It's like an old "Two Ronnies" joke that got separated from its punchline.
I guess it's no worse than having garden gnomes.

For shame:


Fatty fat

Systematics[ edit | change source ]

Levila [ change | change source ]
Fatty fat is widely distributed in Eurasia from the British Isles to the island of Japan and Sunda. Central Asia places a fatty tart in Turkey that is very close to it. In Estonia, a fat bird is a large bird, its abundance is estimated at 300,000 to 400,000 pairs, and the number is from 0.6 to 1.6 million in winter^[5].

Sleep [ change | change source ]


This is not what I expected from a search for "Great Tit".

The image below is Figures 2A and 2B from Chan-Scarabelli et al. (2005), "A case of fatal ephedra intake"... from now on, "Ref. 1". Ostensibly it shows a slice of heart-muscle tissue from an unfortunate woman who died from the side-effects of using ephedra. The red background is fluorescence from a stain binding to the self-destruct protein Caspase-3, expressed in dying cells, while the yellow / greenish dots are dying cell nuclei signalled with TUNEL staining.

Ephedra, a herb reported to suppress appetite and stimulate the sympathetic nervous system as well as cardiac performance, has recently been related to several adverse events, including seizure, stroke, hypertension, myocardial infarction, and sudden death. Here, we describe the case of a 45-year-old woman who died of cardiovascular collapse while taking ephedra. Tissue analysis revealed non-specific degenerative alterations in the myocardium (lipofuscin accumulation, basophilic degeneration and vacuolation of myocytes, as well as myofibrillary loss), associated with myocyte apoptosis, caspase activation, and extensive cleavage of miofibrillary proteins alpha-actin, alpha-actinin, and cardiac troponin T.

This was all very well until an anonymous commenter identified only as Peer-1 noted, in a discussion at the Pubpeer site, that Figure 2A is festooned with recurring visual motifs. That is to say, it was the product of Photoshop rather than of the fluorescence-staining techniques of cell biology. In one quadrant it does match another image of cardiac dysfunction from the same research team, Figure 1C at the right (from Scarabelli et al. 2004a, Ref. 2), so an ultimate origin in microscopy for the two images cannot be excluded altogether.


In further comparison, Figure 2B shares many contours in common with 1D from Ref. 2. A great deal of artistry has gone into them both. Yet in Ref. 2, the tissue biopsy came from a patient whose heart was interrupted for the purposes of coronary surgery ('cardioplegia'), incurring some injury in the form of dying cells... though the TUNEL-illumined nuclei are not all the same. Curious!

Many of these cellular jigsaws could be works by Dubuffet during his 'Hourloupe" period.

This is all by way of introduction to another compendium of observations, collated and curated from PubPeer threads, and I hope that the pseudonymous contributors will accept my equally pseudonymous acknowledgement. Here I am trying to embrace a series of papers that were published over the course of some 15 years, focussing on the images recurring between them: images which have sparked two institutional investigations (so far).

The papers generally delved in the area of cardiology, and in the cascade of cellular dysfunction triggered by an interruption in the heart's blood supply, though not exclusively so. Many came from a productive partnership between one lab in London and one in the US, but no single author signed all of the papers. It is difficult to know where to start, and equally difficult to decide where to stop: to show all the repeated-image links between all the papers would require one of those crime-investigation scenes of snapshots pinned to a corkboard and linked together with red string, so readers are urged to explore the PubPeer threads for themselves. I have given first priority to thematic content, so do not expect a chronological sequence.

There is much for the art-historian to admire. But regular visitors to this site will expect some examination of immunohistochemistry blots - the cell-chemistry spectroscopy that spreads a mixture of proteins out spatially, in the manner of a prism spreading out a lightbeam into constituent wavelengths - and there is indeed some of that. Figure 3B in Ref. 1 includes a loading-control band of α-actinin blots, which had previously appeared as "actin" in Figure 5B of Ref. 3 (Scarabelli et al. 2004b). There, the blots came from the hearts of rats, pre-treated with minocycline to ameliorate the dysfunction cascade from an interruption and resumption of blood supply (ischemia).

The blots were also Actin a decade later when they reappeared in Figure 3A of Ref. 4 (Chen-Scarabelli et al. 2014)... there comparing the sensitivity of diabetic and non-diabetic hearts (human ones again) to cardioplegia. Figure 3C of Ref. 1 has its own complex history. Stripped of the tissue images and the immunoblots, can one be sure that the cardiological case-study existed? -- though it may be that the clinical details of ephedra toxicity are otherwise correct.

Let us turn to what on first glance could be a police identification-parade of decorated donuts, or perhaps a selection of two-straw cocktail bowls.

One at right is a rat's heart that had not enjoyed the protection of minocycline, and a pictorial interpretation, from Figure 3 of Ref. 3:

Infarcted areas, assessed by triphenyl-tetrazolium chloride exclusion, in I/R control (C)... The corresponding color-enhanced images (white= infarcted area; green= area at risk; red= non-ischemic zone) are depicted in E(Ctrl hearts).

Two at left come from Lawrence et al. (2003) (Ref. 5), where they portray hearts that had been extracted from rats and damaged by ischemia, but one had been prepared for this by prior perfusion with urocortin. The three hearts differ in the details of the grey zone of dead muscle (the infarct), and a control and a treatment heart cannot be the same. Yet despite differences in the outline, they reveal identical highlights of reflection, so necessarily they are a single heart. What is one to make of it?


There is no time to linger on Ref. 5, though. Back at Ref. 3, Figure 4B awaits, as a bridge to Barry et al. (2013) (Ref. 6).
Ref. 6 focused on the role of Interleukin-17 within that dysfunctional post-ischemia cascade. In the three panels of Figure 5B,

Blocking IL-17 signalling with a specific anti-IL-17 neutralizing antibody reduced ... apoptotic cell death in the myocardium following in vivo I/R injury. ... apoptosis assessed by the TUNEL assay (B) in sham-operated (control) or rats exposed to in vivo I/R injury (I/R) or I/R plus treatment with IL-17 neutralizing antibody (IL-17 Bo Ab).

... but the three samples of heart muscle are substantially the same (for all are enlargements from the 2004 paper), differing only in the nuclei marked in green with TUNEL fluorescence, presumably added later by hand. Contrary to a common misconception, Apop-Tosis was not the name of a minor Pharaoh from the 26th Dynasty.

We have not exhausted the use of Photoshop's clone tool within the illustrations of Ref. 3. Figure 4F has been retouched (bottom frame here), Locating the repeated areas are left as an exercise for the reader; my interest is the link to other papers from the same oeuvre, for despite the digital enhancements, one can still recognise pictorial overlaps.

The top-left frame is Figure 3A, from back in Ref. 2: "Serial myocardial sections from a postcardioplegic heart ... in cardiac myocytes, as identified by an anti-desmin red banding running perpendicularly to the cell bodies (A)". The top-right frame was Figure 3A in Knight et al. (2008), Ref. 7.: "Desmin-positive myocytes, as identified by the ‘red banding’ running perpendicularly to their long axis" in a rat's heart, surgically removed and sustained with Langendorff perfusion for the experience of 10 minutes of ischemia.

Ref. 7 was recently retracted, for the red horse-shoe pattern of "anti-desmin staining" was too repetitive to be natural... and more to the point, that slice of rat heart, Peter Sellars-like in versatility, had cloned itself to become Figure 1 (untraumatised) and Figure 5 (30 minutes ischemia).


On that note, it is convenient to follow the trail of scarlet myocardium slices back to Ref. 2, for that 2004 paper is generous with the concealed Easter Eggs. The mechanical precision of the horseshoe texture reaches its zenith in Figure 5A, "Cardiac myocytes are labeled by an anti-desmin antibody (A)", which when examined closely appears to have been knitted.


Here is Figure 4, where panels A and B show parallel slices from a control heart, stained to show desmin and urocortin respectively, with an absence of TUNEL self-destruct sequence in 4B; in contrast to C and D, from a post-cardioplegic heart, similarly stained, where "TUNEL-positive nuclei appear yellow". But the Figure Legend contradicts the images themselves, where A overlaps with C, and B overlaps with D: they are all versions of a single source...


... variously retouched, overlaid with different textures.



The images may seem familiar. Partly because these fields of blood-red all blur in the mind (or else they evoke memories of the texture-mapped interiors from too many hours playing 'Doom'). But in addition, sections of Figure 3 were used in the other Figure 3A we encountered above.


Do not worry, we are almost at the end of Ref. 2. First we return to Figure 1D. Its affinities have been noted already. However, it also proves to overlap with 2C from Scarabelli et al. (2001) (Ref. 8), at left:
.

Heart exposed to ischemia/reperfusion: the 2 central cardiomyocytes show colocalization of TUNEL (yellow) and activated C3 staining (bright red); all the other cardiomyocytes stained only for propidium iodide (orange).

Within Fig 2C of Ref. 8, the non-TUNEL nuclei are repetitive in shape.


They are not the only evidence of the Dark Arts of Photoshop within that paper.
Figure 2D in Ref. 8 was replaced in 2017, on account of its subsequent reuse in a 2002 paper in Journal of Biological Chemistry (Ref. 9)... the authors were presumably content with the other figures, since they skipped the opportunity to alter them. This amendment contrasts with the treatment of Ref. 9, for the editors at JBC have no time for image recycling or similar forms of silly-buggers and it was retracted in 2015.

Finally at Ref. 2, time for some green staining as visual relief. Here is Figure 5C:

Serial atrial sections from a postcardioplegic heart (group B). Induction of urocortin in cardiac myocytes ... overexpression of the Kir6.1 potassium channel (bright green cytosolic staining), which is detected not only in urocortin-positive cells but also in urocortin-negative neighboring cells (C).

It appears to be a reworked version of Figure 3D from Scarabelli et al. (2002) (Ref. 10), an "identification of the cell types by staining the same sections with anti-von Willebrand ... antibodies".


The posterised nature of these images reminds one of E. L. Kirchner in his final years, when he was systematically ruining his own earlier canvases by over-painting the nervous Expressionist brushstrokes with featureless pools of pigment. Or perhaps they are homages to Andy Warhol.

Now Ref. 10 was also subjected to a 2017 correction. This involved the replacement of Figures 2C and 2D - Western blots for the protease inhibitors caspase 8i and 9i respectively - the original versions having used the same Actin loading-control band. It was not to remove the regrettable sight of protein streaks appearing repeatedly in other lanes, or appearing to have been drawn in with felt-pen, upon a background that repeats in at least the top three bands of both figures.

At any rate, since the authors passed over the opportunity to replace other Figures at the same time, they evidently stand behind those components. Such as Figure 3E, which really deserves a higher-resolution file, so that we could better appreciate the artistry that went into its construction.

Panels C and E show immunocytochemistry of cleaved C9 and cleaved C8 under the treatment conditions indicated (×400).

Just look at these designs for indoor rock-climbing walls! No, I tell a lie: these airbrushed collages of repeated bricks of texture are Supplementary Figures A and B, with contrast enhanced. The figures are supposed to be largely blank for they illustrate the appearance of the caspase protease enzymes after ischemia / reperfusion.
It is not so easy to explain what is going on with Supplementary Figure C. It provides an excuse to cite Scarabelli et al. (2004c) (Ref. 11), for the same backgrounds and sometimes the same band appear in Figure 1C from Ref. 11 and in the Supplementary Figure. In fact the backgrounds and bands also overlap with the now-replaced figures 2C and 2D, and the not-replaced Figure 2B, perhaps requiring a second round of revision.


