When Vanderbilt University neuroscientist and physician Matthew Schrag went public earlier this year with concerns about apparently doctored images in scores of Alzheimer’s papers—including seminal research underpinning one aspect of the dominant amyloid hypothesis of the disease—he anticipated that his motives and analyses would be dissected. “I also expected every project that I ever participated in to be carefully scrutinized, and that my work would stand up to that scrutiny,” he says.
So Schrag assumed there would be an innocent explanation when, a few weeks after a Science News investigation reported his disturbing findings of apparent misconduct, he received automated emails from PubPeer, a web forum where scientific wrongdoing charges are often leveled. They notified him that two of his own articles from more than 15 years ago had been flagged as containing dubious images.
On close examination, Schrag had to confront an unnerving prospect: that neuropharmacologist Othman Ghribi, Schrag’s first mentor and still a trusted friend, might have also engaged in misconduct.
The papers, published in 2006 when Schrag was an undergraduate working in Ghribi’s lab at the University of North Dakota (UND), covered research on several factors related to amyloid proteins in rabbit brains. (Many Alzheimer’s researchers believe the disease is caused by amyloid’s affects on human brains.) Schrag soon discovered the suspect work in the two papers fit a large pattern of questionable...
Former Democratic Party lawmaker An Min-suk was elected as the progressive camp’s candidate for the June Gyeonggi Province superintendent of education election. Candidate An said, “I will become a...