raphavisses

[raphavisses]

Legal threat against me: a correction at PNAS, a follow-up at Retraction Watch, and pieces in Chemistry World, Science, and at the In The Pipeline Blog

PNAS did not publish the letter to the Editor I had submitted (and which led to a legal threat against me), but they did request that the authors publish a correction adding some of the references that I had cited in my letter. Eventually a correction was published on the 2nd of August, but as I told Retraction Watch for their follow up piece, “this correction does nothing to correct the main…

[raphavisses]

Kavli prize winner threatens to sue me for defamation

Regular readers of this blog might remember that in November 2015, I published a post entitled PNAS: “your letter does not contribute significantly to the discussion of this paper”. That short post related how the then Editor-in-Chief of PNAS, Inder Verma, had dismissed our critique (available thanks to BiorXiv) of a PNAS paper. The justification of the EiC was patently absurd: it could have been…

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Stripy Nanoparticles Revisited

Challenging published results is an onerous but necessary task. Today, our article entitled Stripy Nanoparticles Revisited has been published in Small, three years after its initial submission to this journal (3/12/09) and about three  and a half years after the first submission (to Nature Materials, 21/07/09). As its title indicates, the article challenges the evidence for the existence and…

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Neuroskeptic: Postpublication “Cyberbullying” and the Professional Self

@Neuroskeptic writes: The Science piece describes two controversies. Controversy #1 is the scientific question of the reality of those stripes. That is not the topic of this post. Controversy #2 surrounds the way that Controversy #1 has been conducted. Stellacci’s critics say that they’re engaging in post-publication peer review of Stellacci et al’s claims. Stellacci, however, has described…

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Our First Pre-Registration is Live! Replication of...

After months of efforts, my co-authors and I are absolutely delighted to share this preprint, which is special in many ways: Said, Maha, Mustafa Gharib, Samia Zrig, and Raphaël Lévy. 2023. “Replication of “Carbon-dot-based Dual-emission Nanohybrid Produces a Ratiometric Fluorescent Sensor for in Vivo Imaging of Cellular Copper Ions”” OSF Preprints. November 29. doi:10.31219/osf.io/kf9qe. This…

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Editors and scientific journals are reluctant to correct the scientific record; episode 999

In the context of the post-publication peer review initiative of the NanoBubbles project, we posted a detailed comment at PubPeer on Two-Photon Ratiometric Fluorescent Sensor Based on Specific Biomolecular Recognition for Selective and Sensitive Detection of Copper Ions in Live Cells; Analytical Chemistry (2013). We also contacted the Editor-in-Chief because some of the findings were suggestive…

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82% self-citation and grave misrepresentation in an ACS Nano Focus article

82% self-citation and grave misrepresentation in an ACS Nano Focus article

This post is cross-posted at PubPeer. Mirkin and Petrosko review with enthusiasm and even a certain amount of lyricism the properties and applications of Spherical Nucleic Acids, an expression coined by Mirkin to describe particles prepared in the Mirkin group. Out of the 186 cited references, 160 or 82% have Mirkin as an author. Of the 36 other references, 16 are reviews, books or pre-1920…

[raphavisses]

Gold injections - how to use the scientific literature to sell snake oil to patients

Gold injections - how to use the scientific literature to sell snake oil to patients

To know more about the adventures of Dr Doxey, an unscrupulous charlatan ready to do anything to sell his worthless elixir, read the Lucky Luke Western album by Morris. To know more about Goldic, a real story that does not happen in Lucky Luke’s imagined Wild West, but in the present time, in the UK, Germany and possibly other places, where doctors will take your money in exchange of a…

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Need for transparent and robust response when research misconduct is found (another example)

On the 22nd of February, Dorothy Bishop published an open letter to CNRS Need for transparent and robust response when research misconduct is found signed by leaders and activists in the field of scientific integrity, which has now a response from the CEO Antoine Petit. That letter was prompted by a case in which I am the whistleblower and I hope to be able to say more about certain aspects of…

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What do scientific prizes celebrate?

