Going for a Golden Gate Bridge theme this year.

Looks like it is mandatory to use a sans-serif geometrical font like Futura.

This is another contribution of the fraud busting team Smut Clyde and TigerBB8, this time it is about a cancer researcher, Guoqiang Zhao, professor at the Zhengzhou University in China. Zhao not only pretends to know how to cure cancer in Photoshop, he is also the owner of a paper mill where customer peers pay him bribes for authorships on his original forgeries in international peer reviewed journals. We do not know if knowingly or unknowingly, but fact is: of the ~133 papers Zhao published, already 30 are flagged on PubPeer for data manipulation, until the sleuths got bored and moved on, having made the case clear.

There was already a misconduct investigation, and even some retractions, the Zhangzhou University previously attributed all data fakery to Zhao’s elusive technician. Things are in flow presently, especially on the Chinese social media platform Weibo, and it seems the 53-year-old Zhao will be made to retire prematurely, while all his original research data is facing a clean-up from the university administration.
These mice are playing invisible pianos, and I imagine them singing in little Tom Waits voices. The splashes of colour adorning their chests are the amplified luminescent emissions of Luciferase, tracking the growth of an injected colony of carcinoma cells, unless they are poorly-rendered Sacred Heart tattoos (mice are not noted for their tattooing competence). The point is that three of them have been cloned, allowing them to participant in a different experiment, receiving different therapeutic treatments and Sacred-Heart tattoos. I am open to the possibility that the mouse marked with the orange star is actually an accompanying singer, in which the little groups are more likely to be Leonard Cohen covers bands.


These are Figure 2(e) and (f), from [1], and Figure 2D from [2]:
[1] miR-198 targets SHMT1 to inhibit cell proliferation and enhance cell apoptosis in lung adenocarcinoma
Shujun Wu, GZ, Ping Li, Shanshan Chen, Furui Zhang, Juan Li, Chenyang Jiang, XC, YW, YD, QS, Guoqiang Zhao
Tumor Biology (2016) doi: 10.1007/s13277-015-4369-z

[2] MiR-499 Enhances the Cisplatin Sensitivity of Esophageal Carcinoma Cell Lines by Targeting DNA Polymerase β
YW, JF , WZ, YD, XC, QS, ZD, Guoqiang Zhao
Cellular Physiology and Biochemistry (2015) doi: 10.1159/000430321

Yes, it is time for another exploration of the questionable-research industry, with illustrations pilfered from anonymouse comments in PubPeer threads. Our subject this time is Guoqiang (or Guo-Qiang) Zhao who cures cancer (or causes it) with micro-RNA. A great number of these miRs have been reported... instead of serving as an intermediary in the transcription of DNA into proteins, these are RNA chains that modulate gum up the transcription machinery, for reasons which probably made sense at a time when Evolution had been drinking. Then there are Short Interfering RNAs, siRNA; and Long non-coding RNAs; because of course there are. It is a career-sustaining field of oncology research, though Zhao's focus on it is not exclusive and he has published on more herbal cancer treatments like Myricetin and Saponins and α-Solanine.

Prof Zhao was basically born a professor, in 1965, into a family that has strong ties to his current academic employer, Zhengzhou University (ZZU) In Henan province in China. His father, Zhao Senior, worked as a senior technician for Henan Medical School that later merged with ZZU to become part of its medical school. Zhao Senior had been credited as having some unique skills for experimental setups or preparing experimental materials. In these times, there were only a handful of technicians at this level in local universities, and Zhao Senior was very much sought and certainly earned a great deal of respect. It sure opened many academic doors for his creatively endowed offspring.

Zhao Junior graduated at the Wuhan University, earning his bachelor’s degree a couple of months before his 19th birthday. Obviously, young Zhao must have been a very bright student to graduate from such a top university at such a young age. He then earned a PhD from his father’s alma mater ZZU (no details were shared about that period on Zhao’s CV, maybe his father knows more). In 1992, Zhao Junior started his own research in the field of medical microbiology and immunology. From 1994 to 1999, he was lecturer in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, College of Basic Medical Science (CBMS) of ZZU, before being promoted to Associate Professor. In 2005, the senior technician’s son achieved the rank of full professor in the same university.

Professor Zhao has a cadre of regular colleagues whose names I have abbreviated to reduce the repetition. Here and below: XC = Xiaonan Chen, ZD = Ziming Dong, YD = Yuwen Du, JF = Jianfang Feng, ML = Min Li, CL = Chunya Lu, QS = Qianqian Sun, TW = Tao Wang, YW = Yuanyuan Wang, WZ = Wenqiao Zang, GZ = Guojun Zhang. However, many of his papers are graced with a parade of outside colleagues as first or guest authors. They don't appear to be grad students. Evidently he is sought-after as a collaborator, "popular and very truly run-after".

In CBMS of ZZU, Zhao is the director of the Core Laboratory (公共实验平台). As Associate Chair of his department, primarily responsible for overseeing research, he has the full control of this lab facility. This means in practice, he decides which of his colleagues gets access to this shared lab facility and who doesn’t. Sources revealed that Zhao does not seem getting along with the majority of his colleagues, only a handful of faculty members belong to his privileged inner circle, mainly those trained by Zhao himself as PhD advisor. These people are his top co-authors, in fact they feature as first authors on Zhao’s 30+ papers flagged on PubPeer. One colleague said:

“[Zhao] doesn’t really hang out with us. He minds his own business and seldomly allows us to use his supposedly shared Core Lab. Quite often, Zhao tends to use harsh words in conversations with other faculty members who are not in his circle.”

Even if frequently at odds with many of his colleagues, Zhao does keep good relationships with certain important allies. His superior Ziming Dong is one of them. Dong did several terms of postdoc in different US labs for about 10 years before going back to ZZU in 1998 and eventually becoming dean of CBMS. He is co-author of 6 papers of Zhao’s 30+ papers flagged on Pubpeer, of which 2 had been retracted. Sources say, Dong and Zhao are very close and Zhao invested tremendous amount of time and effort helping Dong to his success. Another frequent co-author of Zhao is Associate Professor Wenqiao Zang, who used to be PhD student under Zhao and remained in the same department after graduation. Zang co-authored 18 papers questioned on PubPeer. After Zhao’s case had been publicized on China’s social network Weibo, Zang was reported to have been taking days off from office, allegedly because of “not feeling well”.

One could easily lose oneself within Zhao's menagerie of cloned mouse images. Here are more examples, linking five separate papers.


The figures above are 5A from [3] and 4(b), (d) from [4]:
[3] Overexpression of miR-203 increases the sensitivity of NSCLC A549/H460 cell lines to cisplatin by targeting Dickkopf-1
Ruirui Cheng, CL, GZ, Guowei Zhang, Guoqiang Zhao
Oncology Reports (2017) doi: 10.3892/or.2017.5505

[4] Overexpression of miR-519d in lung adenocarcinoma inhibits cell proliferation and invasion via the association of eIF4H
Yong Bai, CL, GZ, Yu Hou, Yanjie Guo, Heqi Zhou, Xiaojingnan Ma, Guoqiang Zhao
Tumor Biology (2017) doi: 10.1177/1010428317694566


Above are Figure 5A again from [3], and Fig 1c from [5]. In this case the indicated pair of mice are mirror-image identical twins, so 1c is flipped horizontally for ease of comparison.
[5] Myricetin inhibits proliferation and induces apoptosis and cell cycle arrest in gastric cancer cells

Figures 2G from [6] again, and 5A from [7]:
[7] Long Noncoding RNA RGMB-AS1 Indicates a Poor Prognosis and Modulates Cell Proliferation, Migration and Invasion in Lung Adenocarcinoma
Ping Li, GZ, Juan Li, Rui Yang, Shanshan Chen, Shujun Wu, Furui Zhang, Yong Bai, Huasi Zhao, YW, Shaozhi Dun, XC, QS, Guoqiang Zhao
PLoS ONE (2016) doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0150790


Figures 5B from [7] (flipped horizontally), and 4(b), (d) from [4]. One mouse has turned out to be identical triplets.

Now it is not always easy to tell one nude mouse from another, and the repeated appearance of a photograph (overlaid with a photon-counted rendering of luciferase emissions) could be an innocent mistake born of a haphazard filing system. But it is hard to think of a simple explanation when the image is emblazoned with different splashes of colour depicting its population of carcinoma cells.

So we return to [1]. The legend to Figure 2(d) explains that in Colony-Formation assays of cell survival, with two carcinoma cell-lines, "Significantly fewer colonies formed in the miR-198 group than in the control groups". Inspection reveals unexpected similarities between two of the panels, with additional dots added to the control-group version, accounting for that difference.


A few months after [1], Zhao co-authored [8], in which Fig 3(d) uses the same Colony-Formation plates to illustrate new combinations of micro-RNA and cell lines. One of the discs rotated through 180° and gained additional colonies in the process.

[8] Sodium Butyrate Upregulates miR-203 Expression to Exert Anti-Proliferation Effect on Colorectal Cancer Cells
Ruirui Han, QS, Jianbo Wu, Pengyuan Zheng, Guoqiang Zhao Cellular Physiology and Biochemistry (2016)
doi: 10.1159/000447889

The trail leads a little further, for [8] included Figure 5, comprising Transwell assays of cellular invasiveness with and without the hindrance of miR-203. One of those panels turns out to be an enlarged detail from Figure 2(d) in [9]... the same experiment, except that a different combination of miRs interacted with a different gene to discourage proliferation in a different lineage of melanoma.

[9] LncRNA UCA1-miR-507-FOXM1 axis is involved in cell proliferation, invasion and G0/G1 cell cycle arrest in melanoma
Yanping Wei, QS, Lindong Zhao, Jianbo Wu, XC, YW, WZ, Guoqiang Zhao
Medical Oncology (2016) doi: 10.1007/s12032-016-0804-2

Here are some more examples of Transwell assays. Six comprise Figure 2(c) of [10], where the two kinds of cancer cell become less invasive and metastatic when transfected with mimics of miR-203. The lower six comprise Figure 4(C) from [7].

[10] microRNA-186 inhibits cell proliferation and induces apoptosis in human esophageal squamous cell carcinoma by targeting SKP2
Wei He, JF, Yan Zhang, YW, WZ, Guoqiang Zhao
Laboratory Investigation (2016) doi: 10.1038/labinvest.2015.134

There is some confusion as Figures 2(c) and 4(C) are identified as Matrigel and Transwell assays respectively, and these are not identical; yet we can be sure that both Figures used the same procedure as one panel appears in both, identical apart from a horizontal flip.

But we cannot stop to linger, for Professor Zhao has an impressive oeuvre to cover: 137 papers, published at roughly monthly intervals (he is doing something right, from the journal editors' perspective anyway). Sources reveal he even would be willing to take care of their publication needs as well. A rumour goes that Zhao even made up data/paper for family member of some of his close ties.

When it comes to the question of why Zhao would churn out such vast amounts of manipulated data for so many papers, another rumor provided an answer which seems to making sense, and neither Zhao nor his university ever replied to an email when asked to confirm or deny it. Apparently, Zhao has been known for selling first author spot on his publications, for a modest fee of 30k~50k RMB per paper, approximately €3000-5000. The allegations go even further: Zhao was said to even frequently come back to his “customers” to ask for additional money for an extra figure, or a little more extra here and there, to “make their paper stronger”, as not to endanger the submission. Sometimes extra payment was allegedly needed for a revision that was required by the journal reviewers.

Why would anyone agree to such a business? One source said that many of Zhao’s customers are clinicians. In China, doctors need publications to get promoted to Associate Chief Attending Physician and Chief Attending Physician, especially when they practice in a university teaching hospital as clinical professors. When clinicians don’t have much time to actually do research, they turn to people like Zhao to “collaborate”, meaning, to purchase a paper authorship they need badly for promotion.

So much about the why, but now back to the how of Zhao’s paper mill business. For a change of pace, consider Figures 6(a, b) from [11] and 5A, B from [12]. Both offer graphic testimonial to the growth-slowing qualities of non-coding RNA, in the form of tumors, lined up in grids:

[11] Overexpression of A613T and G462T variants of DNA polymerase β weakens chemotherapy sensitivity in esophageal cancer cell lines
YW, XC, QS, WZ, ML, ZD, Guoqiang Zhao
Cancer Cell International (2016) doi: 10.1186/s12935-016-0362-x


and [12] The long noncoding RNA CASC2 inhibits tumorigenesis through modulating the expression of PTEN by targeting miR-18a-5p in esophageal carcinoma
Wenjing Zhang, Wei He, Jianfeng Gao, YW, WZ, ZD , Guoqiang Zhao
Experimental Cell Research (2017) doi: 10.1016/j.yexcr.2017.09.037


As it happens, [11] and [12] have recently been retracted due to the insufficient originality of the tumors, which had previously (differently arranged) documented other ways of slowing cancer - illustrated on the right-hand side of the two images above. In the case of [11].

The Editor-in-Chief has retracted this article [1] because Figure 6a and 6b show overlap with Figure 4b in [2].* An investigation by Zhengzhou University has confirmed that these figures overlap. The data reported in this article are therefore unreliable.

In the case of [12],

This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief.
In the article Figure 3A top and center panel are duplicated and in Figure 5A elements are duplicated from previous publications from the same authors in Tumor Biol. (2014) 35:12583–12592 DOI 10.1007/s13277-014-2579-4 (Figure 3) and Dig Dis Sci (2013) 58:706–714

The panels of Fig 3A are indeed problematic:

"Dig Dis Sci (2013)" - one of two sources of the repurposed tumors - is [13], to which we shall return:
[13] Effect of miR-451 on the biological behavior of the esophageal carcinoma cell line EC9706
TW, WZ, ML, Na Wang, Yu-ling Zheng, Guo-qiang Zhao
Digestive Diseases and Sciences (2013) doi: 10.1007/s10620-012-2395-x

Two other retractions (and a Corrigendum) are relevant. One, from 2017, involved some acquisitions of text (without attribution) for a 2013 paper, [14]:

"This article has been retracted by the authors [1] because large portions of text have been duplicated from a number of previously published articles, including Tin et al., 2007 [2] and Auyeung et al., 2009 [3]. All authors agree with the retraction."

[14] Astragalus saponins affect proliferation, invasion and apoptosis of gastric cancer BGC-823 cells
TW, Xiaoyan Xuan, ML, Ping Gao, YZ, WZ, Guoqiang Zhao
Diagnostic Pathology (2013) doi: 10.1186/1746-1596-8-179

Picayune plagiarism should not over-shadow an unexpected result: increasing doses of Astragalus saponins have the same effect on gastric cancer cells as a blank control on esophageal carcinoma cells. For the same mobility-assay image was also used in [13]. It is good that all the effort did not go to waste.**

The final retraction, from 2018, has not yet found its way into the ResearchGate archives. It shed blame on an anonymous technician who did the work:

Subsequently to the publication of this article, an interested reader drew to our attention the fact that the six panels shown in Fig. 6 shared several areas of identity among them. Following an internal investigation, a laboratory technician, who was responsible for editing the pictures, admitted that the data as presented in the figure had been manipulated after having mislaid some of the original data.