Two more papers, then let's take a break. "Clinical Applications of Apoptosis in Ischemic Myocardium" (Scarabelli et al, 2006) (Ref. 12) was a review paper, summing up the research team's accomplishments as of 2006. As such, it reprints some of the "hourloupe" pictorial confections that have been noted above, while providing higher-resolution copies. For instance, Figure 16 ("Colocalization of TUNEL and Caspase-3-positive staining used as marker of apoptotic cell death") reprints Fig 2C of Ref. 8, but the increased detail allows us to admire the repeated textures within the cells, suggestive of Photoshop's 'stamp' tool.

Figure 17 reuses parts of Figure 3C from Ref. 10, with additional interpretative arrows.

Now, remember Ref. 6, and the flickering of nuclei between the repeated panels of Fig 5B. That flickering brings to mind Figure 5C from Stephanou et al. (2002) (Ref. 13), where despite reporting different experiments, three of the four panels overlapped... that is, they came from a single larger source. The lower-left panel is bedecked with little TUNEL fireflies, presumably a later addition.

Figure 5. (C). Section of control or ischemic/reperfused (I/R) heart STAT-1 +/+ and STAT-1 –/– stained by TUNEL method and PI. TUNELpositive cells appear yellow when PI is used to counter-stain all nuclei. Non-apoptotic nuclei remain red (× 63).

On account of that image manipulation, Ref. 13 was depublished at the end of March 2018. Meanwhile in 2004, that single larger source had provided Ref. 2 with Figures 1A and 1B... which brings us neatly back to where we started!

"A, Control precardioplegic heart (group A) exhibiting no TUNEL-positive staining or processing of caspase-3. ... B, Control precardioplegic heart (group B) showing no processing of caspase-8 or caspase-9."

As was intimated at the beginning, there have been official inquiries into this whole saga (hence the passing allusions to Corrections and Retractions): see Grauniad, Nature, Retractionwatch. Reports have not been released, only leaked to news media, so uncertainty lingers on those inquiries, like how many they number. It is known, at least, that the investigating institution was University College London (UCL)... their interest stems from fact that one of the recurring authors [see the list at the end of this post] is Professor David Latchman, who was at UCL in charge of the UK end of the cross-Atlantic collaboration, and who subsequently rose to the post of Master of Birkbeck College within / beside UCL.

Dr Latchman was impatient with the stately progress of the probe (which began in 2013), and concerned at its diffuse approach:

“In my view, the investigation should focus on those actually involved in preparing the questionable figures and those directly involved in supervising their production".

In his mind the identity of the guilty parties is obvious (and it's not him), though in that ideal world of undenied confession, there would be little need for an investigation.

The first phase was a "screening panel", not reaching the level of a formal investigation, tasked with a narrow remit of checking concerns that had risen by 2013, involving 28 of Latchman's collaborations. Twenty were found to be blameless, while journals and authors agreed (after negotiation) that the flaws in five of them could be corrected, with two or three requiring retraction. Dr Latchman himself had "no case to answer". Co-author Stephanou took the rap but denied any fault:

"The corresponding author, A.S., regrets the inappropriate figure manipulations of which the co-authors were completely unaware."

Stephanou says he did not prepare any of the images that the panel flagged as problematic . He stands by the decision to correct — rather than retract — some papers, because in these cases the “figures didn’t really affect the overall conclusions”. He acknowledges that there were “genuine mistakes”. In the cases where he was a corresponding author, “I should have been more careful” in looking at some of the figures, he says.

A second phase followed, progressing to an Investigation. Was it a continuation of the initial screening, or a new probe? A report has been leaked, but stovepiped through the Daily Torygraph whose writers are wretched inky incompetents, so the facts came through broken and stupid. It is unclear whether the "panel of three professors ... set up in May last year to investigate the allegations of research fraud" is the same as the "panel of experts" originally convened in 2015 or a third phase still in progress; or whether the leaked report is the final outcome or an interim one; or whether there is overlap between the 32 papers under consideration, and the 20 absolved at the screening stage. It was stated that 25 were absolved in this update, while

two scientists – Dr Anastasis Stephanou and Dr Tiziano Scarabelli – were guilty of research misconduct by manipulating images in seven published papers.

With Latchman being “insufficiently attentive” to the point of "recklessness", but having '“no intention” to commit research fraud'.
The limited remit of the inquiry, at least at the onset, has already been noted. It is natural to wonder how much it covered the output from the UCL laboratory where there was no trans-Atlantic involvement and no contributions from Dr Scarabelli. Evidently it included Soond et al. (2008) (ref. 14), recently retracted for shenanigans with the GAPDH loading controls, where first author Soond was the only one who did not sign onto the retraction. Did it examine Chanalaris et al. (2013) (Ref. 15)? Figure 7 there is admirably parsimonious, for the P42/44 band consists of multiple versions of only three or four bands; one of those bands even appears in the P42/44* lane as well. There are also some bizarre manipulations within Figure 1 but these need not concern us here.

So our attention turns to those papers with no contribution from Dr Stephanou either. I shall try to be brief and non-exhaustive.

In 2002, Schulman, Latchman and Yellon were looking at urocortin and "the p42/p44 MAPK signalling pathway". The crucial Figure 3 of Ref. 16 contains 10 lanes, which (as 'Peer 1' noted) are dominated by seven copies of just three blots, variously exposed and stretched.

The scope broadens now, to a wider genetics concourse of promoters and anti-oncogenes, no longer just focused on cardiac resilience. Refs. 17 and 18 are Ensor et al. (2001) and Ensor et al. (2003), with the BRN-3 transcription factor as the topic. Between them, blots were creatively re-used and re-labeled.

Refs. 19 and 20 are Irshad et al. (2004) and Budhram-Mahadeo et al. (2008), looking at the BRN-3b transcription factor in the special context of neuroblastoma and breast cancer. I need hardly tell you that a PubPeer contributor had concerns about the treatment and re-use of immunoblots between them.

The BRN-3b transcription factor also featured in Budhram-Mahadeo et al. (2006) (Ref. 21), where the transformations inflicted upon a loading control in order to re-use it in Figure 6A are Shakespearean in their complexity. And in Samady et al. (2006) (Ref. 22), where the attention of an Unregistered PubPeer contributor was caught by "the Loch Ness monster swimming below the band in" Lanes 3 and 4.


Now one could argue that the main role of a Principal Investigator of any large laboratory is to motivate students to deliver the desired results, while remaining ignorant of the methods involved. It may also be true that the same Rid-my-kingdom-of-this-turbulent-priest skill-set is ideal for the pinnacle of university administration.

Before we finish, it is necessary to go back to Ref. 4, about diabetic hearts and their greater vulnerability to open-heart surgery, and pick up the thread from there. For as well as the re-use of a decade-old immunoblot gel, this paper is noteworthy for a new stage in the authors' artistic practice.

The variously-hued and angled heart symbols adorning the image are not in the original, but were added by "Peer 2" to mark repeated motifs, in protest against myocyte sections looking so much like CGI.

In fact this artistic period had started five years earlier, in Chen-Scarabelli et al. (2009), Ref. 23. Please admire Figures 5B and 5C:

Figures 5A and 4 are more of the same. If you have noticed a resemblance between the Fig 5 panels from 2009, and the diabetes-specific Fig 5 panels of 2014, then you are not alone.
Other connections between the two papers include the extension of a pre- / post-cardioplegia gel into a diabetic / non-diabetic comparison by the simple expedient of repeating and mirroring some of the blots.


A 2009 display of Urocortin expression pre- and post-cardioplegia, already Photoshopped, underwent further editing to become a 2014 diabetic / diabetic comparison... the extended dance remix for the club scene, as it were.


'Condylocarpon Amazonicum' subjected the latter to Look-Up-Table colour-mapping. The outcome opens windows on the artifactual nature of the image, but it is not recommended for viewers who are recovering from a tequila hangover.

A 2009 display of 'Protein kinase Cε'reappeared as a 2014 measurement of PKCδ, with further graphical editing, though not enough to eliminate the distinctive bubbles in certain lanes.


However, my favourite graphic artifact from these two papers is Figure 6 from Ref. 23. Ostensibly it depicts

Co-immunoprecipitation of phosphorylated PKCε with Kir6.1, Kir6.2, and SUR-2 in protein extracts from pre- and postcardioplegic cardiac biopsies. Phosphorylated PKCε was enriched by immunoprecipitation using a specific antibody and immunoblotted with Kir6.1, Kir6.2, or SUR-2 antibody. Input: protein extracts. PI, Pre–immune control antibody; P-PKCε Ab, immunoprecipitation antibody against phosphorylated PKCε; PKCε, protein kinase Cε.

Contrast enhancement betrays the cloning and smoothing tools of Photoshop, and puts me in mind of early maps of Mars.

Ref. 1. Chen-Scarabelli C, Hughes SE, Landon G, Rowley P, Allebban Z, Lawson N, Saravolatz L, Gardin J, Latchman D, Scarabelli TM (2005). "A case of fatal ephedra intake associated with lipofuscin accumulation, caspase activation and cleavage of myofibrillary proteins".

Ref. 2. Scarabelli TM, Pasini E, Ferrari G, Ferrari M, Stephanou A, Lawrence K, Townsend P, Chen-Scarabelli C, Gitti G, Saravolatz L, Latchman D, Knight RA, Gardin JM (2004a). "Warm blood cardioplegic arrest induces mitochondrial-mediated cardiomyocyte apoptosis associated with increased urocortin expression in viable cells".

Ref. 3. Scarabelli TM, Stephanou A, Pasini E, Gitti G, Townsend P, Lawrence K, Chen-Scarabelli C, Saravolatz L, Latchman D, Knight R, Gardin J (2004b). "Minocycline inhibits caspase activation and reactivation, increases the ratio of XIAP to smac/DIABLO, and reduces the mitochondrial leakage of cytochrome C and smac/DIABLO".

Ref. 4. Chen-Scarabelli C, Knight R, Stephanou A, Scarabelli G, Onorati F, Tessari M, Rungatscher A, Narula J, Saravolatz L, Mazzucco A, Faggian G, Scarabelli TM (2014). "Diabetic hearts have lower basal urocortin levels that fail to increase after cardioplegic arrest: association with increased apoptosis and postsurgical cardiac dysfunction".

Ref. 5. Lawrence KM, Scarabelli TM, Turtle L, Chanalaris A, Townsend PA, Carroll CJ, Hubank M, Stephanou A, Knight RA, Latchman DS (2003). "Urocortin protects cardiac myocytes from ischemia/reperfusion injury by attenuating calcium-insensitive phospholipase A2 gene expression".

Ref. 6. Barry SP, Ounzain S, McCormick J, Scarabelli TM, Chen-Scarabelli C, Saravolatz LI, Faggian G, Mazzucco A, Suzuki H, Thiemermann C, Knight RA, Latchman DS, Stephanou A (2013). "Enhanced IL-17 signalling following myocardial ischaemia/reperfusion injury".