What do scientific prizes celebrate?

Another scientific prize has been awarded to Chad Mirkin for his work on oligonucleotide-modified gold nanoparticles (or Spherical Nucleic Acids, aka SNAs, as Mirkin calls them since 2012)… whilst SNA company Exicure continues on its “death spiral“. The prize is the 2023 King Faisal Prize (KFP) in Medicine and Science. The KFP and Northwestern press releases show a certain disconnect from…

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Spherical Nucleic Acids company Exicure "in survival mode"

Spherical Nucleic Acids company Exicure “in survival mode”

In 2011, Mirkin co-founded (with Shad Thaxton) the biotechnology company Exicure to develop the biomedical applications of spherical nucleic acids (SNAs). After an internal research fraud (misreporting of preclinical data) and at least two clinical trials failing to deliver encouraging results, the company seems unlikely to survive 2023. In 2018, Chad Mirkin called me a scientific terrorist for…

[raphavisses]

Is the Lancet complicit in research fraud?

Is the Lancet complicit in research fraud?

Devastating account of the Lancet complicity in keeping on the record article that they have known for years are fraudulent. And which have caused deaths.

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Letter from Peter Wilmhurst to UCL President & Provost Prof Spence

Letter frm Peter Wilmhurst to UCL President Spence: "From these documents, I do not gain the impression of an aberrant medical researcher. Rather I see a departmental culture of dishonesty and poor practice that UCL is trying hard to conceal."

Following the publication of our letter in the BMJ “Time to retract Lancet paper on tissue engineered trachea transplants” (doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.o498, published 02 March 2022), Peter Wilmhurst has written to UCL President & Provost Prof Spence. I reproduce his letter with his authorization. It is (or will shortly) also be cross-posted on Leonid Schneider’s blog. 4 April 2022, Dear…

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University Responsibility for the Adjudication of Research Misconduct, by Stefan Franzen

University Responsibility for the Adjudication of Research Misconduct, by Stefan Franzen

Stefan Franzen is a Professor of Chemistry at North Carolina State University. He is also a whistle-blower in a case of research misconduct that, eventually, after 10 years, led to the retraction of a 2004 Science article entitled “RNA-Mediated Metal-Metal Bond Formation in the Synthesis of Hexagonal Palladium Nanoparticles.” What he has learnt about research misconduct, he has learnt it the…

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Down the rabbit hole of the Limit Of Detection (LOD)

Down the rabbit hole of the Limit Of Detection (LOD)

This is a guest post by Gaëlle Charron, Maîtresse de conférences at Université de Paris. In a post about SERS sensing hosted on this blog, I complained about LODs being often reported below the concentration range in which the sensor displays a linear signal vs. concentration response. Wolfgang Parak reacted here: he thinks this is not an analytical error. This is a good discussion to have, one…

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What’s a limit of detection anyway? Wolfgang Parak responds to Gaëlle Charron’s blog post

What’s a limit of detection anyway? Wolfgang Parak responds to Gaëlle Charron’s blog post

In her guest post (Sensing by Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS) : to the Moon and back down to Earth again) published last week, Gaëlle criticised SERS articles that reported a limit of detection (LOD) below the limit of the linear range: The range onto which the sensor responds linearly, onto which the signal vs. concentration calibration model will be built, is 0.5-1000 nM. Yet a LOD of…

[raphavisses]

Guest Post: Sensing by Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS) : to the Moon and back down to earth again

Guest Post: Sensing by Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS) : to the Moon and back down to earth again

This is a guest post by Gaëlle Charron, Maîtresse de conférences at Université de Paris Diderot I was about to submit a paper about the detection of atomic ions by SERS the other day. The paper had been in the pipeline for months. I went through a last survey of the recent literature to check for fresh references that it would have been unfair to leave out. When I bumped into a 22 pages review…