Photoshop Manipulation of Scientific Illustrations

Stem Cells at BigU, the Continuing Saga

The Scientific American web site has an interesting article concerning rampant Photoshop treatment of scientific illustrations in publications:

March 23, 2007

---

Journals' Spot-Checking of Images for Photoshop Manipulation Comes Too Late To Stop Latest Stem Cell Fraud

As New Scientist reported in a commendable bit of enterprise journalism, images from a paper in Nature (vol 418, p 41) on a supposed new and groundbreaking type of adult stem cell appear to have been duplicated "in a second paper that was published at about the same time, where they were supposed to relate to a different experiment." But it gets worse:

Now New Scientist has examined a US patent (number 7015037) [Inventors: Reyes, Verfaillie, Furcht ] granted in 2006...

Within the patent are three images that appear to be duplicated from another paper from Verfaillie's group [Authors: Reyes, Lund, Lenvik, Aguiar, Koodie, Verfaillie], published in 2001 in the journal Blood (vol 98, pp 2615-2625)...

The problem is that in each case the duplicated image is used in the patent to describe the production of a different protein from that described in the Blood paper.

New Scientist also has a great infographic showing each of the original images that were allegedly duplicated--and you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to see how they might be construed as a rather sloppy fraud. [The infographic link doesn't always work, so I've put it at the top of this post.]

Awaiting further developments, I remain, your servant,

Bonzo