Ref. 7. Knight RA, Chen-Scarabelli C, Yuan Z, McCauley RB, Di Rezze J, Scarabelli GM, Townsend PA, Latchman D, Saravolatz L, Faggian G, Mazzucco A, Chowdrey HS, Stephanou A, Scarabelli TM (2008). "Cardiac release of urocortin precedes the occurrence of irreversible myocardial damage in the rat heart exposed to ischemia/reperfusion injury".

Ref. 8. Scarabelli T, Stephanou A, Rayment N, Pasini E, Comini L, Curello S, Ferrari R, Knight R, Latchman D (2001). "Apoptosis of endothelial cells precedes myocyte cell apoptosis in ischemia/reperfusion injury".

Ref. 9. Stephanou A, Scarabelli TM, Knight RA, Latchman DS (2002). "Antiapoptotic activity of the free caspase recruitment domain of procaspase-9: a novel endogenous rescue pathway in cell death".

Ref. 10. Scarabelli TM, Stephanou A, Pasini E, Comini L, Raddino R, Knight RA, Latchman DS (2002). "Different signaling pathways induce apoptosis in endothelial cells and cardiac myocytes during ischemia/reperfusion injury".

Ref. 11. Scarabelli TM, Pasini E, Stephanou A, Chen-Scarabelli C, Saravolatz L, Knight RA, Latchman DS, Gardin JM (2004). "Nutritional supplementation with mixed essential amino acids enhances myocyte survival, preserving mitochondrial functional capacity during ischemia-reperfusion injury".

Ref. 12. Scarabelli TM, Knight R, Stephanou A, Townsend P, Chen-Scarabelli C, Lawrence K, Gottlieb R, Latchman D, Narula J (2006). "Clinical implications of apoptosis in ischemic myocardium".

Ref. 13. Stephanou A, Scarabelli TM, Townsend PA, Bell R, Yellon D, Knight RA, Latchman DS (2002)."The carboxyl-terminal activation domain of the STAT-1 transcription factor enhances ischemia/reperfusion-induced apoptosis in cardiac myocytes".

Ref. 14. Soond SM, Townsend PA, Barry SP, Knight RA, Latchman DS, Stephanou A (2008). "ERK and the F-box protein betaTRCP target STAT1 for degradation".

Ref. 15. A Chanalaris, KM Lawrence, A Stephanou, RD Knight, SY Hsu, AJW Hsueh, DS Latchman (2003). "Protective effects of the urocortin homologues stresscopin (SCP) and stresscopin-related peptide (SRP) against hypoxia/reoxygenation injury in rat neonatal cardiomyocytes".

Ref. 16. Schulman D, Latchman DS, Yellon DM (2002). "Urocortin protects the heart from reperfusion injury via upregulation of p42/p44 MAPK signaling pathway".

Ref. 17. Ensor E, Smith MD, Latchman DS (2001). "The BRN-3A transcription factor protects sensory but not sympathetic neurons from programmed cell death/apoptosis".

Ref. 18. Ensor E, Mathews K, Payne Smith MD, Latchman DS (2003). Sensory neurons from mice lacking the Brn-3b POU family transcription factor are resistant to death-inducing stimuli both in vitro and in vivo".

Ref. 19. Irshad S, Pedley RB, Anderson J, Latchman DS, Budhram-Mahadeo V (2004). "The Brn-3b transcription factor regulates the growth, behavior, and invasiveness of human neuroblastoma cells in vitro and in vivo.

Ref. 20. Budhram-Mahadeo VS, Irshad S, Bowen S, Lee SA, Samady L, Tonini GP, Latchman DS (2008). "Proliferation-associated Brn-3b transcription factor can activate cyclin D1 expression in neuroblastoma and breast cancer cells".

Ref. 21. Budhram-Mahadeo VS, Bowen S, Lee S, Perez-Sanchez C, Ensor E, Morris PJ, Latchman DS (2006). "Brn-3b enhances the pro-apoptotic effects of p53 but not its induction of cell cycle arrest by cooperating in trans-activation of bax expression".

Ref. 22. Samady L, Faulkes DJ, Budhram-Mahadeo V, Ndisang D, Potter E, Brabant G, Latchman DS (2006). "The Brn-3b POU family transcription factor represses plakoglobin gene expression in human breast cancer cells".

Ref. 23. Chen-Scarabelli C, Faggian G, Yuan Z, Tessari M, Rungatscher A, Di Rezze J, Scarabelli GM, Abounit K, McCauley R, Saravolatz L, Mazzucco A, Scarabelli TM (2009). "Warm-blood cardioplegic arrest induces selective mitochondrial translocation of protein kinase Cepsilon followed by interaction with 6.1 inwardly rectifying potassium channel subunit in viable myocytes overexpressing urocortin".

The Riddled Life-Raft Founderation should not be confused or indeed bumfuzzled with the Lifeboat Foundation. True, both exist to plan and prepare for Existential Threats to Human Survival. The latter, however, restricts itself to Threats that are old-hat and passé, like asteroid strikes, inimical aliens, rogue AIs, runaway nanotechnology and catastrophic global cooling... as befits an institute that was founded by a tech tycoon and now panders to old-school SF authors in the hope of donations. They have no time for the more conceptual, post-modern menaces that concern us here at the Life-Raft Founderation [meets every third Thursday at the Old Entomologist]:

1. Mass transformation into rhinoceri.
2. Wetware-hacking imagery -- the Langford Basilisk scenario.
3. CODE NIGHTMARE GREEN when the stars align.
4. Jaguars falling from the sky.
5. The Thyxxolqus / Pontypool scenario when grammar is fled and language falls apart into echolalic jargon.*

Whoever chose the name for that other foundation was somehow unaware that whereever there is a 'lifeboat' or even just an 'ark', there is that one passenger with a malign agenda and an evil ideology secretly undermining the communal mission of survival... this always happens, it must be a tradition, or an old charter or something.



That is why we opted for the 'life-raft' name, which is not freighted with negative traditions, unless you count the occasional survival cannibalism.

Anyways, a central issue of concern to the Life-Raft team is of course CODE TLÖN UQBAR, when a constructed fantasy irreality gains such a momentum of circumstantial detail and willed repetition that it breaks through the barrier from the fictive realm and intrudes upon or even subsumes the collective hallucination that we have agreed to call 'reality'. These "Fiddler's Green" wish-fulfillment experiential bubbles are a subject of concern for major intelligence agencies -- the GCHQ centre was built beside one in Cheltenham so as to study it -- so the silence from the Lifeboat Foundation is suspicious.

Doubly suspicious because a notable fictional example of the Fiddler's Green phenomenon (which is to say, a particularly real example) arose in a lifeboat-related situation.

"God is spread pretty thin at 18 south 82 east."

This is what brings ProfessorDr Mr Alireza Heidari to our attention, along with his self-glorifying fabulated accomplishments. If his chosen reality is not one that the rest of us wish to inhabit, an intervention may be necessary, possibly involving a targeted asteroid strike or rogue nanotechnology.

Someone of that name is credited with co-authoring a couple of minor papers in theoretical physics, a decade ago, with an Iranian affiliation. Evidently that scholarly contribution was not enough for Heidari, and he is now Scholar.Researcher.Scientist@gmail.com, author of countless115 199 little mash-ups of cancer-cure nanotech bafflegab. Sometimes co-authored with sock-puppets, sometimes adorned with the trappings of theoretical physics, and largely serving as an excuse to self-cite his previous emissions. We also find Heidari on the Editorial Boards of a clown-car-cavalcade of journal-shaped jizz-mops in which these emissions occurred... not just the familiar suspects of parasitical publishing at OMICS and SCIRP and MedCrave, but all manner of 3rd- and 4th-tier wannabee-scavengers, all the way down through the bottoms of sequentially lower barrels to Peertechz and Crimson and Lupine Publishers (these last two being dual instantiations of a single grifter, for a single suck of the moneyteat is never enough). He must be quite an accomplished scholar of the predatory-publishing industry just to have sniffed out and signed onto so many smorgasbords of scam. Mr Heidari's affiliation during this churn of endeavoursome activity -- the imprimatur of his academic status -- is with "California South University", hence his second e-address on these article-shaped extrusions (alternating with the gmail.com identity), Alireza.Heidari@calsu.us.
As well as providing Heidari with his qualifications and tenure, "California South University" can boast of a storied past and a list of distinguished alumni, both of them copy-pasted from the University of Alberta. Like the U.Alberta, CSU possesses a grand "Butterdome" sports pavilion, which is not as obvious to the denizens of Irvine as one might expect. In short, it is an entity of the Fictive Realm, and its overlap with Consensus Reality is restricted to a single domicile, that of A. Heidari.

Fortunately (in light of its absence from Goofle Maps), one does not have to attend CSU in one's corporeal manifestation in order to graduate there, with its diplomas available by mail. Though it appears to pre-date Heidari's entry into the dumpster-fire publishing eco-system, already selling diplomas while he was still in Iran, and linked to the name of Zahid Yazdanie. But be that as it may... William Grover speculates that the reason for maintaining the quasi-existence of CSU comes back to those editorial-board positions ... for not only does the Onerous Editorial Responsibility exempt one from paying the usual Author Publishing Charges for having one's writings hosted and homed, it also earns one a slice of the APCs paid by less well-networked suckers. So Mr Heidari occupies a niche and an undoubtedly valued role.

The resulting CV of Scholar.Researcher.Scientist is a work of inspired polymathic creativity, and it needs to be recited aloud in a voice that sets out slow and lugubrious and speeds up progressively into a frantic falsetto gabble:

Prof. Dr. Alireza Heidari, Ph.D., D.Sc. is a Full Professor and Academic Tenure of Chemistry at California South University (CSU), Irvine, California, USA. He has got his Ph.D. and D.Sc. degrees from California South University (CSU), Irvine, California, USA. Furthermore, he has double postdocs in Project Management, Oncology, Human Cancer Tissues and Synchrotron Radiation from Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia and also in Nanochemistry and Modern Molecular Electronic–Structure Computations Theory from California South University (CSU), Irvine, California, USA. His research interests include Biophysical Chemistry, Biomolecular Spectroscopy, Quantum Chemistry, Nanochemistry, Modern Electronic Structure Computations, Theoretical Chemistry, Mathematical Chemistry, Computational Chemistry, Vibrational Spectroscopy, Molecular Modelling, Ab initio & Density Functional Methods, Molecular Structure, Biochemistry, Molecular Simulation, Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Medicinal Chemistry, Oncology, Synchrotron Radiation, LASER, Anti–Cancer Nano Drugs, Nano Drugs Delivery, ATR–FTIR Spectroscopy, Raman Spectroscopy, Intelligent Molecules, Molecular Dynamics, Biosensors, Biomarkers, Molecular Diagnostics, Numerical Chemistry, Nucleic Acids, DNA/RNA Monitoring, DNA/RNA Hypermethylation & Hypomethylation, Human Cancer Tissues, Human Cancer Cells, Tumors, Cancer Tissues, Cancer Cells, etc. He has participated at more than three hundreds reputed international conferences, seminars, congresses, symposiums and forums around the world as yet. Also, he possesses many published articles in Science Citation Index (SCI)/International Scientific Indexing (ISI) Journals. It should be noted that he has visited many universities or scientific and academic research institutes in different countries such as United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Scotland, Ireland, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Greece, Russia, Estonia, Turkey, France, Swiss, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Italy, Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, South Africa, Egypt, Brazil, Spain, Portugal, Mexico, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, China, India, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, etc. as research fellow, sabbatical and volunteer researcher or visitor and so on heretofore. He has a history of several years of teaching for college students and various disciplines and trends in different universities. Moreover, he has been a senior advisor in various industry and factories. He is expert in many computer programs and programming languages. Hitherto, he has authored more than twenty books and book chapters in different fields of Chemistry. Syne, he has been awarded more than nine hundreds reputed international awards, prizes, scholarships and honors. Heretofore, he has multiple editorial duties in many reputed international journals, books and publishers. Hitherward, he is a member of more than three hundreds reputed international academic–scientific–research institutes around the world. It should be noted that he is currently the President of American International Standards Institute (AISI), Irvine, California, USA and also Director of the BioSpectroscopy Core Research Laboratory at California South University (CSU), Irvine, California, USA.***

Hitherto? Syne? Heretofore? Hitherward? His conversation coach is rubbish.


