The blog post that has shaken the leadership of Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, one of the world’s preeminent cancer research centers, was written some 3,000 miles away, in a bare-walled, sparsely decorated flat, save for a stack of statistics books and a collection of Rubik’s Cubes.
It’s here that Sholto David, an unemployed scientist with a doctorate in cell and molecular biology, spends his time poring over research papers looking for images with clues that they’ve been manipulated in some way to portray misleading findings — perhaps duplicated, spliced or cropped, or partially obscured.
As he’s toiled away over the past three years, often long past midnight, he’s flagged issues on more than 2,000 papers on a site called PubPeer, where researchers can critique and discuss published studies. His comments are sometimes met by a study’s author dodging the questions raised, and sometimes result in a correction or retraction. Often though, they’re met with no response.