why isn't their stock tanking
How much of Thermo Fisher's antibody data has been manipulated?
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Re: How much of Thermo Fisher's antibody data has been manipulated?
#72This is systematic fraud, and anyone trying those antibodies with falsified data will waste money and time. A lot of papers have been retracted for similar issues. Thermo Fisher is a major worldwide supplier of antibodies, so this has quite a big practical impact.
1. Obviously unethical and fraudulent behavior. 2. It should be determined whether the fraud was just the display image (imagine a sales manager making a bad call when images are not available) or involved the underlying research (more systemic and worrying). 3. It would be interesting to examine occurrence of faked images along with apparent unreliability/irreproducibility of research that has used those products.
There aren't any display images in science.
Manipulating images for presentation is an automated process unless you're ripping someone off. The changes would be uniform across whole sets.
The problem with trying to pass off a fake image is that you need to be more knowledgeable in each dimension of the effort than the recipients are in just one. If anyone remembers the folks identifying East German video from background hum it's kind of like that.
Re: How much of Thermo Fisher's antibody data has been manipulated?
#73This is systematic fraud, and anyone trying those antibodies with falsified data will waste money and time. A lot of papers have been retracted for similar issues. Thermo Fisher is a major worldwide supplier of antibodies, so this has quite a big practical impact.
1. Obviously unethical and fraudulent behavior. 2. It should be determined whether the fraud was just the display image (imagine a sales manager making a bad call when images are not available) or involved the underlying research (more systemic and worrying). 3. It would be interesting to examine occurrence of faked images along with apparent unreliability/irreproducibility of research that has used those products.
"a sales manager making a bad call when images are not available"
It seems nearly impossible to imagine that to be the case. I'd have to disregard the kinds of manipulation entirely. What sales manager would create a whole western block sequence by copying, rotating, and flipping a single element?
Re: How much of Thermo Fisher's antibody data has been manipulated?
#74My first, second, and third instinct here is to say this is pretty obvious and sloppy fraud. But it did remind me of the famous case discovered by David Kriesel where Xerox scanners changed documents in surprising ways. The caption on the YouTube video linked here is entertainingly accurate. https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres... "On the scale of things too horrible to contemplate, "document-…
And now practically every phone camera "enhances" the image via AI that might invent details. Most famously Samsung adding details to photos of the moon.
Is this really pervasive? E.g. To my knowledge the "AI" enhancement that iPhones do automatically is limited to the usual sorts of post-processing for contrast, color, etc. There is an AI editing mode that leans more into generative fill capability that would be analogous to the Samsung incident but I don't think it's happening automatically to every photo you take.
Re: How much of Thermo Fisher's antibody data has been manipulated?
#75My first, second, and third instinct here is to say this is pretty obvious and sloppy fraud. But it did remind me of the famous case discovered by David Kriesel where Xerox scanners changed documents in surprising ways. The caption on the YouTube video linked here is entertainingly accurate. https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres... "On the scale of things too horrible to contemplate, "document-…
> They, for example, replace digits with others in scans. The replacement digits are layouted perfectly into the page, so the errors are hard to see.
I dealt with this where our fax number had a 6 in it and it would sometimes get changed into an 8, which happened to be a valid fax number for another company, ugh. And this was confidential info too…
Always a funny phone call when they insist they sent it to the number on the cover page we sent and then they send us a copy and xerox made it wrong.
Re: How much of Thermo Fisher's antibody data has been manipulated?
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. Obviously unethical and fraudulent behavior. 2. It should be determined whether the fraud was just the display image (imagine a sales manager making a bad call when images are not available) or involved the underlying research (more systemic and worrying). 3. It would be interesting to examine occurrence of faked images along with apparent unreliability/irreproducibility of research that has used those products.
"a sales manager making a bad call when images are not available" It seems nearly impossible to imagine that to be the case. I'd have to disregard the kinds of manipulation entirely. What sales manager would create a whole western block sequence by copying, rotating, and flipping a single element?
Someone else here mentioned proofers, people that prepare marketing materials, as a potential source. I am in no way defending Thermo here. I just meant that the extend of the fraud needs to be determined, from some non-scientist making a decision for short term profits, frustrated that no one saved the picture, or because the pictures showed how ugly the western blots actually are, versus wholesale fabrication of the research from the bottom up.
Re: How much of Thermo Fisher's antibody data has been manipulated?
#77My first, second, and third instinct here is to say this is pretty obvious and sloppy fraud. But it did remind me of the famous case discovered by David Kriesel where Xerox scanners changed documents in surprising ways. The caption on the YouTube video linked here is entertainingly accurate. https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres... "On the scale of things too horrible to contemplate, "document-…
> They, for example, replace digits with others in scans. The replacement digits are layouted perfectly into the page, so the errors are hard to see.
Is this with JBIG2? I remember reading about JBIG2 also used in the FORCEDENTRY zero click exploit that which was (?) used in the Pegasus spyware. Unrelated tidbit, I guess.
Re: How much of Thermo Fisher's antibody data has been manipulated?
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Images like this show how specifically the antibody binds to the antigen. Generally, the ideal is to have very specific binding. As such, this type of image (Western blot) would only have single bands in any vertical lane. Any other bands show that the antibody is binding to other molecules. The evidence of painting out the background is likely someone cleaning up other bands, where the antibody has bound to somethin…
(forgot to say I'm a former post-doc in Cell Biology)
The closest we all will ever get to getting meta meta answers on HN.
Re: How much of Thermo Fisher's antibody data has been manipulated?
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
And now practically every phone camera "enhances" the image via AI that might invent details. Most famously Samsung adding details to photos of the moon.
Is this really pervasive? E.g. To my knowledge the "AI" enhancement that iPhones do automatically is limited to the usual sorts of post-processing for contrast, color, etc. There is an AI editing mode that leans more into generative fill capability that would be analogous to the Samsung incident but I don't think it's happening automatically to every photo you take.
I still remember Samsung faking images when using digital zoom...
https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/13/23637401/samsung-fake-moo...
Re: How much of Thermo Fisher's antibody data has been manipulated?
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
It definitely isn't a good look but I'm not entirely sure where this lands on "the line drawing on my IKEA instruction manual doesn't look like the furniture" to "VW diesel emissions report" spectrum. I'd appreciate if any bioscientists in the audience could clear that up a bit.
This is 'used car salesman' levels of fraud on that scale. People rapidly acknowledge these antibodies work or they don't. There are websites with reviews of them. However in addition to getting ripped off for a few hundred bucks, these antibodies are generally produced by immunizing animals and by faking this data they are unnecessarily increasing the discomfort to these animals for a fraudulent reason. Look up the…
Antibodies on this scale are not _produced_ by animals. The way these things work is an antibody that binds to a specific target will be _discovered_ by immunizing animals and then screening it's blood or lymph nodes for antibodies of interest. Once an antibody is found and commercialized, it is produced in large bioreactors of cell cultures engineered to produce large amounts of a particular protein (in this case the antibody).
Source: work as a software dev at a company developing antibody drugs