Ah yes. AISI proves to have a website, most of its contents copy-pasted from the ISO website. 16 national Standards Agencies are affiliated to the AISI and work under its auspices, though none of the listed people seem to have traceable identities or individual nation-specific addresses, being contactable only through the AISI.

I am not sure of the business-plan details of the intended scam, but presumably it involves displacing and subsuming the actual ISO.


Definitely time for an intervention. Warm up the Low-Orbit Ion Cannon!

Going back to lifeboats... Another relevant tradition or old charter is their tendency to attract tentacled polypoid horrors from the abyss. Yet the Lifeboat Foundation people make no attempt to prepare for this contingency so I am forced to question the sincerity of their mission.


* 'The objective of the High-Energy Jargon Accelerator is to accelerate parts of speech and bang them together at high enough velocity to recreate the conditions of the Big Babel, and restore the broken symmetry between strong and weak verbs in a veritable neologasm of fresh verbal coinage... all harmless enough... but if you listen to those sky-is-falling alarmists, you'd think that our search for the God Participle runs the risk of destroying the meanings of words altogether. To which I reply "Calenture fritillary omicron flange."'

Left: Not jargon

** The Lifeboat Foundation's advisory-board memberships are noted for their inclusive nature, which makes it hard to pick out who the saboteur might be. Or the non-saboteur, as the case may be... According to the tech-dude behind the Foundation, he meant it to be a Trojan-horse Endarkenment scheme to foster distrust of knowledge and rationality, and restore the cultural balance so that Reason and Irrationality can compete on a level playing-field.

Our inquiries reveal that Marco Ruggiero - an old friend of Riddled - has recently joined the Life-Extension and Biotech boards, all the better to advertise his discoveries of time-dilation at the genetic level related to the consumption of insanely-priced food supplements.

Also on the Lifeboat Life Extension Board, we find Mari Konovalenko, Russian futurist and transhumanist who is intent on proving that Russian transhumanists are even less reality-based than the American-born variety. She holds strong opinions on the brilliance of Paolo Macchiarini, the Italian fraudster and failed organ-regeneration / transplant surgeon, which could become a Footnote or Coda if I can be arsed. Her contributions to the sum total of human nescience were what drew me into this topic in the first place.

Life continues to imitate Agatha Christie plot-lines:



A Christchurch medical researcher has died in a suspected suicide as police investigated claims she poisoned her partner last year and also whether she fatally poisoned her husband nine years ago.
...
Before her May 9 death, police had approached her about her partner collapsing at home three times last year. The partner, who Stuff has decided not to name, was rushed to hospital in June, July and August after falling unconscious. Tests eventually revealed his blood contained five different types of prescription medicine. 
...
The partner grew suspicious when he woke in his hospital room to find Dawson wearing gloves and administering what appeared to be a yellow substance to his IV line through a needle.

She claimed she wore the gloves because he was infectious and that he had seen a yellow pen.

Whenever I wake up from a drugged stupor and find the Frau Doktorin by the bedside holding a syringe, she explains that she needs to practice taking samples for work, so that's OK.

Disturbingly, this is probably only the second- or third-most bizarre medical-researcher-related tale of devious murder to come out of Christchurch.

"I never saw it before in my life."



"Where is my dead rat? Someone has moved my rat! I know where I left it and it is not there!"

Two researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology / Indian School of Mines have been in the news lately for nanotechnology retractions, as reported here and here by Prasad Ravinranath. We also refer you to Andy Extance (another science journalist with an interest in research integrity who covered the Sharma / Madhuri imbroglio for Chemistry World) in return for him crediting"anonymous @PubPeer commenters and bloggers like @SmutClyde and @schneiderleonid".

Much of the critical activity occurred at the invaluable PubPeer archive*. The full number of papers under scrutiny is not immediately obvious, due to a limitation of the site's search function. Perhaps it never occurred to its designers that a single author could publish more than 40 papers that would later fall under the shadow of "Post-publication peer review". Alternatively, they were worried that researchers would compete to hold the record for the number of contentious publications. Either way, the search function maxes out and only lists the first 40 hits that match an author's or authors' names... it is an unacceptable restriction and I demand my money back.

Anyway, Drs Sharma and Madhuri felt unfairly singled out by all the attention from image-integrity vigilantes and self-appointed blackboard monitors; they did not welcome the evidence that people were reading their papers. Allegations of extortion ensued, and threats of law-suits, and complaints to the Cyber Police.


As proof of the unfairness, Madhuri and Sharma have adduced a number of arguments, for instance citing the number of Ph.D students they have mentored (their collaborators and co-authors on the papers now under scrutiny). Indeed, this is is a useful reminder that in science we were all students once, [pompous voice] just links in the inter-generational chain of cultural transmission, custodians of skills and values that we learn and pass on [end pompous voice]. Sometimes the transmission goes the opposite way and the guru can learn from the śiṣya.
But that is not the full story, for those post-publication reviews look back over quite a number of years – 'cold-case curiosity' sounds better than 'antiquarian obsession'– and the entries for Sharma and Madhuri cover the whole of their careers, back to before they moved to Dhanbad and the Institute of Mines, to when they were the Ph.D students of (respectively) Professors Avinash C. Pandey at University of Allahabad, and Bhim Bali Prasad at Benares Hindu University. Which brings us, in an indirect and circuitous way, to a different (though overlapping) oeuvre of academic productivity... thereby absolving our host of any suspicion of singling-out, or injustice. So this post is a prequel, as it were, to 'Sharma's Bad Karma'. I am advised that prequels are popular with the young people.
The post can only 'scratch the surface of the iceberg', for Prof. B. B. Prasad co-authored 68 journal publications in the decade 2008-2017 (and a couple of book chapters), peaking in 2013 with 15 papers. The general theme is a kind of lock-and-key "molecular imprinting" paradigm, promising the easy, economical and selective detection of some specific chemical of oncological, pharmaceutical, forensic or environmental interest (e.g. "an anticancerous ifosfamide drug", or hemoglobin, or "organochlorine pesticides"). A stream of dramatic announcements and breakthroughs has ensued, though one looks in vain for developments outside the lab, or indeed for replications.

The detector is prepared by coating its surface with what may be a precision polymer, or carbon nanotubes, or quantum dots, or any other combination of nanotech Worship Words. Crucially, the targetted molecule is one of the ingredients during synthesis of the coating, so that the other ingredients wrap around it and form chemical bonds; then the target is washed or stripped away, leaving "negative mold" cavities in the coating, complete with unfulfilled bonds... ensuring that if any target molecules appear in the environs, they will gravitate straight for those cavities and snap back into place with an audible 'click', measurably altering the detector's electrical or physical properties. In many of these publications, the detectors are dual-function ("simultaneous electrochemical determination of norepinephrine and uric acid", or "simultaneous analysis of cerium and gadolinium ions", or "simultaneous analysis of glyphosate and glufosinate"), in the manner of novelty kitchen appliances.

So Prasad's papers are often illustrated with side-views of electrodes, to highlight their magic coatings. This side-view shows either a "OMNiDID/PGE showing film thickness" (according to Fig 1(C) of Prasad et al., 2017), or "MIP- AuNPs films at PGE surfaces" (according to Fig 2(E) of Prasad, Jaiwal & Singh, 2017).

This imposing wall is the edge of either a "MIP-composite modified sandpaper electrode" (Fig. 3C(a) of Prasad & Singh, 2015), or a "C60 monoadduct-MIP" (Fig. 5(D) of Prasad, Kumar & Singh, 2016). We encourage recycling.

Despite variations in the scale bar, "Fig. 3. SEM images of ... (D) side image of MIP-adduct modified SPCEs" in Kumar & Prasad (2012) is recognisable as "Fig. 2. ... side view of coated layer over PGE, electrode 1 (F)" in Prasad et al. (2013). With a different substrate, it became "Fig. 2. ... (F) side view of coated layer over PGE" in Prasad et al. (2013b).

The background void at the left appears for a fourth time in Prasad, Prasad & Tiwari (2013), as "Fig. 1. SEM images: ... (E) side view of MIP modified MWCNTs–COOH/PGE", with a substrate that was sourced from elsewhere.

"Fig. 1. ...SEM images:... (F) sideview of MIP-modified GNPs-PGE" from Prasad, Jauhari & Tiwari (2014) takes its substrate from Fig. 1, "SEM images of (A) bare ... CIP-modified PGE," of Prasad et al. (2011).

A "MIP-T4 adduct modified Ag electrode for thickness measurement" (Fig 3(e) of Prasad et al. 2010) became a "MIP-AA adduct modified GE (side imaging)" (Fig 2(c) of Prasad et al. 2011). In the course of the transformation, the image lost quality but acquired a grey overlay, while the tastefully cloned 'substrate' at its right was replaced with ugly wallpaper.


I am not convinced that this "side view of sol–gel–DIIP/PGE" (Fig. 1D from Prasad, Jauhari & Verma, 2014) ever existed outside a Photoshop window...

... or this "side view of MWCNTs/MIP"-Carbon Ceramic Electrode (from Fig. 2(E), Prasad, Jauhari & Tiwari, 2013).

Going back to the molecular-imprinting paradigm: it has an intuitive appeal, though like all the best cargo cults, it is best to avoid inquiring too deeply into the working details. It appeals enough to keep the research grants flowing. Conceivably some actual experiments were conducted, hidden behind the photoshops, and the impostures, and the photocopied hand-drawn spectra and voltagrammetric ziggurats, and the forged time-stamps, and the shifting identifications of electron microscopy.

The photoshop component of this decade-long body of work is variable in quality. It may be that the co-authors / students are expected to contribute a composite image as a kind of journeyman's piece, to demonstrate their mastery of the image-manipulation software that seems to be central to the BHU Analytical Chemistry curriculum. Then of course they take those hard-earned skills (and their training in the values of science) when they graduate and move on to academia elsewhere.

So here is Figure 3(B), a scanning-electron-microphotograph of "anodised silver", from Prasad and Kumar (2014):

I like the idea that "some of the holes are very small Sasquatch prints, and the round ones were left by a hunter's shotgun". From the same paper, 3(A), "bare silver surface". The patchwork assembly of repeated motifs all seems very labour-intensive and it might have been easier to find a piece of bare silver to put in the SEM.