The technician's confession probably involved the nine panels of Fig. 5. The nature of that manipulation becomes clearer when the panels are rearranged into pairs, and one can see which cell colonies have been digitally inserted into or subtracted from one member of each pair, but not both. Other pairs are left as an exercise for the reader.

The over-zealous picture-editing technician has been busy! Here are some matches among two sets of Transwell assays, for miR-125a-5p and miR-1207-5p, from Figures 3A of [15] and 3B of [16]. Close inspection reveals occasional colonies in the 2017 versions that are not present in the 2015 versions, as if something happened to the images as well as accidental reuse.


[15] miR-125a-5p upregulation suppresses the proliferation and induces the cell apoptosis of lung adenocarcinoma by targeting NEDD9
Hong Zheng, Jianbo Wu, Jiachen Shi, CL, YW, QS, GZ, Guoqiang Zhao
Oncology Reports (2017) doi: 10.3892/or.2017.5812

[16] miRNA-1207-5p is associated with cancer progression by targeting stomatin-like protein 2 in esophageal carcinoma
Xuan Yang, WZ, Xiaoyan Xuan, Zhongquan Wang, Zhicai Liu, Jinwu Wang, Jing Cui, Guoqiang Zhao
International Journal of Oncology (2015) doi: 10.3892/ijo.2015.2900

Further matches emerge, between Figure 3A of [15] and Fig 5 of [4] - bringing us back to the beginning. Again, the [15] versions are decorated with some repeated colonies that cannot be found in [3]. I like to think that the anonymous technician has been cloned so they can share the work between them.


One of these cases of unexpected similarity was resolved by a 2018 Corrigendum for [16], replacing the entirety of its Fig 3B, due to internally repeated panels. Was it the same 'interested reader'? Researchers are always pleased to learn that readers are paying close attention.

An interested reader drew to our attention that, in the above-mentioned article, there were two figures where identity in certain of the data was shared between panels within the same figure. First, in Fig. 3B, the data shown for the EC9706 cell line/negative control (NC) experiment were derived from the same original source as those for the EC-1/Blank control experiment. ...

There remain other problems with [16], involving FACS cut-&-pasting, part of a general sense of authors pulling out FACS plots from an unsorted scrapbook to tick off items in a template checklist. These - like much else - are left for the reader to explore at leisure.

I prefer to emphasise the positive, which is that beside an oeuvre of 133 publications [137 minus some Notices], four retractions and a Corrigendum pale into insignificance. But...

The troubles are apparently only starting for Zhao. For such scale of a business, his massive paper mill could not go unnoticed for long. Not only there have been rumors about Zhao’s paper-making business for years, but also there have been whistleblowers reporting it to authorities at ZZU. Recall the retraction notice for [11], blaming an obscure technician, mentioned an investigation by ZZU. But with ~30 papers flagged for image manipulation, one technician scapegoat wouldn’t be suffice to convince people with questions. Our source indicated that ZZU will not launch an investigation this time, because it apparently already decided to retire Zhao at the age of 53, years away from the official pension age of 60 for a full professor. It is also reported that Zhao’s current graduate students have already been re-assigned to other labs.

On Monday, Apr 22, 2019, people in CBMS of ZZU received a notice that a thorough data cleaning had been scheduled for 2pm on Friday, the 26th. The notice emphasized that users must export, copy, and backup their data on their own by that time, and this would be the only notice they would receive. Is this a sign of an upcoming investigation and forensic data analysis, or a campaign to destroy evidence of misconduct?
Here is the list of the first authors, co-corresponding authors, or corresponding authors are that have published fraudulent data together with Zhao. Any bet they suffer from buyer’s remorse now.
* Here '[2]' is [17] HAX-1 promotes the chemoresistance, invasion, and tumorigenicity of esophageal squamous carcinoma cells
Sa-jia Sun, Long Feng, Guo-qiang Zhao, ZD
Digestive Diseases and Sciences (2012) doi: 10.1007/s10620-012-2108-5

** [13], in conjunction with [18], gave us this identification line-up of high-steepled churches inspired by Lyonel Feininger paintings. More here.


[18] Silencing of AP-4 inhibits proliferation, induces cell cycle arrest and promotes apoptosis in human lung cancer cells
Xuanyu Hu, Wei Guo, Shanshan Chen, Yizhuo Xu, Ping Li, Huaqi Wang, Heying Chu, Juan Li, YD, XC, GZ, Guoqiang Zhao
Oncology Letters (2016) doi: 10.3892/ol.2016.4451

Enquiring minds want to know more about the JBR Health Education & Research Organisation, or society, or whatever. For its footprint on the Interlattice betrays few clues as to the activities of this nebulous body.

JBR Health Education and Research Organization
CEO and President: Prof. (Dr). B. Rai
CTO and Chief: Dr. J. Kaur
COO and Vice President: Dr. H. Singh
Directors: Prof. Marc Watt, Prof. Peter Jensen, Er. Charles Lewis, DR. Kirk Horlbeck ,Prof. B.K. behera
Patron: Prof. S.C. Anand

JBR Group Leaders:

... 19.Dr. Alexvier Gulyaeva, JBR Transcriptomics, Russia
20.Prof. John F,JBR Proteomics, Germany
21.Dr. Frederic, JBR Genomics, Romania
22.Prof. H.O.Griefa, JBR Protein and Lipid, Ireland
23.Dr. Alexander, JBR Bioinformatics, Sweden
24.Prof. Srdjan Djurovic, JBR Lipid Science and Technology, Norway
25.Prof. Louis Fontain, JBR Cardiology, USA
26.Prof. Erosa Elgebaly, JBR Heart Diseases, New Zealand
27.Prof. Sara Badia, JBR Hypertension, Spain ...

114 Group Leaders are listed for academic specialties ranging from Agriculture to Quantum Technology, but many are fabricated or identity-stolen. It may be that JBR is an acronym for "Just Balwant Rai", for the only person actually flaunting his membership as an academic affiliation, and basking in the group's reflected glory, is a certain Balwant Rai - CEO and President; also journal editor, conference entrepreneur and Space Dentist.


Oh yes, and I admit that "Space Dentist" sounds like one of Hawkwind's more regrettable live albums. Or perhaps an out-take from Bob Calvert's album "Captain Lockheed & The Starfighters", and even now I am mentally changing the lyrics of the second track to "Aero-Space-Age Amalgam".



In that connection, let me dispel the popular misconception that "Crown of Creation" was a Jefferson Airplane concept album about dental prosthetics and cosmology.

But Professor (Doctor) Mr Balwant Rai is not just any incorrigible fabulist. As well as his dress-up games as Orbital Orthodontist, he has erected a magnificent pleasure-dome of fantasy, a world of titles and honours in which he is "Associate Professor, Faculty of Earth & Life Sciences, Kepler Space Institute" and "Program Director and Associate Professor of Aeronautic Dentistry at KSI", although the actual Kepler Space Institute seem unaware of his status there. Returning Mr Rai (or BR) to the forefront of attention, and citing an earlierRiddledpost in the process, Elisabeth Bik has been reading and commenting on his academic corpus. Suffice to say for now that his methods are unsound and his numbers are made up.

Oh yes, a moral the likes of which even God has never seen.



When we first met BR, he was the JBR Conference Group, pimping mockademic congresses aboard the Copenhagen / Oslo ferry vessels... such as the 4th World Silage Conference, 22nd-24th March 2018 (the first three having failed to exhaust the scholarly potential of silage), and the 4th World Citrus Conference & Expo (when I think of citric fruit like oranges and grapefruit and kumquats, my mind jumps at once to the Baltic straits).

"We are best at every conference"
"We are always perfect at our mission"

Now these ferries are a splendid institution. They are popular with Danes jaunting up to Norway to enjoy the unfamiliar experience of "hilly", and who travel overnight both ways because a cabin is still cheaper than accommodation in Oslo (possibly excepting a dormitory bunk in the Anker Hostel). Using Baltic ferries as scamference venues is innovative, though it is not clear whether credit for the innovation belongs to BR in Denmark or the Sweden-based Ashutosh Tiwari of IAAM. Here at Riddled it inspired us to hold our own Orbis-Tertius Congress of Experimental Ethics on the upper deck of a double-decker bus (as a change from the Wigglesworth Lounge at the Old Entomologist), but meanwhile BR has dropped the luxury-cruise aspect.


His mockademic events receive the imprimatur and support of the US Department of Veterans' Affairs. Yeah right. Also supported by Open Research Hub; World Dental Network; StudentJobNet; Incudent["the natural way of dental health"]; and the Journal of Dento-Medical Science & Research... which is to say, other manifestations of BR's entrepreneurial imagination, propping each other up in a network of aspirational grift, with web-domains generally registered by his regular co-author and co-scammer Jasdeep Kaur. This is really sad now. It is a vertiginous glimpse into an entire self-referential, self-sustaining alternative universe ... possibly constructed by Philip K. Dick, though I don't know if Dick would ever have coined such barbaric neologisms as "Incudent" and "Medivents".

Which is a good point to note that the JBR Health Education & Research Society has extended its ambitions and morphed into the JBR Institute of Health Education Research & Technology, and acquired a FaceBorg page of its own. Alas, it is a barren ghost-town of a page, home to coyotes and tumbleweeds, and a couple of posts trying to sign up suckers for the World Dental Network.

Going back to the Journal of Dento-Medical Etc. this did exist... as a short-lived spigot with a single issue in 2013, emanating from Pee-Pee Publisher[I am not making this up]. The Prospectus provides an alternative title - "JBR International Medico-Dental Science and Technology, a journal of the JBR research group" - because of course it does. Whatever its title, the ephemeral entity lingers on to bestow its aura of credibility upon JBR income-related activities.

But journal management is like mopping up elephant poop Show-business: both are hard to forsake. So we find BR at the editorial helm of a number of journals, competing for the custom of the space-dentistry research community. Notably, from the SciDoc cockwombles, the JBR Journal of Translational Space Dentistry, Medicine and Exploration (JBR-TSME) - the flagship of a little flotilla of JBR-branded trash-spigots. And the JBR Journal of Interdisciplinary Medicine and Dental Science, from the lowlife garbage people at OMICS.

Continuing the general theme, one could also count the Journal of Aeronautics & Aerospace Engineering (though it has lost the JBR brand)... though nominally extruded by "Longdom", a new parasitical publisher / conference scammer on the scene, Longdom is just another OMICS polyp embracing various imprints (rebranded to shake off the fraud-stink, while providing an outlet for academic failures who don't want the reputational damage of being seen to publish in OMICS' journal-shaped jizz-mops).

Anyway, BR's rich fantasy life reaches its acme with JBR University. Motto: "It is a long established fact that a reade." This presents itself as a kind of on-line knocking-shop or middle-man, putting would-be tutors in touch with would-be tutees who want the quality of their on-line education guaranteed by a couple of conmen of no fixed abode. Evidently the web designer felt that the text sounded better in the original Lorem Ipsum.



"Thousand of instructors" are claimed, but only one course... in Computer Science, I grieve to report, not in Space Dentistry.

All these aspirational-grifting pretensions of academic acceptance sound pathetic beyond words. But confident bullshit counts for a lot in our wonderful post-truth post-reality reality. BR did blag his way into Dutch dental-school academia for a while, and into the network of Mars-simulation enthusiasts who seal themselves into caravan-sized capsules to test their manned-mission endurance. He convinced actual researchers to co-sign the studies critiqued in Pubpeer threads (with implausibly repetitive numbers, purportedly collected in those confinement exercises). And people signed on to be Directors of that vaporware JBR University! Some of them are regulars from BR's mockademic scamferences.

It seems that no self-deceptive Walter Mitty fantasist is too inept to fail as an Interlattice scammer.

This was all F X Coudert's fault.



I was forced to follow up.

A pair of clever mycologists are discovering new species of Boletus without venturing farther than their supermarket. All thanks to Market Forces, and DNA sequencing technology, and life-style aspirations signified by up-market culinary ingredients, and the willingness of corporate supply-chains to outsource everything to the cheapest origin - which in the case of dried mushroom packets, was forest foragers in China.


So the contents of the packets were not Boletus edulis stricto sensu as claimed, but previously-undocumented varieties (though if there is any shortcoming in flavour, it misses the attention of most customers). Even in feckin Italy, Asian mock-porcini outsells real porcini:

Porcini are estimated to have an annual worldwide consumption up to 100,000 metric tons (Hall et al., 1998). However, their harvest is restricted to wild foraging since, to date, their cultivation has failed. The high prices for this wild food foraged locally in Europe and North America has driven the market towards less costly sources, such as China (Sitta & Floriani, 2008). According to the official website of Yunnan Province (www.yunnan.cn), the major exporter of wild mushrooms in China, locally-sourced porcini have been exported to Europe since 1973, and mushrooms of Chinese origin now account for approximately half of all dried porcini in Italy (Sitta & Floriani, 2008). The Chinese species of porcini have been shown previously to be more closely related to European Boletus aereus than they are to the core commercial species, B. edulis

An analogy could be drawn between fungal mycelia and human trade routes, though I am not the first to draw it.



This opens up new vistas and prospects in the exploration of biodiversity. Here at the Riddled Institute of Dumpster Foraging we are industriously DNA-sequencing packets of imported surimi to identify new species of deep-sea angler-fish and giant squid.

We also await the descriptions of previously- and subsequently-unknown sub-species of orangutan, from DNA found in Indonesian-sourced PKE (palm-kernel-extract) dairy fodder.

"Loner, seen from behind" is #1 in some lists of visual tropes for lazy movie-poster designers, as compiled by lazy Pop-Culture websites. Actually these lists are all the same, in different orders, so I link to one which (unusually) credits the original compiler / montage creator.


It would be very wrong to cobble these all together into a stroby, twitching, epileptogenic GIF.

So when Jordan Peterson monetarised his Interweave notoriety by pitching Self-Actualisation MBA seminars for overly-dramatic Emo kids Incels who want to Think for Themselves and Rediscover their Manhood and Make $$$, naturally he (or his ad advisor) slavishly followed the conventions of that trope:

People have grappled with those sentences and sought to wrest sense from them, only to conclude that Peterson missed his métier and is still writing lyrics for the Glam-Metal band he fantasised about fronting while at university. They make more sense if you imagine them on the B-side of 'The Final Countdown'.


As for his Disruptive-Learning Fellow-ships, they are a standard MLM / Pyramid-scheme scam, though stealing the skin of Robert Bly's "Iron John" tradition so I am concerned that there may be drum circles. The $65,000 tuition is not motivated by personal greed, and is only imposed to motivate the suckers and focus their attention. I am not making this up:

How much will I need to pay in tuition?At Acton you’ll learn the importance of aligning incentives with key success factors, to attract and motivate the right people. Our innovative pay-it-forward financing, made possible by Acton teachers, alumni and other successful entrepreneurs, is designed to mirror this lesson and make Acton as accessible as possible, while making sure every participant has “skin in the game.”

