Blog Archives

What’s new this week

It’s always good to get an email from Ed Yong — good, bad and interesting news on the science home front.  Try Edyong209@gmail.com to subscribe to his blog. Retraction Watch (http://retractionwatch.com) has had some interesting posts this week: “A researcher at Tufts

Posted in ethical concerns, news item, possible fraud, retractions

Back in Business

Sad to say, I set up this blog about a year ago and then promptly ignored it.  But now I am back with a new design and a determination to get myself up and running again.  And what more appropriate

Posted in Uncategorized

Stapel Gets Nailed (but not very hard)

Diederik Stapel is the Dutch social psychologist who admitted to fabricating data in as may as 30 published papers. His story is told in a fascinating article published in the NY Times magazine in April (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/magazine/diederik-stapels-audacious-academic-fraud.html). He admitted to fabricating

Posted in Uncategorized

WI-38 vs HeLa: Suspended Animation versus Immortality

Almost anyone who does tissue culture is familiar with the two cell lines that have produced enough cells to build a mountain. These are HeLa, recently the subject of a fascinating best-seller by Rebecca Skloot entitled The Immortal Life of

Posted in ethical concerns, news item

Welcome to my Blog

From time to time, I will post news items that I think will be of interest. I will try to add new material every week so come back often. If you wish to comment or to tell your own story,

Posted in Uncategorized

Crooked Symmetry

In an article posted in Nature on May 9, 2013, Eugenie Samuel Reich reports on a study published in Nature and featured on the front cover in 2005 that purported to demonstrate that dancers with symmetrical bodies were rated more

Posted in ethical concerns, news item, possible fraud

It’s All About Integrity

The newspapers in NJ are full of the disturbing news about Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Here in a nutshell is what has been and is going on: Last year, Robert L Barchi, a medical doctor with a

Posted in news item

Kenneth Jones’ qui tam suit fails

Kenneth Jones,a professor at Brandeis University, was a participant in a program project grant involving early detection of Alzheimer’s disease in a group of test patients.  The multimillion dollar program project grant involved had been funded over many years with

Posted in news item, whistleblower report