12 ms·
Comment on 2015 mRNA paper suggests data re-used in different contexts
- dr_dshiv 2y agoIs there an obvious way to tell that these are exactly the same? Or is this a pixel level comparison that is not mentioned?
- jldugger 2y agoLook at the "scratch" on the right end of the leftmost dash. That "noise" shouldn't be replicated, right?
- Lammy 2y agoTry looking at the artifacts, not the actual bands. There's a little black hairline on the top right corner of the leftmost band, and a similar line toward the left of the middle band.
- tom_ 2y agoIronically there was a whole post about basically exactly this the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42655870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42655870
- striking 2y agoThere's a video that's quite convincing: https://youtu.be/K0Xio5yo_x8 https://youtu.be/K0Xio5yo_x8 It inverts the second image and passes the first and third images under it, and when there is a complete overlap the combined images make a nearly perfectly gray rectangle, showing that they cancel out.
- barbazoo 2y agoThe page has another comment with an animation where they're overlaying the images to show how similar (same?) they are.
- colechristensen 2y agoAny image manipulation program like photoshop with layers, you put the suspect images on top of one another and use filters to subtract one layer from the other (I'm not sure which filter operation works best, it might be multiply or divide) and then work to align the two layers. Differences and similarities become extremely obvious. You can also get the raw pixel information by converting to a bitmap and comparing values, but it's easier visually because it's pretty trivial for a simple image modification to change all of the pixel values but still have the same image.
- munificent 2y agoThe linked video makes it pretty clear by subtracting one image from the other and showing the difference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0Xio5yo_x8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0Xio5yo_x8
- mellosouls 2y agoThe image with meaningless blotches, technical diagrams and implied dubiousness feels like the beginning of a "please check and comment" meme.
- owlninja 2y agoI guess I'll bite - what am I looking at here?
- IshKebab 2y agoFaked scientific results.
- sergiotapia 2y agowhat happens to people who do this? are they shunned forever from scientific endeavors? isn't this the ultimate betrayal of what a scientist is supposed to do?
- Palomides 2y agoif caught and it's unignorable, usually they say "oops, we made a minor unintentional mistake while preparing the data for publication, but the conclusion is still totally valid" generally, no consequences
- dylan604 2y agoThere's a difference of having your results on your black plastic cookware being off by several factors in an "innocent" math mistake vs deliberately reusing results to fraudulently mislead people by faking the data. Most people only remember the initial publication and the noise it makes. The updated/retractions generally are not remembered resulting in the same "generally, no consequences" but the details matter
- gus_massa 2y agoThe people in the area remember (probably because they wasted 3 months trying to extend/reproduce the result [1]). They may stop citing them. In my area we have a few research groups that are very trustworthy and it's safe to try to combine their result with one of our ideas to get a new result. Other groups have a mixed history of dubious results, they don't lie but they cherry pick too much, so their result may not be generalizable to use as a foundation for our research. [1] Exact reproduction are difficult to publish, but if you reproduce a result and make a twist, it may be good enough to be published.
- barbazoo 2y agoWould this imply that someone faked data in a paper they published?
- UltraSane 2y agoHard to explain how else it could happen.
- boogieknite 2y agoany reason hanlons razor doesnt apply here? honest question, im just a regular 4 year degree off to work guy
- the__alchemist 2y agoThere are perverse incentives in scientific publishing, and there are not many alternative explanations.
- Lammy 2y agoSo sick of Hanlon's Razor. It's just a gift to the actually-malicious. If the outcome is the same then intentions don't matter.
- marxisttemp 2y agoIMO it’s only applicable to humans. Hierarchies attract malicious actors.
- JadeNB 2y ago> So sick of Hanlon's Razor. It's just a gift to the actually-malicious. If the outcome is the same then intentions don't matter. I think that's only true for a single incident. If someone does injury to me, I'm just as injured whether they were malicious or incompetent, but mitigation strategies for future interactions are different.
- dec0dedab0de 2y ago
- doodda 2y agoHere's me, clicking and expecting to read about someone fleecing Spotify by setting up fake bands.
- philipwhiuk 2y agoWhereas actually Spotify funds artificial bands because they're more profitable https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/ https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...