Just saying, you can gain the same insights for free from the Peterson Quotation Generator.


In other news, I am here to report another sighting of the 'disintegration' / 'visual fragmentation' trope in movie poster art. It is the lazy designer's default symbol for themes of dissolution of identity or memory, and the increasing virtuality of reality... so popular, in fact, that it spills over into themes of assembly and integration.

Fortunately other chroniclers besides your humble Riddled scribes keep track of phenomena such as these. I am not sure that the Batman instance entirely conforms to the trope, but whatthehell.














It would be very wrong to cobble these all together into a stroby twitching epileptogenic GIF, also too.

We can count ourselves fortunate that Jordan Peterson's graphic designer did not opt for this trope instead: instead of Johnny Cash cosplay, we could have been subjected to an image of the Great Philosopher deliquescing at the edges into a pile of lobsters.

WTF did I just read?


“Quantum Biophysical Semeiotic” sounds like a reboot of the Sokal Hoax, written by people who were worried that Sokal’s original sting manuscript leaned too far in the direction of making sense. Alternatively, QBS could be a Spacemen 3 covers band. It reminds us that there are sub-levels and sub-basements and malebolges of incomprehension and worship-word-ridden cargo-cult cognition, far deeper than being “not even wrong”. The only way to elevate the whole brainfart towards that basic criterion would be to abandon any expectations that ‘quantum’, ‘biophysical’ or ‘semeiotics’ in the title are in any way related to physics, biophysics or semiotics.

The gist of QBS is that the humble stethoscope is not just an emblem of membership in the Medics’ Guild; in trained hands it is a diagnostic tool of scarce-dreamt-of capacity and specificity. For diabetes, arteriosclerosis, lithiasis and Alzheimers Disease are organ-specific outcomes of mitochondrial- / nuclear-gene defects (manifested through Rube Goldberg 'microcirculatory remodeling' mechanisms). Along with the breast-cancer risk-factor variants of the BRCA-1/2 genes, all can be detected early through auscultation, for all have their own distinctive sounds. As explained in a quartet of Opinion pieces and a Commentary by Dr Sergio Stagnaro (“Sempre arzillo a 87 anni”).




You can probably imagine what the References sections look like.

Fortunately Dr Stagnaro can also remediate these genetic shortcomings, with a hand-wavy invocation of Nonlinear Complexity theory... therefore irradiation with low-level 1-mm microwaves, which increase the fractal dimension of blood vessels by stabilising the attractor (I could be wrong about that, for my attention was distracted at this point by a skwirl, and it may be that the appropriate intervention is actually a hermeneutic reinterpretation of symbolism, or a projection of the wave-vector into a different Hilbert subspace before collapsing it).


Now the people of the Frontiers publishing behemoth – outlet for those Opinions – pride themselves on a whole new paradigm of Peer Review, which bypasses Editorial bias and subjectivity by matching peer-reviewers to manuscripts algorithmically (also obviating the old-fashioned notion that Editors should have some acquaintance with a field and be familiar with the knowledgeable authorities). The algorithms work so well that the paradigm is periodically redesigned, relaunched and reproclaimed as a breakthrough. In these five cases, the algorithm decided to skip peer review completely and just let the editors accept the manuscripts unaided. Unless “Just cash the cheque and print the paper” is an unannounced new feature of the Frontiers business model.


Hilarity continues to ensue from browsing the comments on these opinion pieces. They prove to be 100% spam left by an ingenious and industrious cannabis-oil scammer using identities like "Prattless Watterson". So at least the pieces are being read, if only by automated spambots.

Stagnaro brought himself to wider attention by leaving a comment over at Sylvie Cotaud’s blog, refuting her critical calumnies by pointing out the respect he receives from the Scientific Community… the proof of that respect being the unreviewed acceptance of his APC payments by Frontiers. Also the ingratiating invitations he receives to address a Euroscicon mockademic congress. Now EuroSciCon are well-known as a camouflaged polyp of the OMICS empire of academic grift, so boasting that they’re mooching for one’s money is onna par with boasting of the imminent wealth that was promised in emails from a Nigerian prince.



It is not a good look for Frontiers that they were promoting this fraudulent "7th Edition of World Congress on Cancer Research, Survivorship and Management", and had promised to provide it with livestream video services. The advertisement quickly disappeared down the memory hole in response to Sylvie pointing and laughing, though ads for other EuroSciCon scamferences remain on the Frontiers site.


Stagnaro curates his QBS braindrool on the website of the Società Internazionale di Semeiotica Biofisica Quantistica, which he would like you to look at. While another safe place for his output of Condamine calenture Toothpick is NeuroQuantology



NeuroQuantology was an outlet favoured by the much-missed Dr Martin Persinger. It also turns out to be the work of scammers and inept spammers, but I digress.

Was Newton standing on the shoulders of giants while searching the seashore for shiny pebbles? I guess he had one of those extending gripping things so he could reach down.

https://twitter.com/DaniRabaiotti/status/1132928339835006977

Purple glass drinking vessels with tentacles are called Portuguese man-o-ware.

A University of Kentucky cancer toxicologist with a history of retractions is back under investigation, as recently reported in his local press[RW]. I have nothing to contribute except to link the case to another of Xianglin Shi's papers, which spawned a long-standing thread at Pubpeer, where the insouciant disregard of the editors of Blood reduced "Peer 2" to a state of agitated despair.

Can someone please wake me up from this nightmare?
How is this possible? They are everywhere, I stopped after these ones but there are probably more.
I have contacted VCU several times regarding the seemingly endless issues like the ones pointed out here, but still no action.
Have I misunderstood something? Maybe it is not science after all but an advanced form of "Where is Wally" VCU scientist are publishing?

Peer 2 was referring to the duplicated image elements, which swarm and cavort through the paper like leit-motifs in a Wagner score, like rabbits in the marginalia of an illuminated manuscript, binding the separate Figures together in an intricately-woven web of synchronicity. It is difficult to know where to begin. Anyone trying to annotate all the replications runs quickly out of colors.





The last time I saw so many mascara eyelashes together in one place was at a Siouxsie and the Banshees concert.

Our real focus here is Shi's co-authors on this dubious paper: Professors Paul Dent and Steven Grant of Virginia Commonwealth University, where (along with P. B. Fisher) they form a troika of cancer-research excellence. Their careers are resplendent with publications and scientific honors. I worry, though, that between receiving those honors and editing journals and the endless cycle of grant applications, they have little time left to spend supervising their students or carefully reading all the papers they sign.
The Dasmahapatra episode, for instance, was not a shining display of thorough mentoring and oversight. Girija Dasmahapatra confessed to faking results in eleven Dent / Grant collaborations from 2005 to 2014 [RW] and was subsequently thrown under the bus... or thrown to the wolves... or thrown to the wolves under the bus. It may be that Dent and Grant have really terrible luck with their co-authors.

All of the 11 affected papers will be corrected or retracted, according to the ORI notice.[...]
ORI found that Respondent falsified and/or fabricated data by reporting the results of Western blot experiments and mouse imaging experiments that examined interactions between multiple histone deacetylase and/or proteasome inhibitors in several cancer models. Specifically, Respondent duplicated, reused, and/or relabeled Western blot panels and mouse images and claimed they represented different controls and/or experimental results...

The Dent / Grant oeuvre is of interest to us as encapsulating in microcosm the current biomedical research paradigm, with its feudal hierarchies of PIs and grad-student lab-bench serfs, and the perverse structural incentives which motivate Principal Investigators to minimize the time they spend on the investigations they are principalling. No-one really needs yet another cautionary tale of "How Laboratory Culture Goes Wrong", no more than anyone wants another exhaustive gallery of re-used or manipulated Western blots, but that is what you get.

Grant and Dent's productivity (and Fisher's) caught the attention of the vast and cool and unsympathetic intellects who comment at Pubpeer, with the list of separate threads currently numbering in the 50s. Those threads hint at a general disenthusiasm in the laboratory ethos for farfing around with loading controls in gel-electrophoresis probes (to prevent accidental or unconscious variations in aliquots from skewing the results)... with a belated realisation that reviewers do expect controls, requiring improvised gap-fillers. Thus, from 2004, "Synergistic induction of oxidative injury and apoptosis in human multiple myeloma cells by the proteasome inhibitor bortezomib and histone deacetylase inhibitors" (Pei, Dai and Grant, 2004):

The loading control is Tubulin three times and Actin once. It has six lanes on two occasions and five lanes on the other two (losing Lane 2). It controls for different conditions that result in three different PARP / CF slices, three different Mcl-1 and XIAP slices, etc.

2004 was an Annus Mirabilis. New students joined the team, and we were treated to confections like these, from "Contribution of disruption of the nuclear factor-kappaB pathway to induction of apoptosis in human leukemia cells by histone deacetylase inhibitors and flavopiridol" (Gao et al 2004):

These may look as if Mondrian hurt his head falling downstairs but continued to paint while experiencing temporal-lobe seizures, but the goal is to illustrate how generic slices of gel, each containing seven lanes, each provided loading controls for a series of four-lane blots by shifting the read frame. More crucially, more substantive non-control parts of other Figures (such as the C-Caspase-3 panels of Fig 5A) also turn out to be fabricated.


Many of these demonstrations require adjustments to the contrast and lightness of the as-published Figures. This sheds a cruel, unflattering light, especially on older illustrations. To leap ahead to "Mechanism of in vitro pancreatic cancer cell growth inhibition by melanoma differentiation-associated gene-7/interleukin-24 and perillyl alcohol" (Lebedeva et al 2008), the backgrounds of Figures 1B and 4D do not look at all realistic when treated so harshly:



Returning to earlier in the Dent / Grant corpus, "2-Methoxyestradiol-induced apoptosis in human leukemia cells proceeds through a reactive oxygen species and Akt-dependent process" (Gao et al 2005) is another rich source of improvised loading controls.


"Figures 7d, 7e have their own loading control, but by this point in the paper, the authors had stopped caring very much."


The protein blobs in other, non-control panels of these Figures display the same impressive consistency of shape. Recurring visual motifs follow a cetacean theme, with a sperm-whale in profile, a whale tail, an oil-lamp. Are there special stencils or pipette tips one can use to standardise the shapes of aliquots when adding them to the wells?

Recurrent blobs are also prominent throughout "The three-substituted indolinone cyclin-dependent kinase 2 inhibitor 3-[1-(3H-imidazol-4-yl)-meth-(Z)-ylidene]-5-methoxy-1,3-dihydro-indol-2-one (SU9516) kills human leukemia cells via down-regulation of Mcl-1 through a transcriptional mechanism" (Gao et al 2006). Each Figure is a hiding-place for Easter Eggs, while the loading controls appear to have been assembled from IKEA kitsets.




There are earlier entries in this PubPeer corpus dating back to 2000-2003, raising concerns involving pictorial similarities and discontinuities... these could be clues to duplication or splicing, but could just be artifacts (the image quality is not always ideal, with Western blots seemingly viewed through a shimmering gauzy scrim, or photocopied and rephotographed, or printed on newsprint as half-tones and then sent via fax). It is time to remind ourselves that the mere number of papers flagged at PubPeer is not decisive, for comments there can be trivial or misguided.

Some of the queries, in fact, could easily be motivated by the critics' need for completeness, and the authors could be forgiven for feeling persecuted, or hounded, as if their names were Clinton. Initially they responded to the critiques:


Those responses hinted at a hands-off approach to supervision of the student researchers. Leonid Schneider probably did not help.

(from "OSU-03012 stimulates PKR-like endoplasmic reticulum-dependent increases in 70-kDa heat shock protein expression, attenuating its lethal actions in transformed cells": Park et al 2008).

But evidently the experience was not rewarding. The authors came to view PubPeer as a louche, improper forum and lost their enthusiasm for engagement with its insatiable and incorrigible commentariat.

In this case - "Apogossypol derivative BI-97C1 (Sabutoclax) targeting Mcl-1 sensitizes prostate cancer cells to mda-7/IL-24-mediated toxicity" (Dash et al 2011) - concerns about the problematic Figure 4C were rendered moot by a Correction, though it didn't really explain how the original weird hybrid came to exist.


Anyway, this survey of the corpus is fortunately not intended to follow a chronological sequence. We have already imposed some structure on the sprawling literature by distinguishing a 'Dasmahapatra' period within it, much as one organises the catalog of a heavy-metal band according to replacement drummers or bassists. Similarly we might recognise a 'Rosato' period... Roberto Rosato appears as co-author in 13 PubPeer threads in the oeuvre from 2002 to 2012, accounting for two Retractions and an Erratum. A VCU spokesperson advised RetractionWatch that "The article’s first author, Roberto Rosato, left VCU in 2010."

This sub-corpus deserves to be explored at length, but we can only mention a few highlights - like the eight-lane kitset-assembled loading strip used to control for nine lanes of the protein of interest, in "Mechanism and functional role of XIAP and Mcl-1 down-regulation in flavopiridol/vorinostat antileukemic interactions" (Rosato et al 2007).

Perhaps this was to compensate for Fig 6D in "Potentiation of the lethality of the histone deacetylase inhibitor LAQ824 by the cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor roscovitine in human leukemia cells" (Rosato et al 2005), in which a ten-lane Actin loading strip controlled for nine lanes of the proteins of interest.

In the manner of kaleidoscope aesthetics, a repertoire of graphical elements served to illustrate a sequence of observations by rearranging them into new combinations.

Again, commentators were reduced to an abyss of abject despair:

So we turn quickly to "LBH-589 (panobinostat) potentiates fludarabine anti-leukemic activity through a JNK- and XIAP-dependent mechanism" (Rosato et al 2012):



Accidental conversion of a strip of Western Blot to 'tubulin' or 'actin' or 'EF-1α' could happen to anyone... but when images have been fabricated, or manipulated to substitute for bona fide documentation of an experiment, it undermines ones' faith in the substantive claims.

I originally set out to include Prof. Paul B. Fisher of VCU in this strip-mining survey of PubPeer threads, but space does not permit. As well as co-authorship on 22 entries of the Dent / Grant corpus, he has his own oeuvre of 15 non-overlapping entries. Perhaps there could be a sequel if the readers clamour for one. To pique your interest and whet your appetites, Condylocarpon amazonicum an anonymous Peer prepared some diagrams.




They look like a colored-arrow factory exploded but they are intended to show the reuse of Blots and cell-culture images within and between a trilogy of papers. One Figure has six panels of cells under different conditions but after taking account of all the reflections, rotations and enlargements, these prove to be overlapping details of only two source microphotographs.

