ARTICLE -- Scientists Fraudulently Manipulate Digital Images

KenS · Jun 2, 2008

Fakery of results

About 6 years ago I published a technique paper on the benefits of cross-polarised transmitted light of a zymogram with a new stain that provided a colour the equivalent of a Wratten #8 on the phytase embedded in the gel. Since normal transmitted light (with filtration) could not provide enough contrast to readily observe some of the smaller bands, and could not provide the required photographic/visual contrast with both B/W and Ektachrome. Success was achieved using polarized filtration under the gel with cross polarization on the lens.

Within the first year of publication, I received a few emails a few with a great technique, three emails and one phone call accusing me of Photoshop Phakery.

I do not, however have any record of anyone successfully using my improved/modified technique.

Ken

df cardwell · Jun 2, 2008

"cross-polarised transmitted light of a zymogram" Good photomicroscopy !

I used to amuse myself for hours with a polarizer, analyzer, and piece of cellophane.
LSD was probably way cheaper than a Zeiss microscope, but, hey,
Birefringence is good for you.

Dan Fromm · Jun 2, 2008

DF, in the area where I struggle to work we're all such narrow specialists that there's practically no one fit to review someone else's work. The best a reviewer can do, and few do it, is to demand the raw data and redo the analysis. Practically no one is going to go retake the data from scratch.

But as we all know, lying is wrong. There are problems with applying that simple statement because people lie to themselves. Wishful thinking is a killer. I recall vividly looking at a problem where there was no way I could make n larger than 3. I wanted results, I think I had results, but I couldn't be sure I hadn't just been lucky.

Mahler_one · Jun 2, 2008

Antje said:
Interesting... We had such a case at the research center I got my PhD at. The girl was fired, of course. She also faked protein bands - but she actually scanned them from the catalogue of a lab equipment vendor. Meaning on top of being a total fake and cheat, she didn't even have to run the experiment to get those "marvelous" results.

Still - it's not Photoshop that's the culprit. I'm a biologist, and I spent many many desperate nights at the lab, not being able to find the damn cell growth I was hoping for. It would have been soooo easy to just sprinkle a little interleukin-2 on my cells, randomizing the amount I put on them to cover my tracks, and shove them into the cell counter. Nobody would have been able to tell - and I even could have made pictures of the cell growth on slide film! I could even have shown that miracle to anyone interested live and in person. There would have been no way of telling what I would have done as cell activation via the IL-2 receptor was what I was looking at. I would have manipulated my experiment at the most basic level. I didn't, I never saw the activation I was looking at, and later found that the principle I was studying didn't even allow for cell activation like that - everything was totally right after all, and the missing cell growth pointed me into the right direction in my research.

But it would have been so easy... and it would have made my boss happy... Oh, and the output of the gamma counter was printed on just plain white paper, the data weren't stored anywhere, how could anyone have told I didn't just print them using my office printer? Apart from the simple fact that it would have been just as easy to fake a nice experiment just by putting isotopes into the wells instead of the cells I was studying. And histology - faking cell staining would have been laughably easy and would have created durable slides.

The point is: Science doesn't work without honesty and trust. Photoshop or not. The instances where you could actually use Photoshop to manipulate have been few in my career at least. My work was measured in plain numbers and microscopic slides mostly...

Antje

Hi Antje: Early in my MD career I did some applied basic research in immunology at a large university. I agree that the temptation to make the data fit the hypothesis is very tempting. However, I was surrounded by highly moral and well known scholars, and the data had to be "vetted" before being published-especially if their names appeared anywhere on the papers being submitted!

Completely apart from the issue of academic fraud would be the issues involved if seminal results were to have been confirmed by other researchers. As you know, experimental techniques are often difficult to duplicate from lab to lab, and some -times the difficulty in reproducing results is ascribed to variation in technique(s) and reagents. How disappointing to note that such attempts at duplication and confirmation are apparently, judging from the comments of the journal editors, now oftimes due to fraud by the original investigators. I guess the next step would be to have scientific photos attested to by a notary public AND all of the investigators whose names appear as co-authors.

How is your work going now?

Edwin

Struan Gray · Jun 2, 2008

Antje said:
Hey, I thought Sweden wasn't that bad?

Sweden's good. But like everywhere these days research tends to be confirmative rather than exploratory, which reinforces the sort of problem Dan raised: you become blind to possibilities you didn't forsee at the outset.

I don't think Post-modernism is to blame. Scientists follow the money like everyone else. Nowadays there is lots of money, and it's handed out in ways that discourage - or, at least, don't reward sufficiently - careful, reflective, long-term research.

Not all bias is conscious. Rutherford employed humanities undergraduates to count scintillations for him because the science students kept giving him results that were too good. Even the humanities students became unreliable after a while, being too eager to get a smile as they handed over the day's takings.

The most common crime is representing the superlative as typical.

jpeets · Jun 5, 2008

Sadly, this could be part of a general decline in ethics. I have read that resume fraud has ballooned over the years. Plagiarism in student papers. Fraud on the part of journalists working for major publications. Etc. etc.

I wish it were just a case of better detection, but I am pretty sure it isn't.

As previously noted, there seems to be a growing attitude that if its good for you, do it, and only regret if caught.

DanielOB · Jun 10, 2008

Heh, what suprise: digital image manipulated!
Anyone is doing it for whatever reason, so scientists are not different. The differnce only arise when one find people still beleiving in digital images as possible document (he he he).

KD5NRH · Jun 10, 2008

df cardwell said:
giving Photoshop to researchers is like giving
handguns to customers at a liquor store.

Where do they do this? I have to bring my own handgun when I go to the liquor store. I wouldn't go in the ones around here without one.

DanielOB · Jun 11, 2008

Originally Posted by df cardwell
giving Photoshop to researchers is like giving
handguns to customers at a liquor store.

Photoshoping is "normal". What is abnormal is to beleive in such images.

ARTICLE -- Scientists Fraudulently Manipulate Digital Images

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