ARTICLE -- Scientists Fraudulently Manipulate Digital Images

[mmcclellan]

Journals Find Fakery in Many Images Submitted to Support Research
By JEFFREY R. YOUNG

Kristin Roovers was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania with a bright career ahead of her—a trusted member of a research laboratory at the medical school studying the role of cell growth in diabetes.

But when an editor of The Journal of Clinical Investigation did a spot-check of one of her images for an article in 2005, Roovers's research proved a little too perfect.

The image had dark bands on it, supposedly showing different proteins in different conditions. "As we looked at it, we realized the person had cut and pasted the exact same bands" over and over again, says Ushma S. Neill, the journal's executive editor. In some cases a copied part of the image had been flipped or reversed to make it look like a new finding. "The closer we took a look, the more we were convinced that the data had been fabricated or manipulated in order to support the conclusions."

[...]

Read on at--

http://chronicle.com/free/2008/05/3028n.htm

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Copyright © 2008 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

[df cardwell]

Well, gosh.

Not quite the old romance about the young scholar facing temptation
in a far off library, stealing an unknown letter which refutes a doctoral thesis !
(Dorothy L. Sayers fans, g'day). But giving Photoshop to researchers is like giving
handguns to customers at a liquor store.

Much of the reason I despise burning and dodging a print is that I was forbidden those manipulations when I was a darkroom technician for a Pathology Lab in my college years. I was allowed to fit the scale of the negative to the paper by contrast grade and developer, and each run of prints had to have descriptive notes to accompany the pictures. Old School.

Digital imaging is wonderful for this sort of scientific work,
being able to accurately present what you can see with your eye,
but unless the operator has acquired character along with an advanced degree,
it is all pointless. It should be pretty easy to decide what adjustments are allowed,
which are not. Treat the imaging steps as any other protocol, and require digital certification
of how the image was processed. Not hard, really.

Thanks Michael.

[Lopaka]

Originally Posted by df cardwell

Treat the imaging steps as any other protocol, and require digital certification
of how the image was processed. Not hard, really.

Exactly. There are specific protocols in forensic photography which evidence technicians must follow.

Bob

[Antje]

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

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

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

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

Antje

[winger]

Having worked in a forensic lab for 14 years, photos of evidence there do not get doctored. In a lab like that, there's no motive to do so. In research, the whole publish or perish atmosphere contributes greatly to the desire to show perfect results.

[Antje]

Originally Posted by Lopaka

Exactly. There are specific protocols in forensic photography which evidence technicians must follow.

Bob

As long as you don't manipulate what you want to analyze.

Antje

[Antje]

Originally Posted by winger

In research, the whole publish or perish atmosphere contributes greatly to the desire to show perfect results.

I couldn't agree more.

Antje

[David A. Goldfarb]

I've posted a link to the full text of the article in the initial post, following the opening paragraphs, which tell what the article is about. Please don't post the full text of an article published elsewhere under copyright on APUG.

[wfe]

Neither Photoshop nor technology are the culprits here, people are.....

~Bill

[nc5p]

Science is becoming more and more like this. The dangerous part is that national and local governments routinely pass laws based on this type of hype. They also endanger lives by using this junk science in medical treatments.