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by SubiculumCode 3 days ago
1. Obviously unethical and fraudulent behavior.

2. It should be determined whether the fraud was just the display image (imagine a sales manager making a bad call when images are not available) or involved the underlying research (more systemic and worrying).

3. It would be interesting to examine occurrence of faked images along with apparent unreliability/irreproducibility of research that has used those products.
2 comments
gopher_space 3 days ago
There aren't any display images in science.

Manipulating images for presentation is an automated process unless you're ripping someone off. The changes would be uniform across whole sets.

The problem with trying to pass off a fake image is that you need to be more knowledgeable in each dimension of the effort than the recipients are in just one. If anyone remembers the folks identifying East German video from background hum it's kind of like that.

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adampunk 3 days ago
"a sales manager making a bad call when images are not available"

It seems nearly impossible to imagine that to be the case. I'd have to disregard the kinds of manipulation entirely. What sales manager would create a whole western block sequence by copying, rotating, and flipping a single element?

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SubiculumCode 3 days ago
Someone else here mentioned proofers, people that prepare marketing materials, as a potential source. I am in no way defending Thermo here. I just meant that the extend of the fraud needs to be determined, from some non-scientist making a decision for short term profits, frustrated that no one saved the picture, or because the pictures showed how ugly the western blots actually are, versus wholesale fabrication of the research from the bottom up.
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12_throw_away 3 days ago
> people that prepare marketing materials, as a potential source

Scientific advertising and marketing is a small, specialized field, done by people with fairly solid technical backgrounds (we produce a whole lot of advanced STEM degrees, there's plenty of folks available with this sort of background).

So I just want to be crystal, crystal clear here: there's no way in hell anyone involved in this pipeline should have any confusion as to whether "improving" gel photographs by painting out details and/or copying and pasting blots is fraud. "Proofer" or not.

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