Scientific sleuth
How a blogger with doctorate in cell and molecular biology uncovered research errors and shook Dana-Farber
PONTYPRIDD, Wales — 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 home, 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, 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.
But David recently helped ignite a furor after publishing a post on his Better Science blog that outlined purported errors he and other researchers noticed with images in dozens of papers from top Dana-Farber researchers, including the institute’s chief executive, COO, and research integrity officer. His tone was mocking, at times scathing: A paper coauthored by chief executive Laurie Glimcher “includes some impressive contributions to art, but perhaps not to science,” he wrote.
On Jan. 22, three weeks after the blog post was published, Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber said it planned to retract six of the papers and correct 31.
David, 32, is part of a lineage of scientific
sleuths dating back now more than a decade who — often outside their day jobs or in retirement — comb through papers, sniffing out signs of shoddy data analyses or image chicanery. They alert journal editors, researchers, and institutions, or post about it on PubPeer.
Sometimes, because they involve institutions like Harvard, or are linked to senior figures — or come on the heels of the resignation of Harvard’s president in part over plagiarism questions — allegations of research misconduct become international news. Last year, in another prominent case, Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned as Stanford’s president after image manipulation investigations into papers he coauthored (though he wasn’t found to have manipulated data himself ).
David acknowledges that he is doing the type of digging that others do, and that he’s been doing it for less time than many other moonlighting reviewers. But David, who is more brash than many of his fellow sleuths, has faced scrutiny over the language and tone he uses in his posts and the admittedly crude Photoshopped images he makes, including one with a photo of Irene Ghobrial, one of the Dana-Farber researchers involved, cropped onto the body of a Barbie doll.
“The way that post was written — it’s puerile, it’s snarky, it’s misogynistic,” Barrett Rollins, Dana-Farber’s research integrity officer, said about David’s blog. “I don’t want to go too deeply into this, but that was really upsetting.”
The attention is all a bit uncomfortable, David said over a veggie burger at a pub in Pontypridd, a small town set into the hills 30 minutes outside Cardiff that was once a coal mining hub. What matters, he said, is that errors get corrected, and he hopes what he’s doing contributes to some greater good.
David does this work because he enjoys it, enough to stay up until 2 a.m. reading papers even when he was employed. He views it like a puzzle, a sort of 2D version of the Rubik’s Cubes sitting in his flat — can you look at this scan of two dozen mice and spot which, if any, of the animals have been copy-and-pasted?
David tallies the results he’s elicited, which can give the impression he’s racking up retractions to fill a trophy case rather than serving as a bastion of scientific standards. He also admits to sending rude emails and writing in ways that are designed to provoke. But that’s in part, he said, because his past efforts at playing polite and going through usual channels — writing letters to journal editors or contacting researchers — didn’t get results.
Dana-Farber’s ongoing investigation has not yet determined who was at fault, nor whether any of the errors were deliberate, but David has largely been proven right. While the institute has said that three of the flagged papers don’t need corrective action, the vast majority did.
David started thinking about research integrity, or really, the poor research that makes it into publications, when he was in his PhD program at Newcastle University, where he focused on a type of bacterial protein.
After he finished his doctoral program, David worked for a few years at Oxford Biomedica, a gene and cell therapy company. He then moved to Pontypridd for a job at a nearby contract research organization, but quit last year after a few months and finding that it wasn’t a good fit. He’s been living on his savings and will eventually have to find a job, ideally in an industry role, he said.
David’s interest in finding research errors coincided with the growth of scientific sleuthing. The field started about two decades ago, as journals became digitized, and people could fish for fraud from home, instead of trekking to a medical school library.
The sleuths have over time branched into their own specialties: some hunt for plagiarism, some for flaws in statistical analyses, and some — like David — for massaged images. The growing awareness about how common manipulated images are in papers has raised questions about how the drive to publish compelling research can lead to scientists taking shortcuts.
One aspect that’s been lost in some coverage of the DanaFarber retractions — and which David is quick to bring up — is that other sleuths had flagged some of these papers years ago on PubPeer. His blog post, in addition to detailing his recent claims, also summarized those earlier findings.
Dana-Farber has said it already had a review underway before David started commenting on the research. That could help explain why within just a few weeks, the institute announced it was moving to retract and correct papers. Typically, such reviews take months.
In their comments about possible research misconduct, many sleuths write carefully. They present their claims in a just-the-facts way, avoiding words like “fraud,” which can imply intent, rather than a lack of oversight, simple mistakes, or more anodyne explanations. Part of the idea is to keep attention on the crux of the issues being raised.
Elisabeth Bik, perhaps the most prominent of image sleuths, said she broadly agreed with the claims David made in his blog post. But in her work, she steers clear of making things personal, she said.
“He has used a tone I would not use myself, let’s put it like that,” she said.
David said he aims to be purely academic in his posts on PubPeer, but he sees blogs as a different arena. The For Better Science site is filled with cartoons and irreverent writing. It’s meant to be entertaining for people who care about this sort of thing.
Amid all the attention, David has decided to say yes to the journalists’ requests, including being photographed. But he is leery that any spotlight on him as an individual will distract from his actual points.
“Images are an important part of this, but not images of me,” he said.