Comment by owlninja
Comment by owlninja 2 days ago
I guess I'll bite - what am I looking at here?
Comment by owlninja 2 days ago
I guess I'll bite - what am I looking at here?
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.
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
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"
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 protein on a western blot but the general idea is the same.
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?
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
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.
This guy made some videos about it
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.