"mda-9/Syntenin regulates the metastatic phenotype in human melanoma cells by activating nuclear factor-kappaB" (Boukerche et al 2007);
"mda-9/Syntenin promotes metastasis in human melanoma cells by activating c-Src" (Boukerche et al 2008);
"Src kinase activation is mandatory for MDA-9/syntenin-mediated activation of nuclear factor-kappaB" (Boukerche et al 2010).

First author on all three, Habib Boukerche, has his own PubPeer presence (and a retraction). Any sequel could also look at the accomplishments of frequent Grant / Dent / Fisher collaborator Devanand Sarkar... stepping-stones to his current eminence as Distinguished Professor, Endowed Scholar and Director of Education & Training at VCU.

As for those 11 Dasmahapatra papers, and the ORI report three years ago that interested parties agreed that they were unsustainable, three have been retracted. Extrapolating this rate, the last one will be amended or withdrawn from the literature by 2027. Currently eightsevensixfive of them continue to be read and to accrue citations while other cancer researchers design their own investigations around them, for there is nothing to warn the unwary reader of their false-data nature, not even an Expression of Concern. The reasons for this editorial inaction at Blood and Molecular Cancer Therapeutics are unfathomable.

There is a quality of entertaining schadenfreude Greek Tragedy about the spectacle of a UCLA Vice Chancellor for Research, and quondam Officer for Research Integrity, incurring the retraction of two research papers because of shenanigans in the data. And in the manner of Sophocles or Euripides, we enter the story in media res with much of the action having already occurred, to be visited in flashback or recounted by the chorus. There may be hubris, or the other tragic flaws of Greek dramaturgy. There will certainly be some Western blots, and perhaps some Northern blots for the sake of variety.

A flurry of papers from the UCLA cancer-research dynamo were retracted at about the same time; please pay attention, and try to keep them distinct in your minds, as there may be a quiz. Fortunately everything has been closely documented by the people at RetractionWatch, providing coroner's reports for the demise of the papers after their persecution and assassination by anonymous post-publication commentary at PubPeer.

To begin in 2014, then, questions were raised about a publication from 2007... first in a dedicated blog, then echoed to PubPeer:
[1]. "Rituximab inhibits the constitutively activated PI3K-Akt pathway in B-NHL cell lines: involvement in chemosensitization to drug-induced apoptosis" (Suzuki, Umezawa & Bonavida Oncogene 2007, PubPeer here). First author Eriko Suzuki promptly shouldered the blame for defects in data quality which made the paper unsustainable (at the cost of her PhD and professional career), as verified by RetractionWatch. By "defects in data quality" I mean images of protein expression which were recycled for different conditions, and sometimes for different proteins:



That dedicated blog had called into question a second paper. However, Suzuki was emphatic that her responsibility did not extend that far. And she did pointedly skipped the opportunity to apologise for a role in other collaborations from her time at UCLA.

So let's just number that paper as [0] for the moment, and ignore it:
[0] "Inhibition of NF-kappaB and Akt pathways by an antibody-avidin fusion protein sensitizes malignant B-cells to cisplatin-induced apoptosis" (Suzuki, ... Bonavida Int. J. Oncol. 2007).

Anyway, there was evidently an investigation:

In UCLA’s ensuing investigation, [senior author] Bonavida was cleared of wrongdoing; nevertheless, he says, he was left in shock. “It affected me very deeply,” he says. “I have trained over a hundred students through my career. Nobody has done something like that with my work before.”

Investigations did not stop there, and the end of 2016 saw two more retractions. Professor Bonavida was again the victim of a conspiracy of fate. Answering questions from RW, he thought the university had acted too hastily:

He said a committee at UCLA investigated the allegations, and although he was initially informed the committee was going to ask the journal to correct the papers,
"…for some reason, they went ahead with the retractions…without asking our opinion."

... and that the concerns were misguided or malicious.

Some of the gels that were represented for the controls, apparently somebody claims they were reproduced from other figures. That was not the case, but it was very hard to prove that…I could not defend it, but I tried very hard.

Here are the two papers, both from the Journal of Immunology Some of the authors are recurring members of the dramatis personae so I have boldfaced their names

[2]. "Regulation of tumor cell sensitivity to TRAIL-induced apoptosis by the metastatic suppressor Raf kinase inhibitor protein via Yin Yang 1 inhibition and death receptor 5 up-regulation" (Baritaki, Katsman, Chatterjee, Yeung, Spandidos, Bonavida 2007, PubPeer here)

[3]. "Inhibition of Yin Yang 1-dependent repressor activity of DR5 transcription and expression by the novel proteasome inhibitor NPI-0052 contributes to its TRAIL-enhanced apoptosis in cancer cells" (Baritaki, Suzuki, Umezawa, Spandidos, Berenson, Daniels, Penichet, Jazirehi, Palladino & Bonavida 2008, PubPeer here).

The papers dip into a shared library of blots. It turns out that a single image can be rearranged to illustrate different ways of modulating cell death through the surface protein "Death Receptor 5". Who knew that molecular biology had such Metal names?


Neither of them redounds to the credit of the journal reviewers who looked at the Figures and thought "Yes, that's what loading controls should look like" (or else "OK, that's fake, but it's only a loading control so who cares?"). Nor to the credit of the various authors who can't have looked at the Figures at all. [3] in particular stands out by the lack of effort to hide the fabrications and manipulations.

In its quieter way, [2] also warrants attention. One of its "jumping-gene" loading controls with the self-shuffling lanes (Fig 5C, here at bottom) made a later appearance in a further paper also under the aegis of PubPeer.


But I am getting ahead of myself. First we should meet papers [4] "Molecular Mechanism of MART-1+/A*0201+ Human Melanoma Resistance to Specific CTL-Killing Despite Functional Tumor–CTL Interaction" (Jazirehi, Baritaki, Koya, Bonavida & Economou Cancer Res. 2011, PubPeer here);
and [5] "Proteasome Inhibition Blocks NF-κB and ERK1/2 Pathways, Restores Antigen Expression, and Sensitizes Resistant Human Melanoma to TCR-Engineered CTLs" (Jazirehi & Economou Mol Cancer Ther. 2012, PubPeer here).


They joined the flurry of retractions in early 2017, on the request of the senior author. Professor Economou wore many hats at UCLA, being head of his own cancer-research lab there, Chief of
Surgical Oncology, VC for Research, and Officer for Research Integrity. He did not respond to overtures from RW. Prof. Bonavida was a co-author on [4], and he was more forthcoming with comments, though his response was to downplay his auctorial role:

Bonavida told Retraction Watch that his involvement in the Cancer Research paper was only as a “consultant” who looked it over before it was submitted:
"All the work was done in Economou’s lab, not mine. I have no idea what exactly took place.
The original findings, they were all prepared by Ali Jazirehi."
Bonavida added that he knew Jazirehi well, as Jazirehi had worked in his lab “many years” before.

Given Bonavida's confident conviction that there were no more shoes left to drop, readers who are familiar with all literary conventions will be wondering about the size of the iceberg of problematic papers for which these five are the tip. By way of answer, let these performing planaria entertain you with their well-rehearsed wriggling routine, as choreographed and trained by Jim McConnell for a special issue of the Worm Runner's Digest.


Alternatively, they are part of a Western Blot loading control, appearing in three different contexts in a little triptych of problematic papers:

[6] "Pivotal roles of snail inhibition and RKIP induction by the proteasome inhibitor NPI-0052 in tumor cell chemoimmunosensitization" (Baritaki, Yeung, Palladino & Bonavida Cancer Res. 2009, PubPeer here);
[7] "Inhibition of epithelial to mesenchymal transition in metastatic prostate cancer cells by the novel proteasome inhibitor, NPI-0052: pivotal roles of Snail repression and RKIP induction" (Baritaki, Chapman, Yeung, Spandidos, Palladino & Bonavida Oncogene 2009, PubPeer here); and
[8] "Mechanisms of nitric oxide-mediated inhibition of EMT in cancer: inhibition of the metastasis-inducer Snail and induction of the metastasis-suppressor RKIP" (Baritaki, Huerta-Yepez, Sahakyan, Karagiannides, Bakirtzi, Jazirehi& Bonavida Cell Cycle 2010, PubPeer here).


A number of shared and relabelled visual elements interlink the triptych (while as was foreshadowed above, [8] and [2] have an element in common). Most notably, some blots of antibody-labelled protein are versatile in their roles, illustrating the presence of "Snail", XIAP, Fibronectin orβ-actin.



As we strip-mine into deeper strata of the PubPeer archive, eventually we reach another nexus of interlinked papers, though this one is more of a Pentateuch. Two of its members are closely entwined:

[9] "Inhibition of the Raf–MEK1/2–ERK1/2 Signaling Pathway, Bcl-xLDown-Regulation, and Chemosensitization of Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma B Cells by Rituximab" (Jazirehi, Vega, Chatterjee, Goodglick & Bonavida Cancer Res. 2004, PubPeer here), and
[10] "Rituximab (chimeric anti-CD20 monoclonal antibody) inhibits the constitutive nuclear factor-κB signaling pathway in non-Hodgkin's lymphoma B-cell lines: role in sensitization to chemotherapeutic drug-induced apoptosis" (Jazirehi, Huerta-Yepez, Cheng & Bonavida Cancer Res. 2005, PubPeer here).

Loading controls are recycled to an impressive extent.



So many protein bands are using multiple alias that one's attempts to keep track of them run quickly out of colors.


One of those protein bands, identified with brown boxes above as IκB and ERK1/2 (and, after a 180° flip and some tweaks, as NIK) underwent further vicissitudes. It appeared as IκB again in

[11] "Rituximab-Induced Inhibition of YY1 and Bcl-xL Expression in Ramos Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma Cell Line via Inhibition of NF- B Activity: Role of YY1 and Bcl-xL in Fas Resistance and Chemoresistance, Respectively" (Vega, Jazirehi, Huerta-Yepez & Bonavida J Immunol. 005, PubPeer here);

and in its rotated manifestation, as ERK1/2 in
[12] "Resveratrol modifies the expression of apoptotic regulatory proteins and sensitizes non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and multiple myeloma cell lines to paclitaxel-induced apoptosis" (Jazirehi & Bonavida Mol. Cancer Ther. 2004, PubPeer here).



Papers in this series are also linked by their use of protein-expression RNA immunoblots (reverse-transcriptase / PCR), providing us with some relief from the barrage of Western Blots. For close inspection reveals many more images of RNA blots than there are underlying data, with some creative re-uselinking [9] and [10]...



...with the lanes further jiggered and poked to integrate [12] into the mesh as well.


The 'Rituximab' of the titles is not a Mayan temple complex in the Yucatan Peninsula, but rather a monoclonal antibody designed to destroy unwanted B-lymphocytes; evidently its apoptosis-pathway actions were attracting research interest in the early 2000s. Quite how the results found their way into [12] is an interesting question, as Resveratrol has nothing to do with Rituximab except a shared initial letter (and being another popular research topic of the era). Anyway, this leads us to:

[13] "Rituximab (anti-CD20) selectively modifies Bcl-xL and apoptosis protease activating factor-1 (Apaf-1) expression and sensitizes human non-Hodgkin's lymphoma B cell lines to paclitaxel-induced apoptosis" (Jazirehi, Gan, De Vos, Emmanouilides & Bonavida Mol Cancer Ther. 2003, PubPeer here).

It was first in this nexus to be published, and its contents were plundered to provide illustrations for [10] and [12]. The latter reuse required a 180° flip of the Actin loading band as well as the confusion between Rituximab and Resveratrol.



From the same epoch we find [14] "Rituximab inhibits p38 MAPK activity in 2F7 B NHL and decreases IL-10 transcription: pivotal role of p38 MAPK in drug resistance" (Vega, Huerta-Yepaz, Jazirehi, Emmanouilides & Bonavida Oncogene 2004, PubPeer here). This was a one-off paper, with no pictorial links to other papers, only internal connections... the proteins P-p38 and Bcl-2 proved to be the same, or at least they provided identical bands of immunohistochem gel. A display of RNA expression for a particular protein was dismantled like a Lego tower and reassembled for a different protein.

And [15] "Development of rituximab-resistant lymphoma clones with altered cell signaling and cross-resistance to chemotherapy" (Jazirehi, Vega & Bonavida Cancer Res. 2007, PubPeer here). The duplications are blatant, placed side-by-side as if daring the reviewers to do something about it. Dr. Stavroula Baritaki is thanked "for technical assistance".



The PubPeer archive reveals a few other free-standing papers. Despite the pressure of space I cannot bring myself to omit [16], "Chemotherapeutic drugs sensitize cancer cells to TRAIL-mediated apoptosis: up-regulation of DR5 and inhibition of Yin Yang 1" (Baritaki, Huerta-Yepez, Sakai, Spandidos & Bonavida Mol Cancer Ther. 2007, PubPeer here). We are accustomed to yeoman service from loading controls, overlapped and recycled as in Figures 3 and 4, but in an innovative step, the substantive protein strips of Fig. 3 were sliced horizontally to become the substantive strips of Fig. 4 - DR5 becoming YY1.




After all this, when Bonavida insists that "Nobody has done something like [Suzuki's short-cuts] with my work before", we can only marvel at his capacity for constructive inattention.

One last case-study: [17] is "Raf kinase inhibitor protein (RKIP) blocks signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (STAT3) activation in breast and prostate cancer" (... Bonavida, ... & ChatterjeePLoS ONE 2014, PubPeer here).


With Bonavida as only a minor contributor, that paper is peripheral to my topic here; I cite it more for the third appearance of Devasis Chatterjee, here as senior author [see [2, 9] above]. Now Chatterjee has previously come up on the radar through his collaboration with Paul Fisher of Virginia Commonwealth University, making the present post a sequel of sorts, or a prequel, or a continuity story to that earlier survey of cancer research at VCU.

Demetrios Spandidos was another co-author whose collaborations were regular enough to be singled out with boldface above [2, 3, 7, 16]. At the time of these papers he was affiliated to the University of Crete at Herakleion, but he is best-known as the publisher / editor of cancer-themed journals including International Journal of Oncology (see [0]), and as the entrepreneur of the inevitable cancer-themed conferences. His backstory is eventful, even chequered, stretching back three decades to his time as a postgrad student in Toronto when he was about to publish groundbreaking Nobel-worthy research into oncogenes until everything ended in expulsion from the Siminovitch laboratory and tears before bedtime. But there is no space for that saga now so I will just refer you to primary sources.

From one perspective, all this is now of academic / historical interest. The people most central in all these questionable papers have left research (or left UCLA, which is the same thing!). Stavroula Baritaki still appears on UCLA staff lists but a recent conference (co-organisers: Baritaki & Bonavida) describes her as affiliated to the University of Crete. Bonavida has retired - from his laboratory, if not from conferencing - while Economou has stepped down from vice-chancelloring, closed his laboratory and returned to clinical work. As for Jazirehi, he is suing Economou and the Regents of UCLA for wrongful dismissal.

