“At Thermo Fisher, consistency is more than a goal.”

Earlier this week I posted an example of a fake western blot provided by ThermoFisher to demonstrate the validity of a p53 antibody. I considered it an amusing curiosity. In fact Thermo Fisher Scientific has systematically manipulated antibody validation data!

@johanduchene.bsky.social @sholtodavid.bsky.social Spent the last hour looking, found ten more apparently manipulated Western blots in Thermo Fisher's antibody verification data (across eight different catalogued products). Thread below. www.thermofisher.com/antibody/pro...

@sholtodavid.bsky.social Have you seen this WB from ThermoFisher? Still anti-p53 antibody, but another clone (MA-12648 instead MA5-12557). It also looks like that the band in lane 3 was rotated and reused in lane 4. Moreover, it seems that same band was used for the 2 different clones.

Surprised to discover that Thermo Fisher appears to show a fake western blot for the validation of one of their p53 antibodies. I've added a diagram to show the very similar bands. This does not appear to be one of the "published figures" but their own internal data.

TREM2+ macrophages have rapidly emerged as key regulators in diseases. Studying them requires specific antibodies. Among 14 tested antibodies in KO cell lines by WB, 5 are specific. Pick up the right human TREM2 Antibody. Full report: tinyurl.com/TREM2Ab Or here: tinyurl.com/OGA-TREM2

A 2018 paper with an astonishing muddle of overlapping images has finally been retracted. The authors include the infamous (in some circles at least) Alexander Seifalian, a bunch of Iranians, and for some reason, a bloke from Lancaster. pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

While the non-disclosure of the conflict of interest is a serious issue, it is also important to point out that @sholtodavid.bsky.social and others found several instances of image duplication in this paper. pubpeer.com/publications...

Mariano Barbacid retracts his fresh @pnas.org paper celebrated worldwide as a "miracle" cure for cancer. Official reason is his omitted business interests. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Read my past reporting: forbetterscience.com/2026/02/06/s...

Exciting new graphical abstract from Ivyspring's Journal of Cancer: 10.7150/jca.125659. AI will replace all scientists very soon by the way.

Former Rector Karin Dahlman-Wright, who was foind guilty of research fraud and sued to avoid sacking, triumphantly returns to @ki.se ! news.ki.se/karin-dahlma...

I will chat to Patrick from ImageTwin this week. If you have any questions about the case or analysing images in scientific papers feel free to join. luma.com/0c2016n8

Lorenzo Cohen at MD Anderson presented "Biofield Therapy" results at AACR last week. "Biofield Therapy" sounds scientific but is just a fancy name for telekinesis - AKA staring at mice. Actual photo from his lab below, now deceased psychic staring at mice. Not clear who does the staring these days.

Chris Gaffe: “Scientific Reports has an in-house team who are dedicated to ensuring that the journal operates with integrity. They are an excellent team who care enormously about the journal and the research it publishes." "oxygenaonol", "cen̈rifiugation", "Cos aspe-9" pubpeer.com/publications...

Now that I have finally been paid I made a video about the Dana-Farber legal case from my own perspective: youtu.be/ioRtnMEV46Y

Gorilla Troops Optimizer!

Obviously, this is not the only great use case of this tortured phrase. See here, in the context of embryo cryopreservation: doi.org/10.31674/boo...

Ahahahahaha. @bmj.com first issued a correction to remove the English guys, Anthony Mathur and Sheik Dowlut, as innocent victims of impersonation. Only then did BMJ retract that Iranian papermill fraud! forbetterscience.com/2025/11/05/b...

Oh nothing, just a peer reviewed paper my colleagues found... doi.org/10.1016/j.ma... "1 mL of the mass killing of an ethnic group was opposed to 20 mL of the skin sample and unprotected to light for 7 min." Even AI knows what's wrong here, but @elsevierconnect.bsky.social doesn't.

I have been blogging again at For Better Science, this time a case of an epic image fraud from a Japanese lab: forbetterscience.com/2026/03/24/p...

The same western blot image used 23 times in 14 different papers by one Japanese team. The image has been labelled as representing a range of experiments and proteins. This is the most I have ever seen. Perhaps it is a record?

In retrospect it was a bad idea to train the LLM on dialog from Tarzan movies.

Just read the abstract 🫠 via Alexander Magazinov. I don't believe he is on Bluesky.

