Who fakes cancer / climate research? Apparently, lots of people.

Last summer, I covered the saga of Harvard Business School’s Francesca 
Gino, who was credibly accused of flagrantly fabricating data in at least 
four of her published studies. She was caught when some data sleuths on 
the internet — investigating research misconduct in their free time — 
found discrepancies in the data for her papers and investigated further.

They eventually raised their concerns with Harvard, which investigated and 
ultimately requested retractions of the papers in question. (Gino filed a 
lawsuit against Harvard and the bloggers, accusing them of colluding to 
defame her.)

I kept thinking about Gino’s case as I read the uncannily similar story of 
a scandal at the Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, a 
leading cancer research hospital in Boston.

Dana-Farber was rocked this January by a blog post by Sholto David, a 
molecular biologist and internet data sleuth, in which he presented 
evidence of widespread data manipulation in cancer research published by 
leading researchers including the institute’s CEO and COO. David 
reportedly contacted the institute with concerns about 57 papers, 38 of 
which were ones for which the institute had “primary responsibility for 
the potential data errors.” The institute has requested retractions for 6 
of them and initiated corrections for 31.

These data manipulations, to be clear, were not subtle. (David’s fairly 
bombastic blog post announcing the evidence calls it “pathetically 
amateurish and excessive.”) Many of the cases he identifies involved 
reusing the same images over and over in different figures, with different 
labels, and with the figures having been clumsily rotated or stretched in 
Photoshop or a similar image editor. Plots of data collection on different 
days are mysteriously perfectly identical. Test results are visibly copied 
and pasted.

It raises the question: Assuming that there was some misconduct behind the 
copied-and-pasted images, how were people so emboldened to commit such 
blatant fraud, so publicly, for such a long time? How much grant money was 
secured on the basis of fabricated data, and how much was the crucial 
fight against cancer set back by inaccuracies promulgated in these papers?

And perhaps most importantly, is this only the tip of the iceberg?

Anatomy of a cancer data scandal
For years, biomedical researchers have been aware that the field has a 
problem with faked images in papers. In one 2016 paper, Dutch 
microbiologist Elisabeth Bik scanned more than 20,000 biomedical papers 
for evidence of such manipulation and found that 3.8 percent of papers had 
signs of it, “with at least half exhibiting features suggestive of 
deliberate manipulation.” Worse, the problem appears to be on the rise. 
“The prevalence of papers with problematic images has risen markedly 
during the past decade,” Bik found.

Her scale for describing manipulation examines three kinds of faked images 
— cases where the same image is used twice, with different labels (which 
could be an innocent error), cases where the same image is used twice but 
in one case deliberately cropped (which seems less likely to be an 
innocent error), and cases where an image has something else pasted over 
it (which seems very unlikely to be an innocent error).

So biomedical scientists were already well aware that the field had a 
problem. Some of the specific manipulations highlighted in David’s blog 
post were well-known among scientists, having been the subject of intense 
debate on paper discussion forum PubPeer. But while the concerns were 
well-known, it appears that it took David’s post to prompt retractions and 
an internal investigation.

Mistakes have consequences
It is troubling that cases like Gino’s and Dana-Farber’s required external 
data sleuthing to come to light. Being a data sleuth is deeply 
unrewarding, and even risky. David is currently unemployed and doing the 
work of flagging data manipulation in his free time between gigs, as he 
told the Guardian.

Many data sleuths have been threatened with lawsuits for exposing data 
fraud. “A lot of important science gets done not by big institutions 
questioning things but by independent people like this,” defamation lawyer 
Ken White told me last summer. The problem is that there’s no 
institutional process to review papers unless someone else brings problems 
to light — and most scientists don’t want to endanger their own careers to 
do that thankless, frustrating work.

It’s also troubling that the fakery was so blatant. We’re not talking 
about sophisticated data manipulation here — we are talking about cases 
where scientists badly photoshopped pictures of their experimental 
results. “We only see the tiny tip of the fraud iceberg — image data 
duplications, the last resort of a failed scientist after every other 
trick failed to provide the desired result,” David wrote in his original 
blog post. In a culture where photoshopping experimental results happens 
frequently, it’s unlikely to be the only form of manipulation.

There is another common thread between the Gino fiasco and the Dana-Farber 
one: Harvard University. Between Gino’s case, the resignation of Harvard 
president Claudine Gay, and now the alleged faked cancer research, 
Harvard’s reputation for academic excellence has undoubtedly taken a 
battering.