Now this does not prove that further inquiries did proceed in private, with data shenanigans identified and blamed on Jazirehi, though it is compatible with such a course of events. One can only be sure that whatever was determined. Jazirehi feels that he was singled out as a scapegoat.

Anyway, with these departures, one could argue that even if some of the results reported in [6] to [17] were just made up (with the forgery more egregious than anything in [1] to [5]), another inquiry and further retractions would achieve nothing except institutional embarrassment. Though they would free the PubPeer commentariat from the compulsion to go on documenting image misbehaviour.

This is supposed to be a happy occasion. Let's not bicker and argue about who faked what!

There is also the possibility that despite the weakness of the evidence available to the authors, forcing one or several of them to fabricate more compelling and publishable results, the conclusions of those papers were actually correct, so additional retractions would be wrong.

I can only say that policies of drawing a discreet veil over academic malfeasance and sweeping scandals under the bus carpet have always worked so well in the past.

Especially the comma, working so hard to make sentences comprehensible with so little reward or recognition.


Well done semicolon!
Looking good, ellipses!

Never mind, apostrophe. Take the rest of the day off. Get drunk or something.
((( parentheses )))

These mice were treated for cancer in 2014, using nano-encapsulated pineapple-squeezed bromelain (VII and VIII are identical twins) [1].


Not only was the treatment successful, but it prolonged their lives long past the usual murine span so they could be treated for cancer again in 2018, this time using nano-encapsulated barberry squeezings [2].


Some uncertainly lingered whether the nano-encapsulation involved "Hyaluronic acid-grafted PLGA" or "O-Hexadecyl-Dextran" [3].

The history of "medicinal pineapple" is in fact an interest of mine (I suspect it may be inspired by the verbal resonance between Ananas and Ananias, the patron saint of liars). It began with a German charlatan who reasoned that Bromelain is a meat-softening enzyme, and tumours are made of meat. Anyway, our rodent friends provide a convenient entry point to the cuisine-based corpus of Professor Yogeshwer Shukla at CSIR-Indian Institute of Toxicology Research (Delhi, India). For with the help of his colleagues and students, Dr Shukla has reported diverse botanical treatments for cancer (in mice!) in the course of his illustrious career... with squeezings from garlic, pomegranates, and mangos as well as pineapples. Also grape-skins and tea-leaves; and extracts from cinnamon, ginger and turmeric. Sometimes in isolation, sometimes in synergistic combination. It is as if an unlikely concatenation of events had led to the acceptance of a nouvelle-cuisine cookbook as a grant proposal.

As is the custom of my people, I shall draw heavily on comments left at the 'PubPeer' website, where 40 threads are currently devoted to discussing specific papers from his oeuvre. Some of those papers have been retracted, but surprisingly few in light of the unabashed data frauds they display. I can promise a promenade of hedgehogs, in illustration of Clyde's First Law ("Everything is better with googly eyes") [4].


But gratification deferred is gratification doubled, and to heighten the dramatic tension I'll begin with a peripheral figure: Sahdeo Prasad. The PubPeer archives for Prasad show him participating in much of the output from Shukla's output -- perhaps as a grad or post-grad student -- around 2007-2009, a notably productive period for the laboratory. After that he ascended to the MD Anderson Cancer Center (University of Texas) to work with Bharat Aggarwal and co-author a string of papers, later retracted because the amount of fabrication in them exceeded editorial tolerance. Prasad now collaborates with the mendacious scoundrels at OMICS, and also edits journal-shaped dumpsters for Longdom Publishing (an OMICS polyp).

Now Aggarwal's name should be familiar. He was a pioneer in the field of 'Jurisprudential Science', which is where you prove the validity of your theories and results by issuing bumptious, censorious legal threats against your critics. If Jurisprudential Science is not yet the title of a parasitical journal from OMICS, it should be. Disgrace as a con-man and departure from the MD Anderson did not greatly discommode Aggarwal's career. He continued to publish in Frontiers journals (aided by the complaisance of his quondam colleagues as editors and reviewers), and to star as a guest speaker at magical-thinking scamborees on "curing cancer with culturally-significant herbs and spices".

Many of the Prasad / Aggarwal impostures emerged from a research goal of finding curative benefits from turmeric (more exactly, from the dyestuff / secondary metabolite curcumin extracted from turmeric), obliging them to fake results because in practice curcumin is a shite drug. Aggarwal also played a role in in the Red-Wine bubble... I do not mean the beaded bubbles winking at the brim of a beaker of blushful Hippocrene, but rather, the swell of enthusiasm for the grape-skin component resveratrol which was going to lengthen lifetimes and cure heart disease and cancer by drinking red wine until people collectively tired of faking positive results.


The relevance of this little digression is that Yogeshwer Shukla espouses the same "culturally-significant plant product" ethnocentric-pharmacognosy approach to drug development, attempting to bring his artistic practice under the protective aegis of Ayurveda (like Aggarwal, he plays up the medieval-herbalism aspect of the Ayurvedic scammocopoeia and plays down the arsenic / mercury / lead toxic-metal alchemy). It must be tempting for scientists in India to claim that their work vindicates Ayurvedic Traditional Knowledge, so that as champions of Vedic cultural virtues they can call on the political forces of ethnocentric chauvinism to keep themselves dismissal-proof despite incompetence or corruption. As it happens, herbs like caraway and dill are important in my culture, especially their secondary metabolites infused in alcohol, but I do not pretend that Akvavit botanicals are responsible for my unnaturally-extended life-span.

But back to the PubPeer archives. With so many threads, we can only scratch the surface of the iceberg on the seashore and divert ourselves in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary. Rest assured that curing cancer does not distract Dr Shukla entirely from the 'Toxicology' aspect of his institution, and he also studies the carcinogen side of the coin, even if he sometimes confuses Deltamethrin and Benz-α-pyrene, on one hand [5], with Cypermethrin and mezerein on the other [6].


So let's start with a recent paper (2016) [7], in which the magic of mango squeezings (Lupeol) prevent a fungicide (Mancozeb) from causing cancer. Here are two panels from Figure 2. Now I am not wise in the ways of counting cells by fluorescence and graphing the results as a histogram, but I do know that histograms are supposed to be solid. If they are undercut by erosion or the ravages of termites (marked in red), something is wrong. It is also a problem if fine details are identical in what are purportedly independent experiments (marked in blue).


The pixels which were whittled away from the left-hand panel with the Eraser tool show up as black, after black / white reversing the right-hand panel and superimposing it on the former (everything else cancels out). This is MS Paint work, not even Photoshop! This clumsy, lazy falsification is a slap in the face for honest hard-working data forgers who take pride in their workmanship.

Here are earlier examples of white-anted overhanging histograms, from Fig 4A of [8] at left, while the outlined examples at right (from Figure 2 of [9]) are riddled with glitches, like free software:



In fact these are snapshots in the process of carving cell-count histograms from scratch. They are like scenes from the creation of a sculpture or a painting, like watching Giaocometti scraping away the clay or pigment he had added in an earlier stage in the cycle. Now [8] still centred on mango juice, while [9] focused on the cancer-preventing powers of garlic... but an overlay of these supposedly-separate data sets shows the sections of perimeter which were not re-worked, and leaves one to wonder if there were any original data measurements at all.


One last example before we move on. In contrast to the toppling minarets in Fig. 4A of [8], what renders 4B risible are similarities among its panels, where only a few pixels were scraped from one and added to another.


When we turn from to Figure 2 of [10], which at least still hoes the row of mango-juice cancer prevention (even though its protective powers are extended over mouse liver cells, rather than lymph node carcinoma of the prostate), it is not too great a surprise to encounter find cell-count plots that are outlined but superimposable.


In contrast to histogrammed cell counts, flow-cytometry plots (FACS) measure two fluorescent indicators of each cell's status and use them as coordinates to plot each cell as a point in two dimensions. They feature prominently in this body of work. They display a recurring quality of insufficient difference. Partial replications could arise when someone took a single file of data (recorded for one experimental condition) and ran it twice through different settings of the filter parameters... but also when someone modified a plot in Paint / Photoshop.

A good example is Figure 2 from a 2012 paper on the mutagenic mayhem wrought by Allethrin insecticide in the absence of mango protection. "Boeckella Robusta"wondered"could authors explain how the same dot plots were generated for different treatments in the indicated boxes?"

Indeed, in a superimposition of the Allethrin and Benz-α-pyrene panels, cancellation is complete across three quarters of the plane. There is a patch of white points unique to B-α-P treatment; an exact rectangle of discordant cells; and a zone of black/white pairs where cells were displaced en masse. The forger saw no need for anything sophisticated.

As for the Control panel, res ipsa loquitur.


Paper [1] from 2014 gave us the curative nano-pineapples. As "Notarius Cookei" noted, it also provides examples of FACS fakery. Here I choose Figures 6(G) and 6(H), and 9(F) and 9(H).


"When 99% of cells are identical in both plots, the most parsimonious explanation is that both plots used the same data."

I skip over otherexamples in my haste to reach the delirious heights of [12] and [13]. These companion papers from 2007 and 2008 fed ginger and mangos respectively through the juicer, but the authors liked the FACS plots so much that they used them in both.


Then someone customised and enhanced each version, cloning clusters of points with all the enthusiasm of a child who has just been introduced to the artistic possibilities of the potato-stamp medium. Figures 5(B) of [12] and 4(C) of [13] should be enlarged to appreciate their plenitude.



Another spurt of potato-stamp creativity occurred in 2011, in the panels of Figure 6 of [14]. The prospect of inhibiting the growth of skin tumours (in mice) with a synergistic combination of grape-skins and black tea evidently distracted the reviewers' attentions from the crystalline alignment of the FACS plots.




It also emerged that garlic and pomegranates, together, exerted exactly the same inhibition, resulting in a companion paper [15]. I do not rate for this recipe.


A lot of work went into these constructions, possibly more than simply conducting an experiment would require, so one can understand the authors' decision to repeat them across papers. Suffice to say that the cloning tool contributed to Figure 6 of [15].



Regrettably, [14] was retracted in April for a number of reasons (not just Figure 6). The world of science was thereby deprived of a row of hot-dogs comprising the ERK1/2 band of Figure 2.


These provide a segue to the inevitable Western-blot discussion. For this body of work has its fair share of gel bands with acrobatic talents, somersaulting and stretching and reflecting as they re-identify from one Protean protein to another (and from one paper to another). Figures 3, 4 and 6 from [16]:


The next somersaults are lane-specific and require more skill. At left, Apaf 1 (from Fig 5B of [4]) becomes Cytochrome C (in Fig 3(d) of [17]). At right, p21/ras (from 2(b) of [18]) becomes AKT (in Fig 5(b) of [17])!


At one end of the spectrum of manipulation, blots might be repeated in successive figures with different labels, relying on the incuriosity of readers and reviewers. At the other extreme, they are cut up and reassembled like letters in a ransom note. Here from [19] to [20].




The "scrolls" were another hard-worked loading-control panel with fivesix sightings [8, 12, 17, 18, 22. 27]. Sadly, there is not space to show the "inchworm" panel, or the "dotted dashes", or the "Nike Swoosh", or even the "dashes-and-dots" in their four- and eight-lane incarnations.


My favourite in this little genre began in 2008 as Fig 3(A) of [4], holding sway over six variants of grape-skin therapy. It reappeared as a four-lane version as Fig 1(B) of [20], a pineapple study (other panels of 1(B) also repay attention); and in Fig 3 of [19]. Pay attention to the third (or first) lane: for greater standardisation, it was quadruplicated in another 2009 loading control [23].


While back where we started, [4] also starred Fig 6(B), the "hedgehog promenade". This proves to be another version of that single lane lane from 3(A), now multiplied six-fold and stretched vertically.


Admittedly, not everyone agrees on the necessity for dose-equalising controls. Between publication of [4] in 2008 and an amendment in 2016, it had featured Figs 3(B) and 5, in which five-lane letterbox panels of β-actin sufficed to normalise a series of six-lane blots of interest. Either the readers and reviewers and editors couldn't count or they didn't care.

Recall the point of compass-coded blotting methods: to quantify the protein expression within cells under specific conditions, by a circuitous but precise route (extracting cell contents and separating the proteins by racing them along an electrophoresis-gel racetrack or Proteodrome, then labelling them with antibodies so as to measure total antibody density). Now it is always possible that researchers did measure all the numbers they tabulate and analyse, producing blots in the process with which they could have illustrated their reports, and they only decide to fabricate the illustrations (or repurpose old ones) because of the artistic challenge.

After all this, there is a sense of relief to be had from meeting plain microphotographs of vat-grown tumour cells from the A549 cell-line, rendered fluorescent by different treatment with black tea polyphenols [16]. Or perhaps they hailed from the HeLa and SiHa cell-lines [25].


I had originally hoped to show some Northern blots of RNA expression (Caspase-3 becomes iκBα); or perhaps some DNA fragmentation assays, which display a lapidary, mosaic nature when closely examined. But this report is long enough. I must be content with this loading control from [19], which reminds me (when the lightness is turned up) of a row of caddis-fly larvae.



Now I am not alleging retouching or Photoshop manipulations, but there are two images of Dr Yogeshwer Shukla on the Intertubes. The version shown on his staff page at the CSIR-Indian Institute of Toxicology Research website has changed a lot from the version on his ResearchGate account.



If this is the effect of pineapple or mango or grape-skin treatment, he is his own best advertisement for his discoveries.