Figure 1g from a 2018 paper in Nature (10.1038/nature25170). The red staining is supposed to show cleaved caspase-3 in MCF-7 cells... Except MCF-7 cells have a homozygous deletion in the gene. They are well known to be entirely caspase-3 deficient (10.1007/s10549-008-0217-9).

Cool, useful, project. www.sciencedetective.org/scientific-d...

Schneider Shorts 6.03.2026 – Not identical and also not adjusted by sequencing forbetterscience.com/2026/03/06/s...

Genus: Man or Female? Alzheimer's improved in just four weeks with plant extract 🙄

Maybe investigate how the paper got published.

Another wonderful diagram of a bacterial cell with mitochondria, this one in Frontiers in Microbology (10.3389/fmicb.2023.1194292). Reminder: Bacteria are prokaryotes, they do not have mitochondria...

@pmurray65.bsky.social @forbetterscience.bsky.social Amazing Videregen, having pissed away €6.8m for 3 trials that never opened, pivoted to new rubbish - a dead thymus gland for anti-aging. From the look of it, the company has been nuked from orbit: www.videregen.com LMAO 🤡

Schneider Shorts 13.02.2026 – Prize for Academic Integrity (Europe category) forbetterscience.com/2026/02/13/s...

I want to be author of a paper about cancer biomarkers. You're in luck! We're running a 1/2-price special on processed-alloy papers! What good is that! I'm an oncologist, not a metallurgist. We'll tie a sign to it that says 'cancer'. Do you want the text or not? OK then. pubpeer.com/publications...

Woohoo! #SuperBowl flyover over our city.

Please admire what 'Viola sheltonii' found in Discover Oncology, in "Engineering CAR T NK and NKT cell therapies to target cancer stem cells and overcome stem like resistance". pubpeer.com/publications...

I know that @frontiersin.bsky.social are trying hard to be taken seriously. But addressing the problems in the original figure (left) by a completely new set of panels (that also have problems; right) puts them straight back into predatory journal range. #ImageForensics #ScientificPublishing /

Student journalists at Stanford the first to break a story that’s long overdue stanforddaily.com/2026/02/03/f...

Good article by Theresa DeFino capturing my thoughts on how failure to address research integrity failures today accumulates problems for tomorrow. Each scientist or administrator involved in such a mess has autonomy to facilitate or resist that.

Figure 5. Sudden quarrelling of spouse due to misuse of wireless sensor technology: doi.org/10.5539/jpl....

Following my blog about former Yale Researcher Wang Min, Nature Communications retracted a paper of his today: forbetterscience.com/2025/04/30/y...

Another retraction today for Sam S Yoon. Still currently Chief, Division of Surgical Oncology at Columbia, having lost many of the papers that came out of his lab to retractions for an epic fraud. Not clear what the consequences were apart from the retractions: forbetterscience.com/2023/11/01/m...

1. I now summarized problems of a paper on ketamine on PubPeer and also contacted the editor after contacting the author who didn't respond. I also checked some other papers from authors and indeed found another suspicious one quickly. Thoughts? -> pubpeer.com/publications...

The publishers of Frontiers are very proud of their fraud-detection software and have appointed themselves as "Guardians of Research Integrity". Also, they publish stuff like this.

Prepare for the most groan-inducing CRO drug trial situation you’ve come across in a loooooong time:

2026 begins…with a resurrection of the myth that COVID vaccines cause “turbo cancers:” A review that tried hard to show the vaccines cause cancer found very little, and used handwaving to speculate. via @gorskon.bsky.social sciencebasedmedicine.org/and-so-2026-... via @sciencebasedmedicine.org

I have written a blog at ForBetterScience. Scientific Reports appears to be as bad as ever despite promises to change and an "excellent team" forbetterscience.com/2026/01/06/s...

@spottingthespot.bsky.social Merry $mas! pubpeer.com/publications...

Schneider Shorts 19.12.2025 – Merry Christmas! forbetterscience.com/2025/12/19/s...

The U.S. Department of Justice has reached a $15 million NIH grant fraud settlement with Dana-Farber Cancer Center. This resolves a False Claims Act qui tam complaint that I filed on behalf of @sholtodavid.bsky.social in April 2024, with Gregg Shapiro as my co-counsel.