of the truth, the selective amnesia about giving credits where it's due. Even if you're just getting to know them, hang around just for a bit and you'll see it, even about meaningless stuff. It's what they do. And if you see it even just once with someone, it should be enough to raise your bs alarms about anything they say.

ryandrake 2y ago
My pet theory: Nobody wants to go up against a very charismatic phony in what will almost certainly turn into a battle of wits instead of a battle of facts. Our entire society deifies charismatic phonies. They are the ones that get elevated to the highest positions in politics and the C-level business suite. They're always the heroic Main Character. They build up cult followings. They often look so good, speak so smoothly and have those irresistible Ivy League mannerisms. You're supposed to like them and help elevate them even higher. Do you want to expose this person? The Main Character? You better be right, and you better be ready to have the full force of his charm, persuasion, and cult following at your throat forever.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > Nobody wants to go up against a very charismatic phony in what will almost certainly turn into a battle of wits instead of a battle of facts I’ve met some incredibly unlikeable fraudsters. The bottom line is pursuing them would mean giving up months of my life in a tedious process. In many cases, the fraud seems stupid enough that it’s not okay, but just not worth sacrificing life time over.

iLoveOncall 2y ago

A guaranteed, long, prison sentence is the only long term solution to avoid the problem They cost society billions if not trillions of dollars in follow up research, industry investments and consumers spendings. Some of them cost lives. Some thousands if not much more.

passwordoops 2y ago
>A guaranteed, long, prison sentence is the only long term solution to avoid the problem I'm leaning towards this solution concerning all breaches of pubic trust (e.g., Boeing, Sacklers, etc)
letmeinhere 2y ago
Yes, deterrence does require both sufficient certainty and severity of punishment. But, those can pull against each other and it seems quite likely that universities and individual academics would stonewall if cooperation could lead to a colleague being imprisoned for years. A more fitting punishment is firing and blacklisting from future research posts.
- iLoveOncall 2y ago
  > it seems quite likely that universities and individual academics would stonewall if cooperation could lead to a colleague being imprisoned for years. Obstruction of justice is a crime too. And I'd argue that if they're willing to protect someone faking research they're no better and should follow them in jail.
shellfishgene 2y ago
I'd prefer a system where all experiments are replicated by another independent party. This would prevent fraud but also all other kinds of wrong results through mistakes or incompetence. This would essentially close to double the cost of research, but I think it would be worth it.

JoeAltmaier 2y ago

So, do it again. Was anybody surprised that imported 'supplements' had no ingredients listed?

A_D_E_P_T 2y ago

The notion that DNA barcoding could have been used to identify supplement ingredients at scale was always very unlikely. To make 1kg of a common type of gingko extract, you take 20kg of dry plant matter, grind it all to a very fine powder, extract it in a boiling solvent (often hexane or methanol), filter it under pressure, boil off as much of the solvent as you can, and then you spray-dry or freeze-dry it. This process would leave essentially no intact DNA. I think that the "DNA barcoding" notion was formulated by somebody who didn't understand how extracts are made, and the media just ran with it. What's funny is that rice flour is used as a common filler ingredient in supplements. Imagine barcoding a gingko product and getting "100% Rice" in your DNA report. And yet that would have been possible with even the most scrupulously honest products.

sircastor 2y ago

My mom is an alternative medicine advocate and doctor. While I believe that some of the things she advocates for might have some merit (acupuncture) some things are total bunk (homeopathy). I have always leaned hard on "show me a study from a reputable journal about this" and occasionally she'd send me something from some source that mostly looked like a published paper. The thing that is killing me is that the "good science" done by "good scientists" is increasingly being found to be bunk science done by people who have incentives misaligned with their actual studies. I'm rapidly losing faith in the reliability of published studies and their authors because more and more "good" work is being debunked.

EnigmaFlare 2y ago
Individual papers are never supposed to be reliable truth so it's good to lack faith in them. It's a pity so many are fraudulent but even when they're not, they're still often wrong. They're there for researchers to communicate between each other, not for the general public to make personal life choices from, nor for companies to remove their products from sale because of.
somenameforme 2y ago
In medicine there is billions of dollars to be made by having studies turning out one way, and millions of dollars to be lost by having them turn out the other way. Wiki has a limited section on medicine on their page [1] on the replication crisis, including: --- In a 2012 paper, C. Glenn Begley, a biotech consultant working at Amgen, and Lee Ellis, a medical researcher at the University of Texas, found that only 11% of 53 pre-clinical cancer studies had replications that could confirm conclusions from the original studies.[79] In late 2021, The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology examined 53 top papers about cancer published between 2010 and 2012 and showed that among studies that provided sufficient information to be redone, the effect sizes were 85% smaller on average than the original findings. --- One of the most interesting things in modern times is that China now has a higher life expectancy than the US, yet working conditions can be difficult, Traditional Chinese Medicine is still widely practiced, there is extremely widespread poverty, and access to modern healthcare is relatively limited. I'm certainly not appealing to that traditional medicine, homeopathy or anything of the like. Rather I'm appealing to some sort of nihilism - that I think we know far less than we think we do. SSRIs would be the best example of this - as the actual experimental evidence for their efficacy leaves them comparable to placebos, yet people treat them as the bleeding edge of treatment for the plethora of disorders they're proscribed for, to say nothing of their tremendous side effects. When we look back in time at all the stupid things people did, we often forget that those things were also seen as the bleeding edge of expert treatment at the time. No less than JFK's sister [2] was lobotomized as was the latest treatment for psychological issues at the time, with the result one could expect. And that was scarcely ~80 years ago. It seems quite arrogant to imagine people 80 years from now will not be looking back at us with similar bemusement. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_medicine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_medicine [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy

verisimi 2y ago

'Shocking new study reveals the scientists are people too!'

letmeinhere 2y ago

This is a remarkable fraudster/whistleblower pair: > Their influential paper in BMC Medicine, and subsequent work based on Newmaster’s approach, found that many supplements lacked ingredients listed on their labels and that toxic contaminants tainted others. Some stores pulled products from their shelves, and several major supplement companies embraced Newmaster’s work, paying large sums for quality testing by companies Newmaster established just prior to the publication of the paper. Damn, this guy didn't just defraud for the citations or clout or speaking or even consulting fees; he used it to kickstart his own business empire. > Thompson, now a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, sparked the initial inquiry. As an undergraduate, he and Newmaster co-authored a 2014 paper on forest plant diversity, published in Biodiversity and Conservation. Years later, while completing his Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Thompson began to suspect that Newmaster had repurposed data from a different study by another student. He asked that the paper be retracted, and the journal did so in 2021. And the guy who exposed him wasn't a spectator or a spurned rival, but an untenured academic who opted to torch one of his own early and well-cited papers on principle.

arrrtem 2y ago

The most surprising thing here is that there is a person who can be called a "star botanist"