Sometimes the repetition is so dominant, one could be reading a wallpaper catalog, not Material Science & Engineering. "Was the quintuplicated baboon’s face in (c), as marked up with red in Hoya’s depiction, originally inspired by this example from a tattoo design web site?" wondered C. Amazonicum.

"Perhaps there is a desperate EM technician trapped somewhere in the basement?"

Elsewhere, the original image has been so stirred around by the 'Shop distortion tools as to elude recognition. Assuming that a non-virtual starting-point did exist, though I am open to the possibility that the source was a neural network that someone trained on the depraved perspectives of Matta's ambiguous Surrealist spaces, and H. R. Giger's gauzy airbrushed 'Landscape' series.
Perhaps the idea was to sneak in dick pics to see if anyone would notice.

At their best, these creations become nebulous dream spaces in which foreground and background blur, or vertiginous abysses, reminiscent of Dorothea Tanning.


The fractured, repeated scene above at right, fraught with legs and jaws and multiple eyes, is a vision from an arachnophobic nightmare. It could be the last image seen by an unlucky insect... or a monochrome version of Arthur Tress's aesthetic. Fig 3(a) at left is less of an obvious kaleidoscope, and the stuttering elements only jump out at a second glance.

We need to move on, but I cannot resist showing Fig. 3(D) – "MID nano-fiber at 75,000×" (from "A dual-template biomimetic molecularly imprinted dendrimer-based piezoelectric sensor for ultratrace analysis of organochlorine pesticides": Prasad & Jauhari, 2015) – for I am in the thrall of the meshes of its intricate symmetry. I think it was modeled on the Veve of Ogoun.

As for Fig. 3(C) ("MID-templates adduct nano-fiber at 75,000× magnification"), it seems to have started out as 3(F) of Prasad et al. (2010)– "MIP (after template extraction)-modified Ag electrode". But elongated, and half-obscured by exuberant use of the 'Shop Clone Stamp.**

Figure 3(A) from Prasad et al. (2016b) is as if the loosely-stacked books on my shelves sprouted eyes and stared at me reproachfully. Or like air-dried codfish heaped up in a Norwegian farm-house.

In this case, a source for the composition can be identified, for the central portion later appeared as Figure 2(A) of Prasad et al. (2017).

This is a convenient segue leading to another part of this body of pictorial invention, in which parts of the confections are used elsewhere in different contexts. That is to say, there is no internal repetition, so it is easier to forgive the journal editors and peer-reviewers for blithely ignoring their dubious nature.

At one extreme are the simple rotations, and zooms, and unadorned re-use as representations of a different nanomaterial. There are so many cases of 'enlargement' as an aid to recycling, I don't know which ones to leave out. Readers will just have to explore the PubPeer archives for themselves. This transmission-electron-microphotograph shows either TNPs, or Quantum Dots.

"Fig. 1. SEM images: ... (E) MIP," from Prasad et al. (2014), or "Fig. 2. SEM images: (A) MIP-adduct" from Prasad et al. (2017)?

SEM images of "MIP modified PGEs" (Fig 5(E) of Prasad et al., 2016), or "NIP–carbon composite fibers at 10,000 x" magnification (Fig 2(F) of Prasad et al., 2010)?

At the moment my favourite image manipulation is Figure 3 from Prasad et al. (2010), in which (A) and (B) ("TEM images of crude and MIP modified MWCNTs) are simply the zoomed-in centres of photo negatives of (E) and (D) respectively ("SEM images of MWCNTs-NIP. ... MWCNTs-MIP").***

Moving right along, the "MIP-adduct" (Fig 3(C) from Kumar & Prasad 2012) is a 90° rotation of "MIMSPE fiber: MIP (after template extraction)" (Fig. 1(B) from Prasad et al. 2014). Both also have a sense of vibrant, interrupted movement that somehow brings "Neptune's Horses" to mind... if a fondness for late-Symbolist painting is wrong then I don't want to be right.


A mystery lies behind the "bare pencil-graphite electrode" that appeared with a 2009 electron-microscopy time-stamp as Fig. 3(C) of Prasad et al. (2010) and as 2(A) of Prasad et al. (2010b), for the stated magnifications are vastly different (60,000 x and 8,000 x respectively). When the same image featured as Figure S3A in Prasad et al. (2011), the date-stamp had changed to 2010. Co-author Madhuri must have taken the image with her when she graduated, for a zoomed-in version appeared for a fourth time in Roy et al. (2014), re-purposed as a platinum electrode.


But these digital, virtual fabrications of results are not to everyone's taste, and it is good to be able to say that old-school analog methods are not neglected. Figure 3 of Prasad et al. (2010) is nominally the output of an IR spectrograph, but "the wobbly palsied lines that compose these overhanging, toppling stalagmites" were more likely hand-drawn with a dried-out felt-pen, photocopied and reassembled... keeping it real, as the kids say.
With their identical, forward-bowed heads, the peaks remind me of women in a Burne-Jones procession.

If you prefer vinyl records and valve-amplifier stereros to MP3 files, you are sure to like Figure 4 of Prasad and Lakshmi (2005). It is presented as a series of voltage / current functions - "Differential pulse cathodic stripping voltammograms with MIP-modified hanging mercury drop electrode" - plotted on a X-Y chart recorder, but I believe it to be some kind of hand-drawn ziggurat construction diagram.

Similar ziggurats can be found anywhere in this series of papers, overhanging and wobbling as if the contractor had used slabs of rubber instead of stone for the building material. The artist had presumably seen the rectilinear output of an early X-Y plotter, and decided that voltammograms are supposed to look that angular, without worrying too much about the 'rectilinear' part.

Often photocopies of a crennelation sketch are stacked up, to show how well the voltagrammetry replicates. At left is Fig. 5(C) from Prasad, Srivastava &Tiwari (2013): "run c, multiple runs show reproducibility of the measurement".

The crucial point is worth emphasising again and again: Professor Prasad and his colleagues have been mixing artisanal hand-crafted designs and virtuoso displays of photorealistic image manipulation, and submitting them as multiple papers a year, for over a decade. More crucially, the editors and peer-reviewers of journals with serious-sounding names like Materials Science and Engineering C, and Journal of Colloid and Interface Science, and Journal of Chromatography A have looked at the Figures each time and thought "Yes, that's convincing, print it!"

To be fair to the editors and reviewers, maybe there were even more papers that they didn't accept.

* Obligatory caveat: There is no rule that commentary at PubPeer has to be negative; anyone can use the platform to praise a paper and bring it to wider attention, or for that matter, to criticise it on spurious or malicious grounds - thus the existence of a PubPeer thread for a publication is not damning in itself.

** 3(F) also manifests as a SEM image of "MIP modified QCM sensor", in Figure 2(a) of Madhuri et al (2011).

*** 3(D) reappeared as a "NIP-MIMSPE fiber" (as Figure 1(C) of Prasad et al. 2014); and yet again as a "MIP modified PGE surface" (as Fig. 1(a) in Kumar et al. 2011).

#42:


I knocked at the door but no-one answered

I am open to the possibility that it escaped from one of Colin Thompson's books.

Deer Mushroom, Pluteus cervinus. The foraging websites cannot generate enthusiasm about its culinary qualities, talking of a 'radishy' flavour, which goes away if fried and leaves the 'earthy' flavour dominant. Which is why these specimens survived: Dimitri the professional forager (my main mushroom competitor) would have sold them to local restaurateurs, if he had managed to create a market.

Stewed, with caramelised onions and fine-chopped carrot, celery and daikon.

Previous generations didn't have the video games and social media and digital communication that they could conjure into dire warnings about mental deterioration and the reversion of the young peoples into Morlocks. Instead they made do with the unprecedented speed and easy availability of automotive transport, which would inevitably change the skulls of drivers into a more elongate shape, as a form of streamlining, with concomitant effects upon the mind, heralding a a future of brutish, degraded, degenerate mentalities when the asylums would overflow. ***
.

A natural train of thought - the local commuter train, not the fast express service - leads us to Tochiyama et al. (2018), who recently compared the Neandertal and the Anatomically Modern Skull, to delineate the differences in shape and infer how this must have impacted on Neanderthal cognition. By "the Neandertal Skull" we mean four individual crania, each reassembled from fragments with state-of-the-art 'guesswork' methods to interpolate the missing bits; and the same for the four representatives of Cro-Magnon. Later steps in the guesswork logic assume that the volumes of brain lobes are linked rigidly to the shape of the skull, and only radial deformations are possible: for instance, if someone's forehead is compressed, the frontal lobe behind it must be smaller.


This explains the absence of frontal-lobe functioning among Mayans, other pre-Columbian cultures, East Germanic tribes, French peasants, and umpteen other groups known to modify their infants' cranial profiles with head-binding for aesthetic purposes and status enhancement.



Anyway... Tochiyama et al. are described as pioneers in this burgeoning new field of Quantified Neanderthal Phrenology:

But as SR co-author Naomichi Ogihara told Scientific American, they are the first to actually digitally reconstruct Neanderthal brains.
“Our method allows estimation of the shape and volume of each brain region, which is quite impossible just by analyzing the endocranial surfaces.”

The claim to precedence is true as long as one ignores a slightly-earlier and less-well-publicised study (Neubauer, Hublin and Gunz, 2018). Isn't it always the same? You wait for ages for a paper on Neandertal Phrenology and then two come along at once.

It is quite likely that the notion of extrapolating from skull shape to brain function had occurred to many people in the past, but had previously been rejected as patently daft. In the Golden Age of craniometry in the early 1900s, skull-caliper hobbyists and gentlemen dilettante-anthropologists liked to divide populations into those with bradycephalic and dolichocephalic heads... long narrow heads (the latter kind) were more common in Europe, and therefore superior. But no-one argued that the owners of wider, brachycephalic skulls also possessed larger temporal lobes and would be more skilled in language, memory and facial recognition.*

Now both studies fall within a recognised literary genre in which novelists and evolutionary psychologists and other authors of fiction speculate about the mental differences between Neanderthals and their anatomically-modern contemporaries, and about the racial-memory Original-Sin scars inflicted on the latter by the trauma of having to exterminate the former. Authors follow a roughly 30-year cycle, explaining the current revival of this literary tradition: see Wells 1921; Harness 1953; Golding 1955; Kurtén 1978; Auel 1980.**

It goes without saying that Neandertals must have differed in some respect, for they are no longer extant and there must be some reason for this. Also no-one wants to miss an opportunity to talk about ourselves and 'human nature' in the guise of talking about what we are not. If Neanderthals had not existed then it would be necessary to invent them.

Avid Riddled readers (is there any other kind?) will recall the beginning of this revival with the 'visual brain' theory from 2013. In this, evolution assigned so much of the Neandertal cortex to processing visual information (in compensation for the lower level of lighting in their Northern European habitat of icecaps and blizzards and cave-bears) that no brain-power was left for social-cognition skills and they could not cooperate in groups. Larger eye-sockets were adduced as evidence, and explained as an adaptation to capture more photons. This is SCIENCE so evidence is not merely 'provided' or 'tabled', it is adduced.