[1] "Anti-Cancer Activity of Bromelain Nanoparticles by Oral Administration"Journal of Biomedical Nanotechnology (2014)
Priyanka Bhatnagar, Soma Patnaik, Amit K. Srivastava, Mohan K. R. Mudiam, Yogeshwer Shukla, Amulya K. Panda, Aditya B. Pant, Pradeep Kumar, Kailash C. Gupta
https://pubpeer.com/publications/D7569FE3179E5C77F10CD7D0CAFF1C

[2] "Hyaluronic acid-grafted PLGA nanoparticles for the sustained delivery of berberine chloride for an efficient suppression of Ehrlich ascites tumors"Drug Delivery and Translational Research (2018)
Priyanka Bhatnagar, Manisha Kumari, Richa Pahuja, A. B. Pant, Y. Shukla, Pradeep Kumar, K. C. Gupta
https://pubpeer.com/publications/17D26A485788CD2B46B52781D8DD50

[3] O-hexadecyl-dextran entrapped berberine nanoparticles abrogate high glucose stress induced apoptosis in primary rat hepatocytes"PLoS ONE (2014)
Radhika Kapoor, Shruti Singh, Madhulika Tripathi, Priyanka Bhatnagar, Poonam Kakkar, Kailash Chand Gupta
https://pubpeer.com/publications/012D4D634C827AE2183864F22FD1A0

[4] "Resveratrol induces apoptosis involving mitochondrial pathways in mouse skin tumorigenesis". Life Sciences (2008).
Neetu Kalra, Preeti Roy, Sahdeo Prasad, Yogeshwer Shukla
https://pubpeer.com/publications/4197501DBC472982247DE0AFA234E3

[5] "Early changes in proteome levels upon acute deltamethrin exposure in mammalian skin system associated with its neoplastic transformation potential"Journal of Toxicological Sciences (2013)
Jasmine George, Yogeshwer Shukla
https://pubpeer.com/publications/F65D2C5FFC638303800927B2E28661

[6] "Cypermethrin exposure leads to regulation of proteins expression involved in neoplastic transformation in mouse skin". Proteomics (2011).
Jasmine George, Amit Kumar Srivastava, Richa Singh, Yogeshwer Shukla
https://pubpeer.com/publications/A384A6D53974AF627FC83477C2D43E

[7] "Protective effects of lupeol against mancozeb-induced genotoxicity in cultured human lymphocytes". Phytomedicine (2016).
Amit Kumar Srivastava, Sanjay Mishra, Wahid Ali, Yogeshwer Shukla
https://pubpeer.com/publications/5AA6712082CCC91EEE90C4C5196BFE

[8] "Induction of apoptosis by lupeol and mango extract in mouse prostate and LNCaP cells". Nutrition & Cancer (2007).
Sahdeo Prasad, Neetu Kalra, Yogeshwer Shukla
https://pubpeer.com/publications/5316531EB262091B243859A00C0137

[9] "Regulation of oxidative stress–mediated apoptosis by diallyl sulfide in DMBA-exposed Swiss mice". Human & Experimental Toxicology (2008).
S Prasad, N Kalra, S Srivastava, Y Shukla
https://pubpeer.com/publications/92E0808D22F88CCD9F6CB46ACC36A8

[10] "Hepatoprotective effects of lupeol and mango pulp extract of carcinogen induced alteration in Swiss albino mice". Molecular Nutrition & Food Research (2007).
Sahdeo Prasad, Neetu Kalra, Yogeshwer Shukla
https://pubpeer.com/publications/76E17585B48AC0B38E498B5EC23054

[11] "Allethrin-induced genotoxicity and oxidative stress in Swiss albino mice". Mutation Research/Fundamental and Molecular Mechanisms of Mutagenesis (2012).
Amit Kumar Srivastava, Pramod Kumar Srivastava, Abdulaziz A. Al-Khedhairy, Javed Musarrat, Yogeshwer Shukla
https://pubpeer.com/publications/3D8F9A166D74AE68A779582773B7AD

[12] "In vitro and in vivo modulation of testosterone mediated alterations in apoptosis related proteins by [6]-gingerol". Molecular Nutrition & Food Research (2007).
Yogeshwer Shukla, Sahdeo Prasad, Chitra Tripathi, Madhulika Singh, Jasmine George, Neetu Kalra
https://pubpeer.com/publications/F9BEECCBE9F74B9796BFA11F079FF9

[13] "Regulation of signaling pathways involved in lupeol induced inhibition of proliferation and induction of apoptosis in human prostate cancer cells". Molecular Carcinogenesis (2008).
Sahdeo Prasad, Nidhi Nigam, Neetu Kalra, Yogeshwer Shukla
https://pubpeer.com/publications/977BFB109F38955F21E8259D74F9C0

[14] "Resveratrol and black tea polyphenol combination synergistically suppress mouse skin tumors growth by inhibition of activated MAPKs and p53". PLoS ONE (2011).
Jasmine George, Madhulika Singh, Amit Kumar Srivastava, Kulpreet Bhui, Preeti Roy, Pranav Kumar Chaturvedi, Yogeshwer Shukla
https://pubpeer.com/publications/1ADC5417FEF462F17636A43498D670

[15] "Synergistic growth inhibition of mouse skin tumors by pomegranate fruit extract and diallyl sulfide: evidence for inhibition of activated MAPKs/NF-κB and reduced cell proliferation". Food & Chemical Toxicology (2011).
Jasmine George, Madhulika Singh, Amit Kumar Srivastava, Kulpreet Bhui, Yogeshwer Shukla
https://pubpeer.com/publications/4A46821594EB7EB392F5A9BB471E5A

[16] "Tea polyphenols enhance cisplatin chemosensitivity in cervical cancer cells via induction of apoptosis". Life Sciences (2013).
Madhulika Singh, Kulpreet Bhui, Richa Singh, Yogeshwer Shukla
https://pubpeer.com/publications/8BC7D198B330260105915A17A97BE7

[17] "Chemopreventive potential of resveratrol in mouse skin tumors through regulation of mitochondrial and PI3K/AKT signaling pathways". Pharmaceutical Research (2009).
Preeti Roy, Neetu Kalra, Sahdeo Prasad, Jasmine George, Yogeshwer Shukla
https://pubpeer.com/publications/850796C5228A56DF71E8D4E4601C87

[18] "Regulation of p21/ras protein expression by diallyl sulfide in DMBA induced neoplastic changes in mouse skin". Cancer Letters (2006).
Annu Arora, Neetu Kalra, Yogeshwer Shukla
https://pubpeer.com/publications/A5216BB8F4E05BB3A05E274F56618B

[19] "Regulation of p53, nuclear factor kappaB and cyclooxygenase-2 expression by bromelain through targeting mitogen-activated protein kinase pathway in mouse skin". Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology (2008).
Neetu Kalra, Kulpreet Bhui, Preeti Roy, Smita Srivastava, Jasmine George, Sahdeo Prasad, Yogeshwer Shukla
https://pubpeer.com/publications/4A3803831AE2603C9276ADB9750A85

[20] "Bromelain inhibits COX-2 expression by blocking the activation of MAPK regulated NF-kappa B against skin tumor-initiation* triggering mitochondrial death pathway". Cancer Letters (2009).
Kulpreet Bhui, Sahdeo Prasad, Jasmine George, Yogeshwer Shukla
https://pubpeer.com/publications/19913878F1C75788FE95D3FD1FCADE

[21] "Modulation of p53 in 7,12-dimethylbenz[a]anthracene-induced skin tumors by diallyl sulfide in Swiss albino mice". Molecular Cancer Therapeutics (2004).
Annu Arora, Imtiaz A Siddiqui, Yogeshwer Shukla
https://pubpeer.com/publications/2DE54FD49EB1CAE22A11E768845A2C

[22] "Theaflavins induced apoptosis of LNCaP cells is mediated through induction of p53, down-regulation of NF-kappa B and mitogen-activated protein kinases pathways". Life Sciences (2007). Neetu Kalra, Kavita Seth, Sahdeo Prasad, Madhulika Singh, Aditya B. Pant, Yogeshwer Shukla https://pubpeer.com/publications/916B9A4E38D79FAF24E97FFB891AC8
[23] "Resveratrol enhances ultraviolet B-induced cell death through nuclear factor-kappaB pathway in human epidermoid carcinoma A431 cells". Biochemical & Biophysical Research Communications (2009). Preeti Roy, Esha Madan, Neetu Kalra, Nidhi Nigam, Jasmine George, Ratan Singh Ray, Rajendra K Hans, Sahdeo Prasad, Yogeshwer Shukla
https://pubpeer.com/publications/D9903CAA6326AC41B3A998B45FDFD7

[24] "Tea polyphenols inhibit cyclooxygenase-2 expression and block activation of nuclear factor-kappa B and Akt in diethylnitrosoamine induced lung tumors in Swiss mice". Investigational New Drugs (2010).
Preeti Roy, Nidhi Nigam, Madhulika Singh, Jasmine George, Smita Srivastava, Hasnain Naqvi, Yogeshwer Shukla
https://pubpeer.com/publications/202F3FCC1C55B94992B036E1761395

[25] "PLGA-encapsulated tea polyphenols enhance the chemotherapeutic efficacy of cisplatin against human cancer cells and mice bearing Ehrlich ascites carcinoma". International Journal of Nanomedicine (2015).
Madhulika Singh, Priyanka Bhatnagar, Sanjay Mishra, Pradeep Kumar, Yogeshwer Shukla, Kailash Chand Gupta
https://pubpeer.com/publications/90ECC2BE7345B133B7E876E34801FB

[26] "Regulation of apoptosis by resveratrol through JAK/STAT and mitochondria mediated pathway in human epidermoid carcinoma A431 cells". Biochemical & Biophysical Research Communications (2008).
Esha Madan, Sahdeo Prasad, Preeti Roy, Jasmine George, Yogeshwer Shukla
https://pubpeer.com/publications/15094E64ADDFEDF790E810B4E056EA

[27] "Involvement of multiple signaling pathways in diallyl sulfide mediated apoptosis in mouse skin tumors". Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention.
Neetu Kalra, Annu Arora, Yogeshwer Shukla
https://pubpeer.com/publications/8123113071476EBDEF55EDEE231182

When a journal retracts 14 papers at once - the entire contents of a Special Issue - something is probably happening behind the scenes. Here I may be working the Retraction Watch side of the street, but the story provides enough entertainment for everyone. Also, there are digital doppelgangers and glitches in the Matrix!

The journal in question was Multimedia Tools & Applications, MTAP for short. No doubt this has its devoted readership of experts in multi-format cross-media data integration and analysis, but outside that circle, MTAP is perhaps best known for the 'peer-review piracy' episode last year. Authors had submitted manuscripts for editorial consideration, only to see them rejected (after long delays) on the advice of anonymous reviewers, then promptly appear in the same journal as the work of other authors. In fact this happened three times, with the same team of authorial frauds. Quoth RW:

Multimedia Tools and Applications (MTAP), has retracted three papers by the same group of authors, all of which plagiarized from unpublished manuscripts by other people.[...]
There are four authors in common to all three manuscripts, but only one — corresponding author Chao Xiong of the Changzhou Institute of Technology in China — has responded to any queries from MTAP, according to the retraction notices.

Now cursory inquiries revealed that Chao Xiong is a specialist in the nano-fields of thin-film deposition and opto-electronics. All credit to him for branching out into a new area, but he seems an unlikely choice for a peer-reviewer, so how he had access to the manuscripts he acquired was a mystery. Any thoughts that there might be two Chao Xiongs at the Changzhou Institute of Technology - one toiling in the groves of nanotech while the other robbed researchers - were dispelled by the presence of Acknowledgements, in the plagiarised papers and in ones by the optoelectronics Chao Xiong, to the same regional research grants. More to the point: the nanotech guy did claim credit for the plagiarisms in his ResearchGate entry (though he later scrubbed them out again).

Tiger notes:
Ever since Retraction Watch reported the retraction of his mysteriously plagiarized papers in August 2018, information regarding Xiong has quieted down gradually. His latest appearance on internet was from November 2018 when he was mentioned as the Vice Dean of the School of Electrical and Optoelectronic Engineering of Changzhou Institute of Technology. He is not listed on their leadership webpage any more but still is listed as an Associate Professor there.

At the time, the MTAP management promised a broader investigation:

We conducted an extensive investigation and found evidence that the peer-review process for a number of articles in MTAP may have been manipulated. [...] As this investigation is still ongoing, we are unable to disclose how the corresponding author of the retracted papers may have obtained unpublished material.

This recent drainpipe-gurgling swirl of retractions seems to be part of that inquiry, for similar reasons motivated the depublications... combinations of piracy from unpublished manuscripts [presumably submitted to the journal]; false authorship; and falsified peer review. The editorial explanations themselves display a high degree of unacknowledged self-duplication:

RETRACTED ARTICLE: Internet-scale secret sharing algorithm with multimedia applications
The Editor-in-Chief has retracted this article [1], which was published as part of special issue “Multi-source Weak Data Management using Big Data”, because its content has been duplicated from an unpublished manuscript authored by Her-Chang Chao and Tzuo-Yau Fan without permission. In addition, there is evidence suggesting authorship manipulation and an attempt to subvert the peer review process. Author Chao Xiong agrees to this retraction.

RETRACTED ARTICLE: Medical image encryption technique in big media environment
...because its content has been duplicated from an unpublished manuscript authored by Priya Selvam and Santhi Balachandran without permission. In addition, there is evidence suggesting authorship manipulation and an attempt to subvert the peer review process. Author Chao Xiong agrees to this retraction.

Now the Chao Xiong team, familiar from last year's round of thefts, account for only three of the present 14. So what of the other 11? Well, four of them were ostensibly the work of a team at "State Grid Zhejiang Electric Power Company" in Hangzhou, centred on Caiyou Zhang:

RETRACTED ARTICLE: A new deep representation for large-scale scene classification
Bo Dai, Feng Mei. Deliang Ji, Caiyou Zhang, Jia Shi
...because the article shows substantial overlap most notably with the article cited [2]. In addition, there is evidence of figure duplication without appropriate permission, as well as evidence suggesting authorship manipulation and an attempt to subvert the peer review process.

RETRACTED ARTICLE: Cross-camera multi-person tracking by leveraging fast graph mining algorithm
Caiyou Zhang, Yuteng Huang, Zhiqiang Wang, Hongcheng Jiang, Dongfeng Yan, Jun Cheng
... because part of its content has been duplicated from an unpublished manuscript authored by Her-Chang Chao and Tzuo-Yau Fan without permission. The article also shows substantial text overlap, most notably with the articles cited [2, 3]. In addition, there is evidence of figure duplication without appropriate permission, as well as evidence suggesting authorship manipulation and an attempt to subvert the peer review process.

Two more were signed by Zhengwei Jiang, also affiliated to the "State Grid Zhejiang Electric Power Company, Hangzhou": "Camera network analysis for visual surveillance in industrial electronic context", and "Analysis of security operation and maintenance system using privacy utility in media environment" ("content has been duplicated without permission from unpublished manuscripts", "substantial text overlap", "evidence of figure duplication", "authorship manipulation and an attempt to subvert the peer review process"). Another was signed by Yuteng Huang who has the same employer, while two others were also Zhejiang-based. As for "Image denoising based on parallel K-singular value decomposition in cloud computing" ("there was evidence suggesting an attempt to subvert the peer review process"), it is reassuring to learn that Hongtao Gao was in the employ of the 'Department of Cyber Crime Investigation, Criminal Investigation Police University of China, Shenyang' when he signed it.

Anyway, we need not grieve for these retracted papers, because it is not yet GAME OVER. Even before they disappeared from MTAP with a rude gurgling noise, many had already earned themselves a second incarnation in the Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation (JVCIR for short). Here is a glitch in the matrix; or a case of déjà lu:


Another glitch:

All four Caiyou Zhang forgeries were reincarnated in JVCIR (sometimes with slight changes in authorship), and both of Zhengwei Jiang's.

But there's more! For scrutiny detects papers which have not been taken out from MTAP and shot (yet), but which have already begun their second incarnation in JVCIR.

Oddly, in the doppelganger below, Caiyou Zhang as author of the 'original' has been replaced with Yiyang Yao. The duplicated Abstract has apparently been written by feeding text through a paper shredder and reassembling it, in hommage to the Burroughs-Gysin cut-up technique.

