Comment on 2015 mRNA paper suggests data re-used in different contexts

I guess I'll bite - what am I looking at here?

Faked scientific results.

An (agarose?) gel.

There are partial holes in at at one end. You insert a small amount of dyed DNA (etc) containing solution each. Apply an electrical potential across the gel. DNA gradually moves along. Smaller DNA fragments move faster. So, at a given time, you can coarsely measure fragment size of a given sample. Your absolute scale is given by "standards", aka "ladders" that have samples of multiple, known sizes.

The paper authors cheated (allegedly) by copy + pasting images of the gel. This is what was caught, so it implies they may have made up some or all results in this and other papers.

This is protein on a western blot but the general idea is the same.

Close - this is a SDS-PAGE gel, and you run it using proteins. The bands in the first two rows are from a western blot (gel is transferred to a membrane), where you use antibodies against those specific proteins to detect them. The Pon S row is Ponceau S, a dye that non-specifically detects all proteins - so it's used as a loading control, to make sure that the same amount of total protein is loaded in each lane of the gel.

I love HN - thanks!

Is it conceivable that the control was run once because the key result came from the same run? I can see a reviewer asking for it in all three figures, whereas they may drafted it only in one

This guy made some videos about it

https://m.youtube.com/@PeteJudo1/videos

what happens to people who do this? are they shunned forever from scientific endeavors? isn't this the ultimate betrayal of what a scientist is supposed to do?

if caught and it's unignorable, usually they say "oops, we made a minor unintentional mistake while preparing the data for publication, but the conclusion is still totally valid"

generally, no consequences

The horizontal label is fine, it says Pon S in all images. (I guess a wrong label would be obvious to detect for specialists.)

The problem are the vertical labels

In Figure 1e it says: "MT1+2", "MT2" and "MT1"

In Figure 3a it says: "5'-CR1", "CR2" and "3'-UTR"

In Figure 3b it says: "CR2", "CR3" and "CR4"

There's a difference of having your results on your black plastic cookware being off by several factors in an "innocent" math mistake vs deliberately reusing results to fraudulently mislead people by faking the data.

Most people only remember the initial publication and the noise it makes. The updated/retractions generally are not remembered resulting in the same "generally, no consequences" but the details matter

The people in the area remember (probably because they wasted 3 months trying to extend/reproduce the result [1]). They may stop citing them.

In my area we have a few research groups that are very trustworthy and it's safe to try to combine their result with one of our ideas to get a new result. Other groups have a mixed history of dubious results, they don't lie but they cherry pick too much, so their result may not be generalizable to use as a foundation for our research.

[1] Exact reproduction are difficult to publish, but if you reproduce a result and make a twist, it may be good enough to be published.

Based on the images, it is inconceivable that these are from the same run (see the dramatically different levels of TRF-S in each gel. One column/lane = one sample). This isn't something that would be included because of a reviewer - loading controls are required to meaningfully interpret the results (e.g. the data is useless without such a control).

Additional context to be speculative of OP's intentions. Within the academic world there was a major scandal where a semi-famous researcher was exposed for faking decades of data (Google: Pruitt). Every since, people have been hungry for more drama of the same shape.

This is a general issue with interpreting scientific papers: the people who specialize in the area will generally have a good idea about the plausibility of the result and the general reputation of the authors, but outsiders often lack that completely, and it's hard to think of a good way to really make that information accessible.

(And I think part of the general blowback against the credibility of science amongst the public is because there's been a big emphasis in popular communication that "peer reviewed paper == credible", which is an important distortion from the real message "peer reviewed paper is the minimum bar for credible", and high-profile cases of incorrect results or fraud are obvious problems with the first statement)

I completely agree. When I see a post here I had no idea if i's a good journal or a crackpot journal [1]. The impact factor is sometimes useful, but the level in each area is very different. (In math, a usual values is about 1, but in biology it's about 5.)

Also, many sites just copy&paste the press release from the university that many times has a lot of exaggerations, and sometimes they ad a few more.

[1] If the journal has too many single author articles, it's a big red flag.

Yes, I think science communication is also a big part of the problem. It's a hard one to do right, but easy to do wrong and few journalists especially care or have the resources to do it right (and the end results tends to be less appealing, because there's a lot less certainty involved)

Horseshit. All of the following scientists were caught outright faking results and as a result were generally removed from science.

Jan Hendrick Schon (he was even stripped of his Phd, which is not possible in most jurisdictions) He made up over 200 papers about organic semiconductors

Victor Ninov who lied about creating like 4 different elements

Hwang Woo-suk who faked cloning humans and other mammals, lied about the completely unethical acquisition of human egg cells, and literally had the entire Korean government attempting to prevent him from being discredited, and was caught primarily because his papers were reusing pictures of cells. Hilariously, his lab successfully cloned a dog which was considered difficult at the time.

Pons and Fleischmann didn't do any actual fraud. They were merely startlingly incompetent, incurious, and arrogant. They still never did real research again.