Smithsonian Magazine
By Christian Thorsberg
January 24, 2024
More than 50 research papers published by the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI), a prestigious teaching center affiliated with Harvard Medical School, are under review this week following online claims that their images and data had been manipulated.
Sholto David, a British molecular biologist and blogger, wrote a post for the independent research integrity blog For Better Science on January 2, in which he accuses researchers at the institute of “data forgery.” The long and at times scathing blog post featured images such as protein bands, data plots and PCR results from the papers, which David alleges were manipulated via copy and paste or Photoshop. The studies in question had been published between 1999 and 2017.