It is a very silly theory even by the relaxed standards of Riddled, and I can only suppose that it was accepted into Proc. Roy. Soc. B because the third author was Dunbar (of the eponymous Number). Some people might think that if Neanderthals had enlarged light-trap tarsier eyes, this would do away with the need for special night-sight neural processing requiring half their cortex... but those people are the same nay-saying skeptics and cavilling pedants who also point out that Neandertals lived all across the Levant and were not exclusively adapted to Northern Europe (that's just where a lot of caves are where their bones turned up), so their opinions can safely be ignored.

Press-release-regurging science churnalists at the time dwelt on the elongation of the Neanderthal side of the comparison:

And in fact, Neanderthal skulls suggest that the extinct hominids had elongated regions in the back of their brains, called the "Neanderthal bun," where the visual cortex lies.
"It looks like a Victorian lady's head," Dunbar told LiveScience.

Here at the Riddled Institute of Impure Science and Gratuitous Innuendo, we attribute this cerebral elongation to the extreme rapidity of the Paleolithic forms of transport favoured by Neandertals (or perhaps they practiced head-binding), but other scholars are slow to accept this explanation.

Neubauer et al. (2018) went along with the elongation / globular narrative to account for Cro-Magnon ascendancy. In contrast, Tochiyama et al. (2018) (returning to them at last!) struck off in a new direction. Unable to find any convincing cerebral differences between their Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon reconstructions, they kept fishing, and eventually reported that modern brains have larger cerebellums. Or cerebella, as the case may be. This in turn led them to the startling conclusion that the cerebellum, previously regarded as responsible for 'muscle sequencing / coordination' computations for routine movements, must in fact be the centre of our highest cognitive qualities. I am not making this up:

A new scientific analysis shows that human skulls are shaped in a way that suggests they encased brains with slightly larger cerebellums than Neanderthals. The cerebellum is a brain region associated with activities like planning, adapting to new environments, switching between tasks, and building social relationships

And because cerebellar volume is linked to abilities like cognitive flexibility, language processing, and working memory capacity, the scientists argue larger cerebellar hemispheres may have helped humans survive and adapt to a dangerous world while Neanderthals could not.

This is the point where the usual pedants and critics object that the volume and neural density of the cerebellum also tend to be greater in men than in women. "Which probably means: Neanderthals were as unorganized, antisocial, unimaginative, multi-task failures as modern-day womenfolk!"

After all that, it is a relief to turn to a recent paper with a different approach to the question of Neandertal craniometry: Gregory et al. (2017) introduced the useful concept of the "NeanderScore" and reconstructed that prototypal skull shape by measuring living people and ranking them by their proportion of Neanderthal ancestry. High NeanderScorers tended to have bigger brains, especially at the back in an "occipito-parieto-temporal patch", and were especially endowed in the region of the intraparietal sulcus (perhaps best described as important for visual-motor skills).
There was no downside:

It should be noted that we did not find associations of NeanderScore with smaller frontotemporal volumes³⁸ or shortened anterior extension of the temporal lobes¹³, as might have been hypothesized from previous cranial analyses of H. neanderthalensis

The most recent, best-founded reconstructions of Neandertal appearance have an uncanny resemblance to Paula Modersohn-Becker's portraits of herself and husband Otto. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

* Racial skull-shape differences had already entered popular culture when Rimbaud wrote 'Une Saison en Enfer' (1873). In 'The Anthropologist at Large' (1910), the globular, brachycephalic nature of a bowler hat was a crucial clue for identifying a burglar.

** There is also Vendramini's provocative idea that Neandertals were superior predators while their anatomically-normal contemporaries were merely prey to be stalked and consumed. This provides a possible explanation for the extinction of the Cro-Magnons. As for Kurup and Kurup's audacious but not particularly coherent notions about the autistic Neanderthal civilisation of Dravidian Lemuria, the less said the better.

*** Going back to the 'Automotive brain'... Oglaf's Dwarves demonstrated the effect of chariot speed on skull shape.


In our continuing experiments at Riddled, travel velocity has so far proved unpromising as a way of restructuring heads and brains, but that may simply reflect the fact that the fastest modes of transport accessible to the Riddled staff are the #23 bus, and Another Kiwi's pizza-delivery motortrike on days when he is not rostered on.

We are naturally interested in any technology that lends itself to cranial ductility and cortical remodelling... especially after that experiment with the Cosmic Ray Concentrator that was supposed to increase Space-Time Eddie's cerebral capacity (or at least to shrink his body).

Suffice to say that the side-effects were undesirable.

Perhaps it was the møøse-related posts that drew the spike of Canadian traffic.

It appears that the Western Island is so benighted that academics there are unfamiliar with "Killed By Death":




I suppose "OD'd on Life Itself" would have been inappropriate.

"Only the exhaustive can be truly interesting", according to Thomas Mann. Our journey so far, extensive though it has been, fails Mann's test for "Interesting", as it barely touched on a whole series of studies on the extra-corporeal performance of rat hearts. An omission I shall now redress.

These studies (and plots) involved the removal of still-beating hearts from rats, partly to propitiate Wobbly John the Harvest God, and partly to keep them beating in a nutrient solution, there subjecting them to an interruption and restoration of the oxygen supply. The ischemic hearts may have been subsequently calcined and mingled with wine in an alchemical decoction which grants immortality to the partaker, but some information I cannot share. We have already met Refs. 3 and 5, in which the hearts were perfused beforehand or afterwards with minocycline and urocortin to reduce the damage, encouraging them to recover their function faster and more completely. Recall that the illustrations of ischemic damage in those papers all resolved on close inspection to a single image of a heart, variously retouched to show larger or smaller infarcts. A skeptical approach to the data is justified.


For the Figures of interest, the plots do not just illustrate the data, they are the data (averaged over a number of animals). Here are plots of "post-ischemic release of creatine phosphokinase (CPK)" from Figure 3 of Ref. 3, and also from Figure 2 of Scarabelli et al (2002) - a previously-unmentioned Ref. 24. The presence of CPK is a Bad Thing, and from superimposing the graphs it seems to be reduced equally by reperfusion-only urocortin and by ex-vivo minocycline. What are the odds?


Other graphs showed left-ventricular systolic and diastolic pressure in the autonomous hearts (sP and dP), where a large difference between the two is desirable, and recovery from ischemia is all about the sP returning to its previous high while dP drops back to its previous low. These are some examples of partial recoveries - Figure 2D from Ref. 3, 1(b) from Ref. 24, 5B from Townsend et al. (2004) (Ref. 25) and 2B from Scarabelli et al. (2009) (Ref. 26).


The different treatments have impressively similar results; in fact the first two dP functions are identical. What are the odds? In case you were wondering, Ref. 25 looked at the cardioprotective possibilities of green-tea extracts, while Ref. 26 turned to 'myricetin' and 'delphinidin', which I assume (on the basis of the names) to be extracted from whales and dolphins respectively.

In Figure 2(g) of Ref. 5, the treatment was bromoenol lactone... this produced a different dP function, but the rebound of sP is hard to distinguish from the others.


There appear to be only a few ways that drug treatments can affect the performance of rats’ hearts in a jar. There is the good recovery profile (overlaying urocortin and minocycline to show the nigh-identical sP graphs):


The two extreme cases (almost no recovery; total recovery) result from the control treatment, i.e. none at all; and from saturation in urocortin before as well as after ischemia. These feature as Figures 1(a) and (c) of Ref. 24 and again as Figures 7(a) and (c) of Lawrence et al. (2002) (Ref. 27). After the Aerobic phase, the corresponding graphs are identical so it may be that both papers plotted the same data.


The situation is confused by the discovery that the panels of Figure 7 also repeat four of the panels from Figure 6 of the same paper, with different labels. An innocent mistake on the authors' part, which went unnoticed by editors, reviewers and the journal's readership... thus missing the chance to correct it when the paper was amended in the first wave of errata, to replace a disguised recycled actin blot in Figure 3a.


So we do get "one of those crime-investigation scenes of snapshots pinned to a corkboard and linked together with red string", after all!

Ref. 3. Scarabelli TM, Stephanou A, Pasini E, Gitti G, Townsend P, Lawrence K, Chen-Scarabelli C, Saravolatz L, Latchman D, Knight R, Gardin J (2004b). "Minocycline inhibits caspase activation and reactivation, increases the ratio of XIAP to smac/DIABLO, and reduces the mitochondrial leakage of cytochrome C and smac/DIABLO".

Ref. 5. Lawrence KM, Scarabelli TM, Turtle L, Chanalaris A, Townsend PA, Carroll CJ, Hubank M, Stephanou A, Knight RA, Latchman DS (2003). "Urocortin protects cardiac myocytes from ischemia/reperfusion injury by attenuating calcium-insensitive phospholipase A2 gene expression".

Ref. 24 Scarabelli TM, Evasio Pasini, Anastasis Stephanou, Laura Comini, Salvatore Curello, Riccardo Raddino, Roberto Ferrari, Richard Knight, David S Latchman (2002). "Urocortin promotes hemodynamic and bioenergetic recovery and improves cell survival in the isolated rat heart exposed to ischemia/reperfusion".

Ref. 25. Townsend PA, Scarabelli TM, Pasini E, Gitti G, Menegazzi M, Suzuki H, Knight RA, Latchman DS, Stephanou A (2004). "Epigallocatechin-3-gallate inhibits STAT-1 activation and protects cardiac myocytes from ischemia/reperfusion-induced apoptosis".

Ref. 26. Scarabelli TM, Mariotto S, Abdel-Azeim S, Shoji K, Darra E, Stephanou A, Chen-Scarabelli C, Marechal JD, Knight R, Ciampa A, Saravolatz L, de Prati AC, Yuan Z, Cavalieri E, Menegazzi M, Latchman D, Pizza C, Perahia D, Suzuki H (2009). "Targeting STAT1 by myricetin and delphinidin provides efficient protection of the heart from ischemia/reperfusion-induced injury".

Ref. 27. Lawrence KM, Chanalaris A, Scarabelli T, Hubank M, Pasini E, Townsend PA, Comini L, Ferrari R, Tinker A, Stephanou A, Knight RA, Latchman DS (2002). "K(ATP) channel gene expression is induced by urocortin and mediates its cardioprotective effect".

Here at the Riddled Blogging and Combine-Harvester Racing Club we pay little heed to requests from the readership or suggestions of targets for satire, for readers are known to be fickle and feckless and even vice versa, easily distracted by the news cycle and its ephemeral celebrities. In the particular case of Jordan Peterson, it is hard to make him look any more ridiculous or intellectually squalid than he has already managed by himself by talking to journalists.

Several years ago, Jordan Peterson told me he wanted to buy a church. This was long before he became known as “the most influential public intellectual in the Western world,” as he was described in the pages of the New York Times a few months ago. It was before he was fancied to be a truth-telling sage who inspired legions, and the author of one of the bestselling books in the world this year. He was just my colleague and friend.
I assumed that it was for a new home — there was a trend in Toronto of converting religious spaces, vacant because of their dwindling congregations, into stylish lofts — but he corrected me. He wanted to establish a church, he said, in which he would deliver sermons every Sunday.

