Dana-Farber Cancer Institute to Retract Studies Over Photoshop Debacle
Governor Abbott Is Firing Back
January 24, 2024
Make it Stop. Hillary is Cringe-Posting Again
January 24, 2024Remember how we were all told to “trust the science?” And if you didn’t, you were called an idiot because scientists are perfect and beyond reproach? Yeah, about that. Turns out what everyone actually meant was “trust the Photoshop.”
Harvard University’s affiliated cancer hospital, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, announced it will retract six studies and correct 31 others after a blogger exposed dozens of papers by several authors of having manipulated scientific images.
The president and CEO of the institute, Dr. Laurie Glimcher, has four papers being investigated that molecular biologist and blogger Sholto David alleges helped build her career.
“No doubt Laurie built her career on papers like this one, in Nature Immunology (2003), which includes some impressive contributions to art, but perhaps not to science,” David wrote in his blog For Better Science, in which he explains how multiple scientific images were manipulated.
LOL “impressive contributions to art …”
The super fun part? The scientists being investigated are faculty at Harvard Medical School.
On the bright side, it looks like if you want to be a professor at Harvard it’s an easy, two-step process:
- Familiarize yourself with ChatGPT
- Become skilled at manipulating cancer cell images in Microsoft Paint.
“The presence of image discrepancies in a paper is not evidence of an author’s intent to deceive,” Barrett Rollins, Dana-Farber’s research integrity officer and chief science officer emeritus, told CNN on Monday.
“That conclusion can only be drawn after a careful, fact-based examination which is an integral part of our response,” he added. “Our experience is that errors are often unintentional and do not rise to the level of misconduct.”
Uh huh. How much you wanna guess that Barrett Rollins also doodled his way into his position?
After scandals like this and Claudine Gay getting caught plagiarizing another scholar’s work, it’s safe to say the institution’s “elite” façade is starting to crack.
5 Comments
This is reminiscent of a hoax by an astronomer from a few years ago. He used a picture of a slice of chorizo on a jet black background, then passed it off as a planet he claimed to have discovered in deep space. Many in the scientific community fell for it. I must admit that picture did look authentic, though I learned about the “planet” after the fact.
>errors are often unintentional
How do you accidentally Photoshop something?
Good question! Do you remember when CBS photoshopped Katie Couric to look slimmer after she was hired to anchor their evening news? They were forced to change it after viewers pointed out how fake that image was. Speaking of photos, I miss seeing your pictures of Toby. How is he, by the way?
Over the summer he was injured defending the chickens from a fox. It cut his leg up pretty good, but he is all healed up now.
I think he is also developing an allergy because his sniffer has been clogged up for a couple weeks. Other than that he’s been good. He was out bouncing around in the snow like a puppy.
I know a lot of space images have false colors to greater show contrasts and I could maybe see someone going a little bit over the top doing something along those lines.