Hacker News

Nice! Just because you’re the top comment, I feel it is helpful to quick readers to point out that it has 0 to do with what happened here. :)

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.

I didn't realize whistleblowers could recover part of fraud settlements:

> The civil settlement includes the resolution of claims brought under the qui tam or whistleblower provisions of the False Claims Act by Sholto David. Under those provisions, a private party can file an action on behalf of the United States and receive a portion of any recovery. David will receive $2,625,000 under today’s settlement.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/dana-farber-cancer-institute-...

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.

It is intentional fabrication: it requires a lot more brain cycles to surreptitiously produce false data, it would literally be less work to Prepare the Western blots and scan them. Its the stuff they sell, so they have ready access to the products and would be much easier and cost-effective to simply perform (if it worked). Only if the product is known not to perform as specified is there a profit incentive for fabricating such "evidence".

It's more than just false advertising, it's criminal negligence wasting research attention, research time (repeating experiments to understand whats not working), naive nameplate quotations in the scientific literature also corrupts the scientific record (the author knows they are simply restating the nameplate specifications, but the reader may confuse it as a claim by the author).

Wondering if its sort of OK because it might just be marketing material, think of how the tobacco and other lobbies manipulate the scientific record. I mean technically it is marketing material... if one cynically views the scientific record as a poster wall where the highest bidder is allowed to plaster their spam all over the place.

> "This image is supposed to demonstrate that the antibody being sold works as intended. It is labeled as “Advanced Verification” data on Thermo Fisher’s site"

(links to https://www.thermofisher.com/uk/en/home/life-science/antibod...)

I think it is technically marketing material, but if you have to fabricate your marketing material, that's not a good sign that the material is accurate. If I buy a car based on an advert where it shows the car going at 300 mph, and in real life it maxes out at 30mph, that's misleading advertising and something should be done about it.

Given that "at Thermo Fisher, a single vial containing a 0.1 mL aliquot of antibody solution typically costs 400 to 500 USD", you'd want to have accurate marketing material before buying it

Doing a western blot right takes a bit of practice and there are a couple failure modes you need to watch out for. Stuff like background "noise", smears, drifts can make it hard to get binary decision out of your experiment. E.g. antibodies are usually very very specific, but they can have impurities, unspecific bindings to other proteins etc which make interpretation harder. If they remove these from the advertised images you'll have a hard time comparing your own results to them. ESPECIALLY if they remove whole bands from the gel picture, which imho should be very much verboten.

Typically these catalogues have some numbers with regards to the antibodies binding affinity / impurities so you can have a general idea of what to expect, but having a clean image might mislead you into thinking that you did something wrong in your own setup. Seeing how wide spread it is, it's easy to imagine that their own lab is not run very "cleanly" and they have antibody contaminations in their gels, or issues with their own protocol that they're trying to edit out. Doubt that's the case, but it's really not a good look.

I'd treat this about the same as datasheets for mechanical or electrical parts.

When I buy an electronic component as a regular consumer I expect the datasheet "typical" values to be accurate 90% of the time. I can imagine larger industrial customers would really raise a stink if it's worse than that. However, any critical components in my circuit must be verified and "binned", and that's on me.

When you’re deciding which antibodies to buy you’ll look at these figures to get a sense of their quality. Antibodies aren’t perfect and might bind proteins unrelated to the one you want to study. Depending on your application, some off-target binding might be acceptable, but usually it’s not. Also, they might just be completely nonfunctional and bind nothing (perhaps due to missteps during manufacturing).

So what this fraud does is convince you to give these antibodies a chance when you otherwise wouldn’t have. You should validate them yourself and show they only bind your target before doing an experiment, but now you’re just wasting time and money evaluating something that’s guaranteed to fail.

Antibodies are notoriously unreliable, so you might have to give two or three vendors a try before you get one that works. Now I’m starting to wonder how much of that reputation is due to fraud and not just nature.

What paper? This is about several hundred datasheets.

> 6. Did Thermo Fisher manipulate or fabricate antibody data?

> No.

Listen to these guys. What assholes.

Without engaging in your point, small nitpick: These are images of Western blots[1], not PCR.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_blot

From the comments on the article by the author it looks more like 10% so far and they haven't systematically looked. That means ~10% if a probable floor of how much fraud there is.

No marketing or design company would duplicate a band from another experiment (taking care to rotate it to make it look different nonetheless). Even in that unlikely scenario, Thermo Fisher is still responsible for the scientific data they publish.

In some of the experiments, the same random noise background exists with different black blobs superimposed at where you expect the correct value to be. Ie they took a fixed realistic-ish looking background, and drew in the 'correct' values

Its hard to argue that that isn't fraud as a result. It isn't touching up existing data, its fully fabricating data

The background painting could maybe be explained like this (depending on what was hidden), but I don't think the duplicated blobs have a good explanation, especially because some were rotated to try to hide the manipulation.

I disagree. If you look at the photos the painting used to make black blobs shorter. As I understand, black blob vertical position is the weight of a molecule, and they want to hide the fact that there are heavier or lighter molecules. So originally there was a long blob, and they made it look shorter.

More pretty, which would signify that the sample has less impurities -> better value

Some are just completely fabricated so it's hard to say if they have equivalent uglier images with real data...

Probably not very much, same as if you ate agar, grass, a pencil eraser (rubber), or candle wax. But why would you?