In contrast, I am always willing to rant about the Five Factor approach to psychology, often at excessive length, which is why I am seldom invited to parties. The Five Factor Model or FFM is one of several forms of 'trait personology' allowing persons to portray their image of themselves by endorsing or rejecting a series of descriptors from a questionnaire [descriptors = adjectives or self-descriptive phrases]; their responses are variously combined to score the subject on five broad scales. Their names are sometimes abbreviated to OCEAN, because NEOCA sounds like it could be a cellphone manufacturer. You might encounter the system in Vocational Astrology, used to determine your shape as a peg, in order to drive you into the appropriately-shaped hole... in this context, scores on Conscientiousness and Openness (say) are found to be more rigorous and plausible than the language of "Venus in trine, Moon in the Fourth House, Jupiter in Opposition". The big question is how much you can predict about someone if you know their score on (for instance) Neuroticism (other than their score on some future Neuroticism test), and the answer is "two-thirds of sweet fuck-all".
The general rule with trait psychology is that its insights can be right, or non-trivial, but not both, and the FFM is not glaringly wrong. It is not as fraudulent as some rival tools for psychometric astrology, for it is distantly related to observations and supported by a fragile scaffolding of circular reasoning and evidence collection; as opposed to (for instance) the Myers-Briggs system, which is rectally-sourced in its entirety.

Much of that fragile scaffolding involves Factor Analysis in some way. FA is well-favoured in numerically-inclined schools of psychology, and when I get around to writing my long-promised textbook on "Artefacts and flaws of different numerical methods: Choosing the one that matches the desired results", it will be the first chapter. When you have taken some devoutly-wished-for conclusion and built it into the design of some questionnaire or inventory, FA is the instrument of choice for discovering that easter-egg within the test responses, while you feign an expression of gratified surprise that Objective Reality has hewed so closely to your theory. There was going to be a metaphor here about the rabbits so often discovered within top-hats, and how Objective Reality must have placed them there, but let's go with Thomas Mann instead:

It pleases me to imagine that Mann intended Pharoah's Daughter and her attendants to be an allegory on the banks of the Nile of Factor Analysis.

But this brings us back to Jordan Peterson. Peterson is in demand because he burdened himself with the demanding though well-remunerated role of Socially-Conservative Intellectual -- making garbage people comfortable in their bigotry and reassuring them that their predigested opinionations are simply recognitions of Objective Reality -- but he also has a day-job as an employment psycholomogist.* With the FFM as his specialty, which is enough to bring him into the Riddled wheelhouse after all, assuming that he can find room there among all the wheels.

Peterson has his own proprietorial variant, the "Unfakeable Five Factor" test: marketed as spoof-proof and resistant to subjects using their responses to paint a false personality picture. You can hire him as an Expert Witness, to testify to the undistorted validity of profiles thereby obtained (and in child-custody cases, to the custodial superiority and non-violence of the father). Alas, his ill-prepared forays into the realms of jurisprudence were not a great success, unless by "success" you mean "inspiring judges to criticise junk-science and unfounded self-estimation in creatively pungent phrases", and his testimony was ruled inadmissible on account of being abject bafflegab. Do readthose Rulings: the judges do not hold back on Peterson's arrogance and lack of preparation.

[19] This is perhaps the most interesting of all of the reports that counsel for the respondent wishes the court to consider.  It comes as close to “junk science” as anything that I have ever been asked to consider. 

Now I have exhausted my knowledge of the Peterson oeuvre so I shall continue by mining the comments for clever aperçus and pretending to be their author:

It was like Joseph Campbell got hit by a bus and no one noticed, and he staggered across the street to the public library with blood running down his head, and he read nineteen pages of The White Goddess, and three chapters of The Golden Bough, and then the last two-thirds of Émile Durkheim's Wikipedia page, and suddenly he understood the shape of the world beneath its shroud of falsehoods and deceits. And also he lost about 50 I.Q. points. And Peterson's fans are all so dumb they're unable to notice that not only is their Emperor naked, he's actually a horse. I don't know how that anthropomorphized clownshoe has been able to pass himself off as an intellectual for all these years.

But what I really want to say about this FFM approach is how unambitious it is. We no longer hear depth-psychology talk of mapping the mechanisms of the mind in order to predict cognition and behaviour [this paragraph sounds better if you imagine Vincent Price reading it out in his most sententious tones]. Instead we have learned a lot about the folk-psychology narratives and conventions and expectations that we use to make sense of people's behaviour, for now that psychology is all about measuring impressions of personality -- outsourcing the work to untrained observers and tabulating their responses, though without any diminution of professional prestige or remuneration -- it has become a study of the limitations of observers. Depth psychology has drained out to the approximate superficiality of an oil-slick on a wet road. It is like when you lose your keys in a territory so you search for it on a map because there is more light there.

That analogy needs work, so here is another one. We see three dimensions of colour. This is a perceptual limitation rather than a feature of the ambient environment -- evolution has no time for the full complexity of spectral variations among different light sources, and our eyes and brains are designed to throw most of the information away (colour space is only two-dimensional for most mammals; birds routinely have four or five dimensions of colour experience). Were someone to conclude from our perceptual incapacity that the manifold of spectral variation is only three-dimensional in physical reality, we would view that person as very silly indeed, or else a Five-Factor theorist.

A closing paragraph should go here but I can't be arsed writing one right now. Maybe tomorrow.

* What is it with Occupational Psychologists? That was originally Dr Linda Gottfredson's area... though rather than using the FFM to measure pegs and match them to vocational holes, she specialised in Holland's aptitude schema, which has six factors rather than five, arranged in a hexagonal circumplex (in turn, Holland's RIASEC scheme should not be confused with the Hogan Personality Inventory, which has six or possibly seven factors, and is popular in executive-headhunting circles). The whole field is roughly on a par with phrenology in terms of intellectual rigour, but at least it helps the practitioners find gainful employment, if no-one else. At some point, though, Gottfredson took a sharp turn into white-supremacy thinking, swallowed 'The Bell Curve' holus-bolus, and was the main instigator (along with fellow-sewer-rat David Brooks) of an Open Letter / full-page advertisement in the WSJ, supporting its message of 'race realism'.

A previous post touched fleetingly on that episode of popular nescience in the 1990s when a small band of disinterested, evidence-driven, 100%-agenda-free maverick thinkers had the temerity to challenge the orthodoxy of equality in intellectual endowment. Of special interest to your hard-working Riddled staff is the backlash when the cowled monks of the Equality Inquisition stormed the laboratories and the groves of academe, all “You can’t handle the truth!”, shutting down the inquiries to the point that “The Bell Curve” never rose above the obscurity of the cover page of Time. David Brooks and Andrew Sullivan and Linda Gottfredson and the collected editorial board of Intelligence were inspired to champion the right of the book’s authors to ask questions however inconvenient, and we can all see how their own careers suffered in the subsequent Stalinist reprisals.

Fast-forward two decades, and a new generation of brave maverick researchers are broaching the possibility of inhomogeneities in the geographic distribution of the genes of supremacy, undeterred by the orthodoxy of geneticists and anthropologists and palaeontologists. You probably haven’t heard of these human-biodiversity heretics, for the cowled monks of the Inquisition were swift to mobilise (they may have been spent the intervening years slumbering in the crypt of a cathedral somewhere) and they went all “Some questions are NOT TO BE ASKED” again, suppressing this new just-asking-questions crowd to the point that they have to hire a hall at UCL for their conferences.
Now here at the Riddled Department of Traditions and Old Charters or Something, I am always available to rant about cycles in intellectual / contrarian thinking, as long as the frostygirls are buying the vasopressin. Especially if it is a 20-year generational cycle, where the delightful prospect beckons of shoehorning it into the 22-year rhythm of sunspots and solar magnetism reversals.

So in the case of this recurring oppression of independent thought white-supremacist bafflegab, we go back twenty years to a previous ideologue / heretic clash in 1976, and harken to Sprague de Camp, as he introduces the ‘cowled inquisitors’ trope. They embody the Spectre of Political Correctness, or something.

The geographical taxonomy of human variation presented in "Breeds of Man" was already dated then (Cavalli-Sforza had published The Genetics of Human Populations in 1971) and it has not aged well. De Camp set out expecting to conclude that the mavericks were right and "equality" is a sentimental shibboleth of liberalism; that heredity is paramount and intelligence is determined by the geographical location of one's ancestors. But then he encountered the greeter claims of environment, and ended up accepting that the Equality doctrinaires were right all along (though probably for the wrong reasons), so he gets many cookies for intellectual integrity.

I hang onto a copy of the April 1976 Analog as it continued the serialisation of 'Children of Dune', with the Schoenherr illustrations, and I am a sucker for nostalgia.

Must credit Emma and B^4 for contributions in an earlier comment thread.

Can't post, due to travel & work & beer.


This is what happens when conceptual artists are invited to redesign street-maps.

With all the developments and retractions and cruelly-truncated research programs in the field of regenerated airway transplants, it is easy to overlook the parallel events involving 'text transplants'. I refer of course to the experiments of Dr Carmine Finelli and his colleague and mentor Dr Giovanni Tarantino, as reported in posts at RetractionWatch and by Sylvie Cotaud at Ocasapiens.

Finelli rose to prominence 18 months ago in L'affair Dansinger when a paper he had published seemed familiar to one of its readers. The reader had in fact written identical sentences and tabulated identical data, at an earlier date, but his own version had been rejected for publication (by a panel of peer reviewers which included Carmine Finelli). Soon 'Marco' reported that Finelli & Tarantino (2013) was a near-verbatim copy of Wang et al. (2009) (although augmented by the addition of a paragraph of Concluding Remarks, copied from the Abstract of a paper from 2001). The commotion drew the attention of commenters and contributors to PubPeer, who delight in pursuing low-hanging fish and fruit in a barrel, and who doubted that the episode would be an isolate.

The results of their inquiries are documented in 36 threads at PubPeer: 21 co-authored by Finelli and Tarantino, three by Finelli (plus other colleagues and students) and 12 by Tarantino. The dates range from Tarantino (2007) to Finelli (2017), with their productivity peaking in 2013 with nine papers and 2014 with eight. In short, the experiments of the Dottori were all about taking blocks of text (of greater or shorter length) from donor papers, decellularising them stripping out the references, and re-seeding the resulting "scaffold" with stem cells citations of their own previous publications.

You will have to read the PubPeer threads themselves to decide how far the papers depart from conventional standards of originality. In the first two examples above, the re-authored source material was republished in undigested form. At the other extreme are lapidary mosaics of paragraphs woven together from multiple sources (to the extent that a mosaic can be woven): sometimes just Abstracts, with no indication that the main texts of these papers had been consulted. Or nuggets or inclusions of source material, embedded in connective tissue. Finelli et al. 2014a and 2014b are the same collage in two different journals.*

Sometimes journal editors will curate an issue with an Editorial that picks out the significant contributions, bookended by introductory and concluding paragraphs that put them in context and abstract their recurring themes. These prefaces can be stripped of the contribution-specific descriptions and repurposed as perfectly republishableartifacts in their own right.

