Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza retracts four papers
This story lacks a lot of context. This linked article provides some of it:
https://forbetterscience.com/2020/10/07/gregg-semenza-real-n...
There's a big range between "grad student loaded the wrong file when making sub-panel 3d" and "explicitly falsified images to support an hypothesis". This article certainly makes it seem like the latter.
Science is a human endeavor and there will always be people trying to game the system The good news is, an awful lot of cheaters get caught these days and it's getting riskier all the time.
Every first year grad student in the sciences should be introduced to Elizabeth Bix, before they have to submit their first manuscript and feel the temptation to try some slight-of-hand with their figures: https://twitter.com/microbiomdigest
Pubpeer has listed 54 papers under Semenza that are questionable.
What a curious article.
- don't say "there is a concern the figure is wrong". Concern is not the salient point - correctness is. Is the data wrong or right?
- why are we focusing on the figures at all? Is the data correct but the figures don't represent? Or is the incorrect data correctly represented by the figures? This is a critical point left unaddressed
Still Nobel prize so the climbing strategy, whatever it was, worked.
People cheat to become navy SEALs, why do we think narcissistic academics wouldn’t do the same to achieve preeminence?
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There should really be prizes for finding this stuff. A Nobel prize for integrity?