Via Evolgen, an article by Nicholas Wade on tools to recognize doctored images that accompany scientific manuscripts. Perhaps because “seeing is believing,” pictures (including visual presentations of data) have been a favored weapon in the scientist’s persuasive arsenal. But this means, as we know, that just as images can persuade, they can also deceive.
The deceptions Wade discusses in the linked article rely primarily on using Photoshop to cover up inconvenient features (like bands on gels), to resize isolated parts of images, to rotate things, and the like. Wade writes:

At The Journal of Cell Biology, the test has revealed extensive manipulation of photos. Since 2002, when the test was put in place, 25 percent of all accepted manuscripts have had one or more illustrations that were manipulated in ways that violate the journal’s guidelines, said Michael Rossner of Rockefeller University, the executive editor. The editor of the journal, Ira Mellman of Yale, said that most cases were resolved when the authors provided originals. “In 1 percent of the cases we find authors have engaged in fraud,” he said.

(Emphasis added.)
Notice that while most of the manipulations were not judged to be fraud, there was a fairly high proportion — a quarter of the accepted manuscripts that had illustrations — that violated JCB guidelines.
Possibly this just means that the “Instructions to Authors” aren’t carefully read by authors. But it seems likely that this is also indicative of a tendency to cherry-pick images to make one’s scientific case in a manner that would seem pretty darn sneaky were it applied to data. You can’t just base your analysis on the prettiest data; why should you get to support your scientific claims with the prettiest available images?
RPM has a lovely discussion of this, including the phenomenon of “picture selection”. And the Wade article gives a nice feel for how the mathematical features of digital images can make alterations that aren’t detectable by the naked eye as altered quite easy to find with the right algorithms. Either this kind of image doctoring will get smacked down quicker than a student paper cut and paste from the internets … or the job opportunities for mathematicians in science labs may increase. (Knowing how the algorithms work may make it possible to find ways to defeat detection, too.)
But that’s not the part of the Wade article that got my dander up today. The bit I want to discuss (below the fold) is whose responsibility it is to catch the folks trying to lie with prettied-up images.

Continue reading→

Silly human nature, getting scientists into trouble. Until the robots are ready to take the reins of the scientific enterprise (and personally, I have my doubts that this is first item on the robots’ to-do list), we’re faced with the practical problem of figuring out how to keep human scientists honest. Among the broad strategies to accomplish this is reducing the potential payoff for dishonesty compared to honesty (where, as we know, doing honest science is generally more labor-intensive than just making stuff up).
I take it that this piece by David S. Oderberg is a variation on the theme. In the aftermath of the Hwang Woo-Suk stem cell fraud-o-rama, Oderberg suggests that the best way to save science from the “unholy lust” of its practitioners is to cut public funding for scientific research.

Continue reading→

Via Inside Higher Ed comes news that the Food and Drug Administration has changed its mind (do administrative bodies have “minds”?) about rules it recommended on how scientists get approval for their research projects from IRBs (institutional review boards). In particular, the rules were intended to head off abuses of the approval system that might come from “shopping around” for the IRB most likely to respond favorably to one’s research proposal. From the IHE article:

[The FDA] announced in the Federal Register that it would withdraw a 2002 plan that would have required scientists seeking approval for a particular piece of research to inform “institutional review boards” on their campuses of any previous attempts to gain that approval.
The FDA, which oversees significant amounts of federal research funds and regulates IRB’s, which are the campus panels charged with approving clinical trials involving human subjects, said it was considering the 2002 rules because of concerns raised in a 1998 report by the Department of Health and Human Services’s inspector general about what it called “IRB shopping.” The report suggested that in at least “a few” cases, researchers “who were unhappy with one IRB’s reviews [of their proposed study] switched to another without the new IRB being aware of the other’s prior involvement.” Many large universities and medical centers have multiple review boards.
FDA officials sought comments on a proposed change in the rules governing IRBs that would require researchers to include in their research proposals information about prior attempts to seek approval for the experiments. “These disclosures,” the FDA wrote at the time, “could help ensure that sponsors and clinical investigators who submit protocols to more than one IRB will not be able to ignore an unfavorable IRB review decision and that IRBs reviewing a protocol will be aware of what other IRBs reviewing similar protocols have concluded.”

What was the worry with “IRB shopping”, and why has the FDA decided to stop worrying about this?

Continue reading→