The works include review articles and Invited Editorials. Also of note, and exemplifying the "lapidary mosaic" style, are two scrapbookedChapters in the Handbook of Lipids in Human Function (2016) and a third for Nutrition in the Prevention and Treatment of Abdominal Obesity (2014). Ronald Watson, editor of both volumes, presumably commissioned the chapters.* There is a lesson here for young scholars, about the kind of academic conduct by which one builds a magisterial reputation in the field... how one earns invitations to write Editorials, and to be a peer reviewer.



The World Journal of Gastroenterology was a favourite target, with 14 flagged publications (seven of them without Finelli). This hails from Baishideng Publishing Group, a pay-to-play company noted for spamming and negotiable standards of review. Second favourite was Journal of Gastrointestinal and Liver Diseases (the organ of several Romanian medical associations) with five co-authored papers.

In 2013, the editors of J. Gastroint. Liver Dis. were compelled to reprimand Finelli and Tarantino for including an antepenultimate paragraph in their 2012 contribution, without attributing Zelber-Sagi et al. (2011) as the authors. This being "minor plagiarism with inadequate attribution in an already published review", the authors were let off with an apology and a promise to go forth and sin no more, while the editors will engage in no further correspondence, for they feel that they have discharged their obligations. The ironic aspect of this single recycled paragraph is that it is almost the only paragraph in Finelli & Tarantino (2012) that was not taken from Zivkovic et al. (2007).

In one form or another, paragraphs from Zivkovic et al. can be found in half-a-dozen of the doctors' works in the medium of collage. They were especially besotted with its introductory phrases ("The rising incidence of obesity in today’s environment is associated with many obesity-related health complications..." and "This constellation is also recognized as the metabolic syndrome and is characterized by underlying..."), e.g. Tarantino, Capone & Finelli (2013); Finelli & Tarantino (2014); and Tarantino & Finelli (2016).



Another productive text-mine was Harrison & Day (2007). It provided the bulk of a review article, Finelli & Tarantino (2012), although when the Figures were redrawn for that 2012 appearance they lost much of their aesthetic elegance.


Other paragraphs reappeared in Finelli, Gioia & La Sala (2012), and as a subsection in a 2014 Chapter. It so happened that Harrison and Day had committed a harmless but distinctive malapropism, which was faithfully copied in each emergence, making them easy to find.

I could go on. A summary from Cai et al. (2006) was recreated five times, including in Tarantino & Finelli (2016) again (for that chapter is something of a greatest-hits compilation): not necessarily a record but still an accomplishment to celebrate. It may be that after the first few repetitions, the authors genuinely believed that they were merely copying their own unimprovable bons mots. Other sources ranged from Wikipedia to Dr Mehmet Oz. As well as text, Tables and Figures were fair game.


Meanwhile, science blogger Neuroskeptic had reported the discouraging outcomes of an experiment in editorial receptivity:

Over the space of four months, I reported about 30 cases of plagiarism in review papers to various journals, with the help of Turnitin plagiarism detection software.
Every case I reported was a serious one. The percentage of unoriginal text ranged from 44-90%, with an average of about 65%.

I was inspired by this example to conduct a similar project with the present oeuvre, selecting 18 papers from 13 journals and emailing the editors, drawing their attention to these questions of originality and attribution (this sounds so much better than "anonymous poison-pen denunciations"). I assured the recipients that our correspondence (or their lack of response) would be confidential.

In 11 of 18 cases my email was acknowledged, with some editors asking for further information or promising to conduct an inquiry. Less encouragingly, only two of the 18 have experienced an actual change in status. It may be that a 16-month interval is not long enough for journals to compare two blocks of text, or to obtain the authors' consent to an intervention. However, I have not counted the case of Finelli, Gioia & La Sala (2012) where my message was superfluous, as the editors had already been notified and were already taking steps. Nor did my list include Tarantino, Di Minno & Finelli (2015), which the editors of Oncotargetretracted depublished without prompting, leaving no explanation or trace of its previous existence.

In "Rivers of London", Dr Walid knows the score:

When I asked Dr Walid about it, he merely said that he liked to keep certain of his files secure.
‘From who?’ I asked.
‘Other researchers,’ he said. ‘They’re always looking to pirate my work.’ Apparently the hepatologists were the worst.

* Finelli et al. (2014a / 2014b) reappeared in an extended dance remix as a book chapter in 2017 -- gaining some additional copy-paste though losing the co-authors -- though no-one bothered to annotate the piracy, for the publisher in this case was Bentham, who are unlikely to care.

Stockpiles of Stupid were running low again so we dispatched teams of ninja ethnologists to conduct fieldwork among distant primitive tribes in the Bumblefuck Archipelago and record their creation myths and magical-thinking ritualistic worldviews, before they are spoiled by exposure to civilisation and rationality.

What they brought back was this report from Alcorcón, Spain, where the media had fallen for an alluring line of bullshit-and-blarney from a team of Dutch and Spanish monorail salemen... all about the state-of-the-aunt no-cutting-edge Research Hospital devoted to Integrative Healing and Traditional Chinese Medicine that would soon bring patients flooding into Alcorcón, thanks to a €30-million gift from the Chinese Gubblement, coming Real Soon Now to repay the bridging loans. Never mind the delicate allusions to the material signs of commitment that the host city should show to secure that gift [this project will be selected on bases of infra structure and readiness to take the step to establish a new concept of healthcare...]; just look at the CGI!

Now small towns succumbing to richly-embroidered blandishments does not normally fall within the purview of the Riddled School of Unconventional Ethics and Fishnet-Stocking Museum, but it turned out to be purviewable after all, so bear with me. The pages at the "China Europe Business Development Services" website provide not only glossy architecture-porn CGI, but also documentation of the TCM hospital story-line, lavish with circumstantial detail.



But then the city's embittered political dissidents applied due diligence:

On December 29 the municipal government of Alcorcón announced an agreement for the Chinese government to invest 300 million euros to build an "International Health Center", which combined Traditional Chinese Medicine with Western medicine, on a plot of 60,000 meters square in the South Ensanche neighborhood of our municipality.

...

None of this seems to have to do with the International Health Center announced by the City Council of Alcorcón. The promoter company, China Europe Business Development Services (CEBDS), seems to be more dedicated to the promotion of "natural therapies" of Chinese origin and not in the scientific development of drugs from the experiences of the TCM, nor with the medicine Western, as the company reflects on its own website, its interest in Spain is due to the permissiveness of our legislation with the sale and dissemination of Western-origin pseudoscientific therapies such as homeopathy.
And is that despite having been announced as an investment by the Chinese government, is this private company, chaired by the Dutchman Robert De Vos, who would be in charge of the investment. In addition, although "China Europe Business Development Services" does seem to have several advisors of Chinese origin, it does not have any member of the Chinese government among its directors. According to its own website, its Executive Director is the Brazilian Alexandre Ferreira Lopes, and its Director for Business Development, the Spanish David Martinez Hinojosa.

...and the webpages discovered an urgent appoint elsewhere, and in the manner of leprechaun gold of Macavity the Cat they were no longer there, proving impossible to archive (on account of the fictive, irreal nature of the Chinese invstors), leaving only screen-grabs.

It is not entirely clear whom CEBDS are targeting with their offers to facilitate mutually-lucrative links between Euro and Chinese business leaders. The vanished and surviving pages at the CEBDS website worked hard to foster the impression that CEBDS's officers enjoy the confidence and purchasable access to the highest echelons of the Chinese kleptocracy, but I am not convinced.

CEBDS CEO Robert de Vos used to have a LinkedIn page, designed to reel in Europeans with a general lure of "there are many scams going on and this is your chance to grab your share of the moneyswirl". Combined with a fatalistic / upside-of-defeatism sense of "Europe is finished, the future is China; CEBDS is your chance to welcome our new overlords while they are still recruiting collaborators". All punctuated with freshly-coined Confucian aphograms and epirisms (and even the other way around), and permeated with the odour of joss-sticks and honourable high-mindedness, which is to say not intended for the eyes of actual Chinese businesspersons.

Alas, that entry too has gone down the memory hole, so you will have to take my word for it. Instead, here is another vanished page from the CEBDS site:



The crux is at the bottom:*Immortalis Klotho"!

Immortalis Klotho, readers will recall, is the latest wonder-drug from the ever-inventive Dr Marco Ruggiero, who has dazzled us for centuries with his wondrous creations. Coming in quick succession after GcMAF, Magic Yoghurt, Rerum®,** and perhaps a few more that I forgot. It lengthens life-expectancy beyond the bounds of today, by causing relativistic time-dilation effects at the level of cellular DNA, perhaps by boring the base-pairs in such tedious degree that time seems to pass more slowly for them (a similar effect might explain how Ruggiero seems to have dazzled us for centuries). Dr Ruggiero has published repeatedly on time-dilation and quantum neurology, and likes to cite the Old Testament as science literature to prove that the original Biblical-Patriarch longevity was not unreasonable for Immortalis customers to expect. For the marketing and distribution of this new product, he teamed up with "Sacha" Stone - failed rock-star, wannabee New Age Messiah, and broad-spectrum grifter.
Now we turn to the Immortalis Testimonials page (recently closed to public scrutiny, but attempts to archive it were less unsuccessful). Most of the testifying entities are anonymised, or are V14GR4 spam-bots who attained sentience but have not yet left traceable on-line footprints. But wait, who are these individuals ‘Robert de Vos’ and ‘David M[artinez]’, offering their independent and disinterested testimony from CEBDS?

De Vos is black-haired in his photographs, though he credits Immortalis with restoring his pelage to its original blondity. It is unclear what arrangement between Ruggiero and the CEBDS monorail Alcorcónmen inspired the latter to become Immortalis pimps, but one is heartened to find them providing full service.

* Another crux at the bottom, c/o Man Ray.

** In other news: Rerum® (“The Stuff”) is now obsolete and de-recommended! For another quantum leap occurred in immune-support therapy, and another good new thing has hied into view, with a brutally-kerned logo that could easily be mistaken for that of a designer bottled-water brand . Coming real soon! One struggles to curb one’s anticipation!


Of course Rerum® had already accrued imitators and competitors for the moneys of the credulous born-sucker-demographic clientele (I am SHOCKED SHOCKED to encounter this lack of solidarity within the medscam industry), so its abandonment was only a matter of time.

So far, ‘Imuno’ is purveyed only through ‘Naturalsolutions.nz’, operating out of the basement of Michael Kelly’s new-age / Alt-Med cash-extraction facility and pantechnicon of modalities at St Benedict’s Road (Auckland, NZ). His other business activities have inspired us with admiration and hilarity. Details of who registered the primary website ‘imuno.biz’ are veiled behind an anonymising service,
though not very effectively, for it is hosted on an IP address that is quite selective about the other websites it hosts. That is to say, the evidence points to Michael Kelly as the main instigator and producer of Imuno®.

In the past Mr Kelly has been creative in his attributions, and it is possible that the alleged role of Ruggiero in this new product is purely his own invention. We should not be too quick to conclude that Ruggiero is trying to backstab Heinz Reinwald (Swiss impresario of Alt-Med bafflegab placebos), who seems to control production and distribution of the now-deprecated Rerum®. And perhaps takes an excessive share of the profits.

As always, it is the high calibre of the individuals one thereby encounters that bring me back again and again to Ruggiero’s cosplay version of medical research.

Alternative title: "Man Reading Aloud to a Turkey".