This article will be visual significance into the graphical guidance (the chart is a medium-sized join subgraph) Deep structure, from the level of learning a significant map The original image pixel to the object level graphic (oGL), and further Space level graphics (sGL). In particular, we first sample Super pixels from each image, and they are used as buildings Block of each object. In order to seamlessly describe different objects The number of oGLs is generated by spatial adjacent links The super pixel oGL object response mapping is obtained by obtaining Transfer the semantics of the image tag to oGL. As space The layout of the object plays an important role in the prominence of the object Based on the relevant learning distribution proposed sGL OGL position between. Finally, in order to imitate the” winner of all” Biological vision mechanism, the largest majority of voting programs The sGL of the image is probabilistically combined into a significant graph. Experimental results show that oGLs and sGLs capture the object level well And space-level visual cues, resulting in competitiveness Significant detection accuracy.

This process of parallel publication reached its acme with a four-fold paper. This appeared in MTAP - in a different Special Issue, on "Data Security in Multimedia Modeling" - and was retracted for the now-familiar reason of behind-the-scenes piracy:

RETRACTED ARTICLE: Moving object surveillance using object proposals and background prior prediction
Yiyang Yao, Jun Li, Tengfei Wu & Luming Zhang
...because its content has been duplicated from an unpublished manuscript submitted by a different group of authors. In addition, there is evidence suggesting authorship manipulation and an attempt to subvert the peer review process.

The main author promptly republished it in the same journal with different co-authors and a different title:

Efficient object analysis by leveraging deeply-trained object proposals prediction model
Bo Dai, Yiyang Yao, Wenjing Ye & Jing Zheng

Not satisfied that this plagiarised paper had reached its full potential, he went on to recycle both versionsthrough JCVIR, where they appear in a single issue.



This is an egregious achievement, even by the standards of academic publishing, and deserves some sort of celebration.

Am I the only one struck by the emphasis in this genre on Big Data mass surveillance, and algorithmic segmentation of video scenes into individuals and backgrounds? It is almost as if a network of academics asked themselves "What sort of Cargo-Cult nonsense should we promise to get research funding from a dystopian government of authoritarians and kleptocrats?".

Things begin to make more sense - in a sufficiently broad sense of "sense" - when we check back to that MTAP Special Issue on “Multi-source Weak Data Management using Big Data” (a rubric now devoid of contents after all contributions were deemed to be plagiarised, and only accepted because of fake-author shenanigans and bogus peer review).


The name of the supervising Guest Editor should be familiar:


Tiger notes:
The special issue of MTAP had 5 guest editors to help organize it. Among them, the Leading guest editor is Yiyang Yao from the State Grid Zhejiang Electric Power Company (SGZEPC) in China, and Luming Zhang from Hefei University of Technology in China.

Sad to say, suspicion falls on Yiyang Yao. If, hypothetically, he had used his position as Reviewer and Guest Editor to run a rather amateur papermill (appropriating some manuscripts to repurpose them for his colleagues, and selling others to people in need of publications to adorn their CVs), the outcome would look very much like the situation we observe. Chao Xiong and his team would just be unusually regular customers.

Tiger notes:
Yao is a colleague of Caiyou Zhang at SGZEPC, while Luming Zhang is a collaborator of Caiyou Zhang. They three, together with Bo Dai, the first author of one of Caiyou Zhang’s 4 retracted papers from this special issue, have had close collaboration on more than one project. At least two of their collaborations ended up winning nominations (no information on final results) for a National Award on Electrical Engineering Science and Technology, in 2017 and 2018.


Based on available information on internet, Caiyou Zhang is in the high-level leadership of the SGZEPC and apparently Yiyang Yao's senior or even boss. In addition, Caiyou Zhang is the vice chief representative of CCP there.

What can be a reasonable speculation is that when Yao got the chance to organize a special issue (it could also be that the special issue was originally their idea proposed to the Journal), he immediately thought about to have his boss Caiyou Zhang to take advantage of the special issue he was leading the effort to organize. However, Caiyou Zhang might not have much to submit for publication. So, Yao was so nice to provide his own previously published paper to his boss to include in this special issue.

Coda 1
Here and here are 2017 and 2019 Abstracts, by Yiyang Yao and two otherwise-disjoint teams of co-authors, paper-shredded for connoisseurs of the cut-up tradition... either that, or Google Translate was drunk that day. They are not yet unretracted

Image quality tendency modeling by fusing multiple visual cues
Yiyang Yao, Tengfei Wu & Jun Li

Image quality tendency modeling by fusing multiple visual cues
Wenjie Zhang, Yiyang Yao, Jinxion Wang, Xinyu Xiang & PengShu
If anything, the 2019 (JVCIR) instantiation of this Flickr-themed text is less grammatical than the 2017 version. It is like someone trained a neural network on the complete late works of Samuel Beckett. Perhaps it is deliberate, to veil the contents from the unknown original authors who might otherwise recognise their unpublished words in print.

Flickr is a photo/video hosting site with over 87 million user. Upload more than 3 million 500 thousand new photos every day at present there are no tools to organize these huge numbers of users aesthetic tendency. Although Flickr allows users manually adding different groups, they are difficult to maintain Updates should be made when new users are added or deleted. In this paper puts forward a series of Flickr users system. Each loop contains similar users aesthetic tendency. We observed: (1) an aesthetic model of thought should be flexible, because of different visual features typically represent different data sets, and (2) Significant differences in the number of photos from different Flickr users stay. In this work, a new probabilistic topic model is proposed describe the aesthetic interest of each Flickr user potential spatial distribution. After that, an affinity graph is similarity is described by aesthetics interests of Flickr users. Obviously, intensive users of Flickr are similar in taste. Thus, these users are divided into different Flickr bounds efficient dense graph discovery. Piping it is proposed that the Flickr bound discovery is fully automatic. Extensive we show that our proposed method is accurate for mine Flickr experiments 60,000 Flickr user community.

But wait! There's more! For a third instantiation of the same Abstract had already found its way into MTAP, this time attached to different authorship and text. In fact it is the 14th recently-retracted entry, previously unmentioned, from that “Multi-source Weak Data Management using Big Data” Special Issue.

RETRACTED ARTICLE: Flickr image quality evaluation by deeply fusing heterogeneous visual cues
Yongjun Zheng, Weiyu Di & Shen Jiang
... because its content has been duplicated without permission from unpublished manuscripts authored by Sandeep Sood and by Pegah Nikbakht, Mojtaba Mahdavi, Shahram Etemadi and Sima Arasteh. The article also shows substantial overlap with a published article [2]. In addition, there is evidence suggesting authorship manipulation and an attempt to subvert the peer review process.

Despite the seemingly-focused title, this third paper is longer, and globally incoherent; it was like the dreadful outcome of purloining three separate manuscripts and sending them though the matter transmitter simultaneously. Individual segments make a semblance of internal sense but in toto they are completely calenture frittiliary fishtank, lurching between (1) content analysis / aesthetic grouping of Flickr imagery, (2) digital watermarking algorithms for image validation, and (3) data encryption for secure data storage on the Cloud and the Internet of Things. There was handwaving and incantation of Worship Words but no concrete contribution to any of these concerns.

Some Figures re-appeared in the bilocating "image quality tendency modeling" paper(s) already adduced.

But though "Flickr image quality evaluation" is an unnatural hybrid which transgresses all the laws of literary lineage, it is also a kind of Ur-version, a textural trove to be plundered at leisure. So other Figures and many paragraphs of text found their way into a fourth publication, in MTAP again, retracted only hours ago:

RETRACTED ARTICLE: Large-scale image-based fog detection based on cloud platform
Chao Xiong, Ruxi Xiang, Yuan Li, Xia Han & Hongwei Du
... because its content has been duplicated from an unpublished manuscript authored by Sandeep Snood without permission. In addition, there is evidence suggesting authorship manipulation and an attempt to subvert the peer review process.



You probably recognise the name of the ostensible author, which brings us back to where we started.

None of this makes any sense and now I have a headache.

Coda 2
It is all alarums and excursions at JVCIR, and even as I write the duplicated publications are vanishing from existence, in the manner of the memory-erasure scene from "Eternal Sunshine". Perhaps the editors or managers read the Twiddle-box.


JVCIR has Special Issues of its own, and the papers briefly resurrected from MTAP all fell under the rubric of "Text-based Image/video Understanding in Social Media Context". I have not found any record of the Guest Editors responsible for selecting and scrutinising the short-lived contributions.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/17/accidental-cat-filter-appears-on-pakistan-officials-briefing

I do not envy his future neighbours at #12.

"I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble monstrous violent stabby feline; but I have the reincarnated soul of Elizabeth Regina, and I am ready for my next Hilliard portrait."

Feel free to admire these panels. The angular silhouettes are not cranes in flight or fish schooling among bubbles, but vat-cultured carcinoma cells from a lineage prone to metastases; they have been lured through pores in a microfilter and then stained, to quantify how different conditions and deterrents affected their invasive tendencies. Sadly in light of the positive results of this 'migration assay', it did not exist outside Photoshop, and in comments at PubPeer, 'Bacillus Mannanilyticus' has helpfully circled some of the clone-tool-multiplied cells.

The authors took the criticism to heart and recently retracted the paper --

This article has been withdrawn at the request of the authors. It contained several inappropriately processed and incorrect figures, Figs. 3C, 3D, 4B, 4C, 4D, 5B, 5D, 6B, 7B, 7C, and 8B. On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author has taken full responsibility and apologizes to the readers of Molecular & Cellular Proteomics for submitting and publishing the erroneous article and any inconvenience caused.

-- though without crediting PubPeer or B. Mannanilyticus... perhaps they learned of the cloning accidents through other channels.

An earlier retraction from the same research group hinged on overlapping microphotographs. Let us say that the number of stained tissue slices (and thus the number of distinct treatments) represented in Figures 5 and 7 was smaller than the number of panels in those subdivided diagrams. Like roofing tiles, or Ordnance Survey maps, the panels share many edges in common.

This article has been retracted at the request of the authors. It contained several inappropriately processed and incorrect Figures. On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author has taken full responsibility and apologizes to the readers of BBA Molecular Basis of Disease for submitting and publishing the erroneous article and any inconvenience caused.

This is our introduction to the oeuvre of Dr Li Jia. Now care is required when counting how many of her papers have been discussed at PubPeer (and the Researchgate archives are little better), for there are some quite separate names in Chinese which become 'Li Jia' when romanised by the Pinyin system. Here we are concerned with the Dalian Medical Hospital cancer researcher, who received her Ph.D in 2006 - the basis for her initial papers (seven of them with her Ph.D advisor as main author and herself as first author). That Li Jia.


What draws me to this oeuvre is the breadth of fake-data styles it encompasses. The versatility is impressive. Future conferences on Data Integrity could use it for an overview of the range of graphical techniques available for inventing results in cell biology. In fact the sheer abundance of material to include has forced me to be systematic, and to arrange everything along a time-line. I have limited its scope to the decade 2006-2015, with 27 papers receiving post-publication review at PubPeer (the two retractions, both from 2014, are [22] and [23]).

The time-line is not comprehensive; it features images that tie everything together by occurring more than once. There was no space for exuberant but one-off fabrications, such as Figure 3B from [3] in which hepatocarcinoma cells multiply to form colonies in nutrient agar (peer-reviewers were not concerned that identical colonies arose independently, such as the Mickey Mouse silhouette marked with a blue trapezoid in the first and third panels).

Over to the left of the chronology I have arranged the various manifestations of Western blots. The emphasis is on the metamorphoses of a small number of loading controls, the labels on the lanes changing according to the exigencies of different experiments. Now one school of thought regards loading controls as a needless, time-wasting formality, and relies on the process of harvesting cell contents to capture the same number of cells and yield the same concentration of proteins for each experimental situation (i.e. for each lane in the blot) - making it nugatory to control for that concentration. Jia was evidently of that persuasion.

However, that defense does not apply to the "swoosh" series of metamorphoses (from papers #3, #5 and #7), in which the recurring blot serves as empirical evidence for the three substantive proteins MMP-11, COL8A1 and VEGF-A.


Apparently the same slice of gel can be a GAPDH control from different cell-lines in [1], or Matrix Metalloprotease-11 expression in the same cell-line exposed to different concentrations of tunicamycin, in [2]. None of this is promising for the Ph.D thesis source. Nor is it a good advertisement for supervisor and main author Jianing Zhang, who had left Dalian Medical University in 2013 and took the position of the Dean of the School of Life Science and Medicine in a neighbouring, but much more prestigious Dalian University of Technology.


That second manifestation as MMP-11 opens up further vistas of exploration when we look at its nominal loading control. It overlaps with other controls in the same paper, and they with others still... until we can reconstruct a single Ur-blot with nine lanes, from which various segments were extracted to provide the GAPDH controls for five separate blots, comparing multiple gamuts of conditions and spanning papers [1], [2] and [9].


No reconstruction is needed for a 12-lane GAPDH blot, which was shown in full in Figure 2E of [3], ensuring stability over a time-course.


Short excerpts from it can be found controlling for other trials in [3], [5] and [7] (where we met them already), and [11].

However, new material did enter the repertoire after 2010. One eight-lane band will always be "lipstick traces" to me. Various fragments featured as Figure 5A of [12], as 6A of [17], and four times in Figure 5 of [16].


The time-line includes a 2011 gap between [10] and [11], when Jia spent a year in Japan on a research fellowship (May 2010-May 2011) on the basis of her promising youthful productivity. Evidently this provided fresh blots, among them a second six-lane segment featured in overlapping segments in [11], [15], [16] and [17]... I like to think of it as the "charm bracelet".



In total, counting Figure 1D of [11] as well as 6B, the charms appeared five times. As its debut it took the form of the substantive protein B4GALT1 to justify a crucial claim of the paper: that the expression of that gene was blocked by a targeted shRNA. In that manifestation it acquired a GAPDH loading control of its own, which was less versatile, occurring only twice there and again in [12].



From Western Blots we shift to a genre grouped on the extreme right of the time-line. Here the molecules of interest - to be separated by molecular weight and labelled - are DNA segments, transcribed from RNA in the cellular extracts using Reverse Transcriptase, then amplified with PCR. Repurposed Northern Blots are not a novelty, and readers may recall them coming under scrutiny in previous blogging, but Jia took them to a new level. Prepare yourself for flotillas of kayaks and Canadian canoes parading across the screen, like a Mohawk war party in a Fenimore Cooper novel.

Two strands of repurposing can be discerned. The less active strand is distinguished by the crumpled prow (or stern) of one of the kayaks, and comprises only [3], [4], [6] and [13].