- philipwhiuk 2y agoCan someone change the title to: "Comment on Nature paper on 2015 mRNA paper suggests data re-used in different contexts" The current title would suggest music to most lay-people.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tones411 2y agoAgreed
- kylebenzle 2y agoDisagreed. Title is fine.
- hinkley 2y ago“We are no longer called Sonic Death Monkey. We are on the verge of being called Kathleen Turner Overdrive, however this evening we will be Barry Jive, and the Uptown Five.”
- ActionHank 2y agoAs someone clueless about music and mRNA I've got to say this wouldn't help me much.
- fabian2k 2y agoEven for people familiar with the field this title is a bit hard to parse at first without context. "bands" really needs either gels or gel electrophoresis as context.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dang 2y agoOk, we've changed it. Submitted title was "Same three bands appear in three different presentations with different labels". picture (the submitter) had the right idea—it's often better to take a subtitle or a representative sentence from the article when an original title isn't suitable for whatever reason, but since in this case it's ambiguous, we can change it. If there's a better phrase from the article itself, we can change it again.
- lxe 2y agoNot just same bands, but same noise and artifacts too. They copypasted the data?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- smusamashah 2y agoThey have a playlist of 3500 videos showing images like this one https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlXXK20HE_dV8rBa2h-8P9d-0pwqxyXnA https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlXXK20HE_dV8rBa2h-8P9d-0...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- k2enemy 2y agoI was curious how the video creators were able to generate so many videos in such a short timeframe. It looks like it might be automated with this tech: https://rivervalley.io/products/research-integrity https://rivervalley.io/products/research-integrity
- bArray 2y agoVery cool. I wish these guys would have a podcast discussing high profile papers, how influential they are, what sorts of projects have been built on top of them and then be like "uh oh, it looks like our system detecting something strange about the results". I wish wish wish there was something similar also for computer science. If I got paid for how many papers that looked interested but could not be replicated, I would be rich.
- jvanderbot 2y agoA desperate need for automated experiment verification and auditing is needed. Something as simple as submitting exif + archiving at time of capture, for crying out loud. A imgur for scientific photos with hash-based search or something. We have the technology for this.
- w10-1 2y agoThe opportunity here is to automate detection of fake data used in papers. I could be hard to do without access to data and costly integration. And like shorting, the difficulty is how to monetize. It could also be easy to game. Still... The nice thing about the business is that market (publishing) is flourishing. Not sure about state of the art or availability of such services. For sales: run it on recent publications, and quietly ping the editors with findings and a reasonable price. Unclear though whether to brand in a user-visible way (i.e., where the journal would report to readers that you validate their stuff). It could drive uptake, but a glaring false negative would be a risk. Structurally, perhaps should be a non-profit (which of course can accumulate profits at will). Does YC do deals without ownership, e.g., with profit-sharing agreements?
- captn3m0 2y agoElizabeth Bik (who is known for submitting such reports to journals) has a nice interview about this problem[0], which covers software as well. > After I raised my concerns about 4% of papers having image problems, some other journals upped their game and have hired people to look for these things. This is still mainly being done I believe by humans, but there is now software on the market that is being tested by some publishers to screen all incoming manuscripts. The software will search for duplications but can also search for duplicated elements of photos against a database of many papers, so it’s not just screening within a paper or across two papers or so, but it is working with a database to potentially find many more examples of duplications. I believe one of the software packages that is being tested is Proofig. Proofig makes a lot of claims but they also list a lot of journals: https://www.proofig.com/ https://www.proofig.com/ [0]: https://thepublicationplan.com/2022/11/29/spotting-fake-images-in-scientific-research-insights-from-science-integrity-consultant-elisabeth-bik/amp/ https://thepublicationplan.com/2022/11/29/spotting-fake-imag...
- sega_sai 2y agoAt least this paper has only 43 citations over last 10 years, which is really nothing for Nature, which means it's basically irrelevant. (Obviously it is still a good idea to identify cheaters)
- egberts1 2y agoCopypasta.