But the discovery of these challenges at America’s best-known prestige 
university has also served to bring public attention to an issue that 
badly needs it. Maybe Harvard’s embarrassment will spark change.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24086809/fake-cancer-research-data-
scientific-fraud

NASA EXPOSED IN ‘MASSIVE’ NEW CLIMATE DATA FRAUD

Principia Scientific

Veteran award-winning journalist Günter Ederer reports of a shocking new 
global warming data fraud in NASA’s global temperature data series, as 
relied on by the UN and government climate scientists. The data has been 
carefully analysed by a respected data computation expert Professor Dr. 
Friedrich Karl Ewert and is being made publicly available for independent 
verification.

Professor Ewert’s findings seem to show NASA has intentionally and 
systematically rigged the official government record of global 
temperatures to show recent global warming where none would exist without 
the upwards ‘revisions.’

The astonishing results are now available online to the public. P Gosselin 
of notrickzone.com reports:

Ederer reports not long ago retired geologist and data computation expert 
Professor Dr. Friedrich Karl Ewert began looking at the data behind the 
global warming claims, and especially the datasets of NASA’s Goddard 
Institute of Space Studies (GISS).

Ewert painstakingly examined and tabulated the reams of archived data from 
1153 stations that go back to 1881 – which NASA has publicly available – 
data that the UN IPCC uses to base its conclusion that man is heating the 
Earth’s atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels. According to 
Ederer, what Professor Ewert found is “unbelievable”:

>From the publicly available data, Ewert made an unbelievable discovery: 
Between the years 2010 and 2012 the data measured since 1881 were altered 
so that they showed a significant warming, especially after 1950. […] A 
comparison of the data from 2010 with the data of 2012 shows that NASA-
GISS had altered its own datasets so that especially after WWII a clear 
warming appears – although it never existed.”

Ederer writes that Ewert particularly found alterations at stations in the 
Arctic. Professor Ewert randomly selected 120 stations from all over the 
world and compared the 2010 archived data to the 2012 data and found that 
they had been tampered to produce warming.

The old data showed regular cycles of warming and cooling over the period, 
even as atmospheric CO2 concentration rose from 0.03% to 0.04%. According 
to the original NASA datasets, Ederer writes, the mean global temperature 
cooled from 13.8°C in 1881 to 12.9°C in 1895. Then it rose to 14.3°C by 
1905 and fell back under 12.9°C by 1920, rose to 13.9°C by 1930, fell to 
13° by 1975 before rising to 14°C by 2000. By 2010 the temperature fell 
back to 13.2°C.

But then came the “massive” altering of data, which also altered the 
entire overall trend for the period. According to journalist Ederer, Ewert 
uncovered 10 different methods NASA used to alter the data. The 6 most 
often used methods were:

• Reducing the annual mean in the early phase.
• Reducing the high values in the first warming phase.
• Increasing individual values during the second warming phase.
• Suppression of the second cooling phase starting in 1995.
• Shortening the early decades of the datasets.
• With the long-term datasets, even the first century was shortened.

The methods were employed for stations such as Darwin, Australia and Palma 
de Mallorca, for example, where cooling trends were suddenly transformed 
into warming.

Ewert then discovered that NASA having altered the datasets once in March 
2012 was not enough. 
Alterations were made again in August 2012, and yet again in December 
2012. For Palma de Majorca:

“Now because of the new datasets it has gotten even warmer. Now they show 
a warming of +0.01202°C per year.”

Using earlier NASA data, globe is in fact cooling

The veteran German journalist Ederer writes that the media reports of 
ongoing global warming are in fact not based on reality at all, but rather 
on “the constantly altered temperatures of the earlier decades.” Ederer 
adds:

Thus the issue of man-made global warming has taken on a whole new 
meaning: Yes, it is always man-made if the data are adjusted to fit the 
theory. The meticulous work by Ewert has predecessors, and fits a series 
of scandals and contradictions that are simply being ignored by the 
political supporters of man-made climate change.”

Ederer also brings up the analysis by American meteorologists Joseph 
D’Aleo and Anthony Watts who examined 6000 NASA measurement stations and 
found an abundance of measurement irregularities stemming in large part 
from serious siting issues. According to Ederer the findings by Professor 
Ewert are in close agreement with those of Watts and D’Aleo.

Ederer writes of the overall findings by Professor Ewert:

Using the NASA data from 2010 the surface temperature globally from 1940 
until today has fallen by 1.110°C, and since 2000 it has fallen 0.4223°C 
[…]. The cooling has hit every continent except for Australia, which 
warmed by 0.6339°C since 2000. The figures for Europe: From 1940 to 2010, 
using the data from 2010, there was a cooling of 0.5465°C and a cooling of 
0.3739°C since 2000.”

Ederer summarizes that in view of the magnitude of the scandal, one would 
think that there would be in investigation. Yet he does not believe this 
will be the case because the global warming has turned into a trillion-
dollar industry and that that too much is tied to it.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/nasa-exposed-massive-new-climate-data-
fraud-maha-hamdan