The "core blot" of the second strand is recognisable by the wee peg below the keel of one kayak and by the dot above another one (I surmise that to be the vanguard of the war party, and the leader has raised a small balloon, in the manner of a tour-group leader, to stop the others wandering off and becoming separated). It was cropped to two bands and three lanes for its debut in [1], and to a three-by-four form for [2]


This blot had already been manipulated when it first appeared outside Jia's thesis: the upturned kayak at the top right corner is a fabrication, spliced in. Anyway, these distinguishing marks allow us to trace the blot through its variants and permutations in [3], [4], [5], [6], [7] and [8]. Sometimes the kayaks are merely flipped vertically [5] or horizontally [7]:




Conversely, in [4] the manipulations reach delirious heights of ransom-note rearrangement to create eight lanes.



The two strands meet in Figure 1A of [6], which is a veritable stamp collection. Even a Helpful Diagram does not really make clear how much the core blots were sliced up and reconfigured.



Let's go back to the Colony Growth assay, and to a group of images recycled across [4], [7], [8] and [10]. Everything can be improved with googly eyes, but also with duplicated colonies. Among other discoveries, it emerged that COLA81 manipulations affect the proliferation of Hca-F cells in exactly the same way as CD147 manipulations affect P388D1 cells... even producing identical colonies (in multiple copies). To my mind this phenomenon deserves a paper in itself.


We have already encountered the Invasion / Migration Assay. There is some visual variety in its applications, depending on the specific lineage of cancer cells that had squeezed through pores in the filter. The software enhancement of the images is constant, though, and B. Mannanilyticus noted a number of cloned cells in Figure 3B of [16] (see also 4B).



Some of the repetitions stem from the fact that the upper-right and lower-right panels of 3B are essentially the same, as can be seen when one of them is colour-inverted and superimposed on the other, so that identical areas cancel out. The areas of failed cancellation are where cells were added to one panel, or the other, but not both.

We should also pay attention to the upper-left panel of 3B, for it reappeared in [19] as the top right of Figure 5(b), minus the Photoshop improvements (again, an inversion and superimposition clarify the areas of difference). The repeating sections are confined to other panels of 5(b), and to look at them closely is to be reminded of the crude faces in Appel's "Vragende Kinderen" paintings.



But we cannot linger on those images for I am impatient to move on to a group of invasion-assay results which may well be hommages to Yayoi Kusama and demanded their own thread in the time-line. Overlapping sections of panels reappear between a half-dozen papers, stretching across seven years, purportedly representing treatment with different siRNAs to discourage the cells' mobility. This series began in 2007 with Figure 5A of [3], where the most obvious overlaps are with 2E from [10].


Note that a prominent cell was inserted for the [10] version (or perhaps erased for the [3] version), presumably for aesthetic reasons. The authors continued to improve the images with more dots and manipulations, as if in the thrall of a gaes or whatever is the opposite of trypophobia, and the series build to a crescendo in [13] (2012)...


... then reached a dizzying apotheosis of artificiality in [18] (2013).




The failure of the PLoS-One reviewers to recognise the creativity poured into these figures must have been galling. Anyway, the links of re-use / alteration between papers are spelled out in the PubPeer threads, and rather than take up more space, I have prepared a little diagram to help interested readers follow the routes from one to another.


We are nearly finished with Invasion / Migration Assay images. The ones featured in [24], [25] and [26] are close to the angular cranes-in-flight profiles with which we began, though because they are purple I'll compare them to tropical fish in aquarium tanks. I lied when I wrote that "the software enhancement of the images is constant", for there is nothing amiss with these examples... except their re-use within and between papers, differently labelled.

One visual motif remains to tie these papers together. The FACS-plot strand stretches practically the length of this sample, from [3] to [27], though only five papers take part.

Because the three panels of 3B from [5] portray the protein-expression distributions of murine hepatocarcinoma cells, while panels 1, 2 and 4 of Figure 3A from [7] involve human leukemia cells - measured under different conditions - we expect them not to cancel out when panel is superimposed upon panel. But prepare for disappointment:


The repetitions are not complete; some points have been added or scraped away (each point indicating a single cell), as if an experimental data-file had been plotted with a different choice of filtering parameters, or simply revisited in Photoshop. As for the third panel of 3A, it is an unnatural chimera, formed by grafting two half-panels together.

A single color-coded diagram captures the almost-repetitions across Figures 4E from [10], 4B from [3], 3B from [5] and 6D from [27].

After 2015, Li Jia's research shifted direction towards the area of micro-RNA and its role in intra- and inter-cellular regulation. [28] is "Comprehensive N-glycan profiles of hepatocellular carcinoma reveal association of fucosylation with tumor progression and regulation of FUT8 by microRNAs", from 2016. [29] is "Long non-coding RNA HOTAIR promotes osteoarthritis progression via miR-17-5p/FUT2/β-catenin axis".

A feature of this newly-popular miRNA genre is its strong visual conventions. Papers follow a template, and as well as Western Blots and FACS plots, readers expect to see immunofluorescent staining and scatterplots of miRNA levels against cancer biomarkers.


As part of that shift, her laboratory left behind the egregious displays of forged results. Another 10 threads at PubPeer examine her output since 2015, but with some exceptions they concern trivial image duplications that can be corrected with an embarrassed Erratum notice and a Does-not-affect-the-Conclusions. Indeed, four of the affected papers have been recently amended (coinciding with the Retraction with which we began). Note, too, that these 10 papers are only a fraction of the group's productivity, with 11 papers published in 2017 and nine in 2018.


It may be that Li Jia does not need to make up results now that she has students of her own. Once you make it you no longer have to fake it. It may also be that I spent too much time on over-thinking this. Arguably there is nothing exceptional about this body of work, though it does conveniently bring together a diverse range of ways in which data manipulation can manifest.

Here are some out-takes. The task of finding the source(s) is left as an exercise for the reader.




[1] "Deglycosylation of CD147 down-regulates Matrix Metalloproteinase-11 expression and the adhesive capability of murine hepatocarcinoma cell HcaF in vitro", IUBMB Life (2006). Li Jia, Huimin Zhou, Shujing Wang, Jun Cao, Wei Wei, Jianing Zhang. (PubPeer here)

[2] "Caveolin-1 up-regulates CD147 glycosylation and the invasive capability of murine hepatocarcinoma cell lines", International Journal of Biochemistry & Cell Biology (2006). Li Jia, Shujing Wang, Huimin Zhou, Jun Cao, Yichuan Hu, Jianing Zhang. (PubPeer here)

[3] "siRNA targeted against matrix metalloproteinase 11 inhibits the metastatic capability of murine hepatocarcinoma cell Hca-F to lymph nodes", International Journal of Biochemistry & Cell Biology (2007). Li Jia, Shujing Wang, Jun Cao, Huimin Zhou, Wei Wei, Jianing Zhang. (PubPeer here)

[4] "CD147 regulates vascular endothelial growth factor-A expression, tumorigenicity, and chemosensitivity to curcumin in hepatocellular carcinoma", IUBMB Life (2007). Li Jia, Huaxin Wang, Shuxian Qu, Xiaoyan Miao, Jianing Zhang. (PubPeer here)

[5] "CD147 depletion down-regulates matrix metalloproteinase-11, vascular endothelial growth factor-A expression and the lymphatic metastasis potential of murine hepatocarcinoma Hca-F cells", International Journal of Biochemistry & Cell Biology (2007). Li Jia, Jun Cao, Wei Wei, Shujing Wang, Yunfei Zuo, Jianing Zhang.. (PubPeer here)

[6] "Expression of CD147 mediates tumor cells invasion and multidrug resistance in hepatocellular carcinoma", Cancer Investigation (2008). Li Jia, Henggui Xu, Yongfu Zhao, Lili Jiang, Jingda Yu, Jianing Zhang. (PubPeer here)

[7] "siRNA-targeted COL8A1 inhibits proliferation, reduces invasion and enhances sensitivity to D-limonence treatment in hepatocarcinoma cells", IUBMB Life (2009). Yongfu Zhao, Li Jia, Xiaoyan Mao, Henggui Xu, Bo Wang, Yongji Liu. (PubPeer here)

[8] "Silencing CD147 inhibits tumor progression and increases chemosensitivity in murine lymphoid neoplasm P388D1 cells", Annals of hematology (2009). Li Jia, Wei Wei, Jun Cao, Henggui Xu, Xiaoyan Miao, Jianing Zhang. (PubPeer here)

[9] "Knockdown of Caveolin-1 by siRNA Inhibits the Transformation of Mouse Hepatoma H22 Cells In Vitro and In Vivo", Oligonucleotides (2009). Shujing Wang, Li Jia, Huimin Zhou, Wei Shi, Jianing Zhang. (PubPeer here)

[10] "Differential expression of Axl in hepatocellular carcinoma and correlation with tumor lymphatic metastasis", Molecular Carcinogenesis (2010). Ling He, Jianing Zhang, Lili Jiang, Changgong Jin, Yongfu Zhao, Guang Yang, Li Jia. (PubPeer here)

[11] "Differential expression of Axl and correlation with invasion and multidrug resistance in cancer cells", Cancer Investigation (2012). Yongfu Zhao, Xiance Sun, Lili Jiang, Fengjuan Yang, Zhaohai Zhang, Li Jia. (PubPeer here)

[12] "Glycomic alterations are associated with multidrug resistance in human leukemia", International Journal of Biochemistry & Cell Biology(2012). Zhaohai Zhang, Yongfu Zhao, Lili Jiang, Xiaoyan Miao, Huimin Zhou, Li Jia. (PubPeer here)

[13] "Effect of enhanced expression of COL8A1 on lymphatic metastasis of hepatocellular carcinoma in mice", Experimental & Therapeutic Medicine (2012). Zhen-Hai Ma, Jin-Hui Ma, Li Jia, Yong-Fu Zhao . (PubPeer here)

[14] "Axl glycosylation mediates tumor cell proliferation, invasion and lymphatic metastasis in murine hepatocellular carcinoma", World Journal of Gastroenterology (2012). Ji Li, Li Jia, Zhen-Hai Ma, Qiu-Hong Ma, Xiao-Hong Yang, Yong-Fu Zhao". (PubPeer here)

[15] "B4GALT1 gene knockdown inhibits the hedgehog pathway and reverses multidrug resistance in the human leukemia K562/adriamycin-resistant cell line", IUBMB Life (2012). Huimin Zhou, Zhaohai Zhang, Chunqing Liu, Changgong Jin, Jianing Zhang, Xiaoyan Miao, Li Jia. (PubPeer here)

[16] "Glycogenes mediate the invasive properties and chemosensitivity of human hepatocarcinoma cells", International Journal of Biochemistry & Cell Biology (2013). Rui Guo, Lei Cheng, Yongfu Zhao, Jianing Zhang, Chunqing Liu, Huimin Zhou, Li Jia. (PubPeer here)

[17] "Functional roles of glycogene and N-glycan in multidrug resistance of human breast cancer cells", IUBMB Life (2013). Hongye Ma, Xiaoyan Miao, Qiuhong Ma, Wenzhi Zheng, Huimin Zhou, Li Jia. (PubPeer here)

[18] "Modification of glycosylation mediates the invasive properties of murine hepatocarcinoma cell lines to lymph nodes", PLoS ONE (2013). Zhaohai Zhang, Jie Sun, Lihong Hao, Chunqing Liu, Hongye Ma, Li Jia. (PubPeer here)

[19] "Axl gene knockdown inhibits the metastasis properties of hepatocellular carcinoma via PI3K/Akt-PAK1 signal pathway", Tumor Biology (2014). Jingchao Xu, Li Jia, Hongye Ma, Yanping Li, Zhenhai Ma, Yongfu Zhao. (PubPeer here)

[20] "Reversal effect of ST6GAL 1 on multidrug resistance in human leukemia by regulating the PI3K/Akt pathway and the expression of P-gp and MRP1", PLoS ONE (2014). Hongye Ma, Lei Cheng, Keji Hao, Yanping Li, Xiaobo Song, Huimin Zhou, Li Jia. (PubPeer here)

[21] "ST6GalNAcII mediates the invasive properties of breast carcinoma through PI3K/Akt/NF-κB signaling pathway", IUBMB Life (2014). Dongliang Ren, Li Jia, Yanyan Li, Yanxin Gong, Chen Liu, Xu Zhang, Ning Wang, Yongfu Zhao. (PubPeer here)

[22] "Effect of ST3GAL 4 and FUT 7 on sialyl Lewis X synthesis and multidrug resistance in human acute myeloid leukemia", Biochimica et Biophysica Acta (2014). Hongye Ma, Huimin Zhou, Peng Li, Xiaobo Song, Xiaoyan Miao, Yanping Li, Li Jia. (PubPeer here)

[23] "Modification of sialylation mediates the invasive properties and chemosensitivity of human hepatocellular carcinoma", Molecular & Cellular Proteomics (2014). Yongfu Zhao, Yanping Li, Hongye Ma, Weijie Dong, Huimin Zhou, Xiaobo Song, Jianing Zhang, Li Jia.(PubPeer here)

[24] "Phyllodes tumor of the breast: role of Axl and ST6GalNAcII in the development of mammary phyllodes tumors", Tumor Biology (2014). Dongliang Ren, Yanyan Li, Yanxin Gong, Jingchao Xu, Xiaolong Miao, Xiangnan Li, Chen Liu, Li Jia, Yongfu Zhao. (PubPeer here)

[25] "Axl mediates tumor invasion and chemosensitivity through PI3K/Akt signaling pathway and is transcriptionally regulated by slug in breast carcinoma", IUBMB Life (2014). Yanyan Li, Li Jia, Dongliang Ren, Chen Liu, Yanxin Gong, Ning Wang, Xu Zhang, Yongfu Zhao. (PubPeer here)

[26] "Axl as a downstream effector of TGF-β1 via PI3K/Akt-PAK1 signaling pathway promotes tumor invasion and chemoresistance in breast carcinoma", Tumor Biology (2014). Yanyan Li, Li Jia, Chen Liu, Yanxin Gong, Dongliang Ren, Ning Wang, Xu Zhang, Yongfu Zhao. (PubPeer here)

[27] "α-2,8-Sialyltransferase Is Involved in the Development of Multidrug Resistance via PI3K/Akt Pathway in Human Chronic Myeloid Leukemia", IUBMB Life (2015). Xu Zhang, Weijie Dong, Huimin Zhou, Hongshuai Li, Ning Wang, Xiaoyan Miao, Li Jia. (PubPeer here)

[28] "Comprehensive N-glycan profiles of hepatocellular carcinoma reveal association of fucosylation with tumor progression and regulation of FUT8 by microRNAs", Oncotarget (2016). doi: 10.18632/oncotarget.11284. Lei Cheng, Shuhang Gao, Xiaobo Song, Weijie Dong, Huimin Zhou, Lifen Zhao, Li Jia (PubPeer here)

[29] "Long non-coding RNA HOTAIR promotes osteoarthritis progression via miR-17-5p/FUT2/β-catenin axis", Cell Death & Disease (2018). doi: 10.1038/s41419-018-0746-z Jialei Hu, Zi Wang, Yujia Shan, Yue Pan, Jia Ma, Li Jia (PubPeer here)