- 5mk 2y agoI've always wondered about gel image fraud -- what's stopping fraudulent researchers from just running a dummy gel for each fake figure? If you just loaded some protein with a similar MW / migration / concentration as the one you're trying to spoof, the bands would look more or less indistinguishable. And because it's a real unique band (just with the wrong protein), you wouldn't be able to tell it's been faked using visual inspection. Perhaps this is already happening, and we just don't know it... In this way I've always thought gel images were more susceptible to fraud vs. other commonly faked images (NMR / MS spectra etc, which are harder to spoof)
- dylan604 2y agoIsn't this the plot for pretty much every movie about science research fraud? When Richard Kimble was chasing his one arm man, it led to the doctor using the same data to make the research look good. I know this is not the only example.
- kylebenzle 2y ago"Whats stopping?" nothing, and that is why it is happening constantly. A larger and larger portion of scientific literature is riddled with these fake studies. I've seen it myself and it is going to keep increasing as long as the number of papers published is the only way to get ahead.
- hinkley 2y agoYou switched the samples! In the pathology reports! Did you kill Lentz too!?
- fabian2k 2y agoGel electrophoresis data or Western/Southern/Northern blots are not hard to fake. Nobody seeing the images can tell what you put into each pocket of your gel. And for the blots nobody can tell which kind of antibody you used. It's still not totally effortless to fake as you have to find another protein with the right weight, this is not necessarily something you have just lying around. I'd also suspect that fraud does not necessarily start at the beginning of the experiments, but might happen at a later stage when someone realizes their results didn't turn out as expected or wanted. At that point you already did the gels and it might be much more convenient to just do image manipulation. Something like NMR data is certainly much more difficult to fake convincingly, especially if you'd have to provide the original raw datasets at publication (which unfortunately isn't really happening yet).
- cosmojg 2y agoOoh, I love that this website exists, and major props to whoever made that visualization!
- bdangubic 2y agodamn you spotify … :)
- snowwrestler 2y agoThere is so little content and context to this link that it is essentially flame war bait in a non-expert forum like HN.
- netsharc 2y agoI smell this too, especially with the editorialized HN title that contains the word "mRNA".
- picture 2y agoThe title was edited by supposedly HN moderators after I posted it. I actually ran into this youtube channel and thought it was very interesting, since I didn't realize academia seems to make so many mistakes all the time. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42728742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42728742
- mrshu 2y agoFor reference, the title of the paper this appeared in is "Novel RNA- and FMRP-binding protein TRF2-S regulates axonal mRNA transport and presynaptic plasticity" Google Scholar reports 43 citations: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Novel+RNA-and+FMRP-binding+protein+TRF2-S+regulates+axonal+mRNA+transport+and+presynaptic+plasticity https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Novel+RNA-and+FMRP-bind... The images still seem to be visible in both PubMed and Nature versions. PubMed version: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26586091/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26586091/ Nature version: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms9888 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms9888 Nature version (PDF): https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms9888.pdf https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms9888.pdf
- neilv 2y agoIf you just looked at all the undergrads trying to find ways to cheat on their homework, exams, and job interviews, it'd be easy to imagine that university lab science conducted by those same people is also full of cheating whenever they thought they could get away with it. But I've wondered whether maybe some of the fabrications are just sloppy work tracking so many artifacts. You might be experienced enough with computers to have filing conventions and workflow tools, around which you could figure out how to accurately keep track of numerous lab equipment artifacts, including those produced by multiple team members, and have traceability from publication figures all the way to original imaging or data. But is this something everyone involved in a university lab would be able to do reliably? I'm sure there's a lot of dishonesty going on, because people going into the hard sciences can be just as shitty as your average Leetcode Cadet. But maybe some genuine scientists could use better computer tools and skills?
- NotAnOtter 2y agoPruitt? Is that you?
- robwwilliams 2y agoJust for context: The senior author is Mark Mattson: one of the world’s most highly cited neuroscientists with amazing productivity and large lab while at NIH when this work was done. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=N3ObarMAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=N3ObarMAAAAJ&hl=en... Mattson is well known as a biohacker and an expert in intermittent fasting and health benefits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Mattson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Mattson He retired from the National Institute on Aging in 2019 and is now at Johns Hopkins University. Still active researcher. https://nihrecord.nih.gov/2019/08/23/mattson-expert-brain-aging-science-fasting-retires https://nihrecord.nih.gov/2019/08/23/mattson-expert-brain-ag...