Stanford Fake Image Scandal - The Xerox Hypothesis

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[danielschein]

I don’t think the western blot machine did this. I think the image it took was probably uploaded, copied, shrunk, and otherwise moved around dozens of times before it finally ended up in a published paper. Any one of these steps could have gone through a bad image compression algorithm.

There is a simple solution here. Publish the original photo. It shouldn’t have any artifacts.

[joshmeyer]

I, for one, find it completely plausible that a systemic data compression issue has been compromising scientific research for years or even decades without anyone noticing. Just another reason why Elizabeth Bik's work is so important.

[Unhelpful]

I watch these videos as consolation for me not getting into the ivies as an undergrad

[wompastompa]

Reminds me of the (perhaps apocryphal) story about how Mandelbrot's prints kept coming back different from what he expected because the print technicians kept "cleaning up" the blobs they thought were errors.

[gaithdroby]

Correction: some labs still use actual film for western blotting and develop the exposed films like the olden days. Those exposed films need to be scanned.

[JohnVKaravitis]

Imagine having your criminal conviction being the result of this bullshit.

[brendanloconnell]

I work at a massive medical university, and all of our gel scanning equipment still prints to a thermal printer most of the time. Theoretically, we can save to a USB but most of the time we just print it out and scan it due to requirements that the thumb drives be encrypted. So it is plausible. Still probably need to retract some of those papers.

[wallycola]

I think you are assuming that he was using the most up-to-date Western blot imaging machines, but for many old machines, Western blots and other gel electrophoresis images are often printed physically and then physically documented in a lab notebook. Those might then have been xerox'd. Source: I've worked in many labs with older equipment.

[RobertHawthorne]

I'm retired now. But for years I worked for an engineering company and did a lot of Xeroxing of documents with a lot of numbers. Over time there were issues where people had issues with some of my calculations shown in copied documents. Nothing major, but always a pain in the posterior to have to go back and show my original work was right. Never occurred to me or anyone I worked with that the Xerox machines could produce this kind of error. Damn!

[AUser-tn]

Super dodgy that he cited an unrelated paper to support the theory. Meanwhile we haven't yet seen a single verified example of _complex shapes_ getting duplicated in such a way.

[wkgurr]

The issue is not so much whether dodgy software leads to image degradation that might be interpreted as image manipulation. The issue is this: The degradation very often seems to occur exactly where the authors of the paper require it to occur and in a way that supports the author's hypothesis put forward in the concerned paper. If this is an issue of dodgy software compression algorithms then these image alterations should appear randomly and not predominanlty in places that fit the author's hypothesis. If a band on.a Western blot in the lower left corner is identical to a band in the right top corner of the same blot this is certainly not an error in the image processing algorithm but an active image manipulation performed by a human with intent to deceive.

[BronwynKirby-du]

As some other people commented - for older papers yes it is possible the images were captured as physical "photo" which needed to be scanned.

[profdc]

If one of these old Xerox scanners still works, maybe one could scan in some Western blots and see if this happens.

[KyriosHeptagrammaton]

This still raises the huge question of "What are peer reviewers doing, exactly?"

They should have caught this ahead of time. Otherwise, why even include the diagrams in the document?

[FiLo-nbpr]

As a scientist who has been publishing papers for over two decades (not as many as a Nobel laureate, but still quite a few), all of them filled with pictures and graphs, there are no two figures that even look similar enough to warrant further checking. So, yeah there's definitely something fishy there... The most probable explanation is that one of his students tried to cook things up. No matter how carefully you check, you can never redo all of their calculations, at some point you just check plausibility. I can report of having caught a student doing so (luckily before submission), but obviously I can't guarantee that no such case slipped my attention. Practically no one can.

[veranikakv]

As someone who works in the lab with pretty old equipment I never needed to make a *copy of a print of a picture* of my gels. Some western blots use photo film, some transilluminators just take a picture from the attached camera anf save it or print it out on a thermopaper. There is no need to make xerocopy of a print as you can always print the original.

[kablamo]

What a terrible solution to implement. You expect that a copy machine would do just that, copy something.

[darkaryn]

That is one big the reason why you do quantitative measurements, no matter how your immages get messed with, there are tables and graphs and if they are fraudulent too well ... Never trust pretty immages.

[BobfromSydney]

I'm feeling completely infuriated by the idiotic design of the compression algorithm. Scanning documents is very important in business and legal contexts and a dodgy scanned image could result in someone getting the wrong bank account details added to a financial service, resulting in payments going to the wrong place. I'm sure there are many other contexts where a copy of something like a contract being scanned wrong could have extremely harmful consequences. What the hell were the idiots at Xerox thinking? Just spend a few more dollars installing more memory in the giant cubic meter sized machines you greedy bastards.

[rabidwallaby]

The fact that the images were what was wrong tells me it's probably not the printers...