Plagiarism, Misconduct Running Rampant
Last week I saw an awesome Twitter post. Dr. Elisabeth Bik posted a figure from a recently published paper in a cancer journal. The caption simply read, "What's wrong with this image?" I looked at it carefully for two solid minutes. It was images of baby mice, "pinkies" in the reptile feeding trade, all lined up on their sides with military precision. Some had tumors, some didn't and the figure looked legit. Until I saw her annotated photo. She circled examples of how the same little mice babies were cut-n-pasted multiple times, appearing over and over again in different rows. It was manufactured data. Dr. Bik does a remarkable service to science. A trained molecular biologist with a substantial CV, she now voluntarily spends her eagle eye scouring the literature for things that don't look quite right. Like duplicate mice in a manufactured figure. I had the pleasure of interviewing her for the Talking Biotech Podcast, and she'll be fea