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Selected moments of Friday's meeting on research integrity in the French Senate, and brief thoughts about what was not discussed enough

What was not discussed (enough) at the colloquium of the French Research Integrity Office

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How to establish whether a disputed claim is true or false? Publication of the results of our first replication and call for others to replicate our work

How to establish whether a disputed claim is true or false? This is one of the questions at the centre of the ERC Synergy project NanoBubbles, which studies the barriers to the correction of science. We focus on a controversy in bionanoscience: there are hundreds of scientific articles that report the specific detection of molecules or ions inside cells with nanoparticle probes, yet, when they…

How to establish whether a disputed claim is true or false? Publication of the results of our first replication and call for others to replicate our work

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Post doctoral Fellow: nanoparticle synthesis and characterisation for reproducible bionanoscience

*** PLEASE share this job advert *** Scientific context: The ERC Synergy NanoBubbles project is led by researchers from the Universities of Sorbonne Paris Nord, Maastricht, Grenoble-Alpes and Radboud, in collaboration with researchers from the CNRS, the University of Twente, IRIT and Ecole des Ponts. The project focuses on how, when and why science fails to correct itself. To understand how the…

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Welcome to the PhD games... and may the odds be ever in your favor!

Here is a short post to share some information about a talk I gave last week, for the third consecutive year, to over 200 new PhD students (and their supervisors) at the Welcome Day for new entrants 2025-2026 of the BioSPC doctoral School. The talk was entitled “Welcome to the PhD games… and may the odds be ever in your favor!”. I tried to make it both fun (it is a welcome day after all) and…

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What should you do if you discover made up data in your own papers? Félix Sauvage @For Better Science

See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil See also the last paragraph of my previous post for a comment on the too slow and inappropriate response of CNRS and université of Lille to this case.

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Response of French research institutions to research misconduct remains inadequate

In March 2023, Dorothy Bishop and sixteen other internationally recognised leaders in the field of scientific integrity took the unusual step of sending an open letter to the CEO of CNRS to highlight that “the response [to unambiguous evidence of data manipulation] by institutions, publishers and funders is typically slow, opaque and inadequate, and is biased in favour of the accused, paying…

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Prize and lies

Three years ago, I asked in a blog post here What do scientific prizes celebrates? It was a reaction to false claims in press releases by the King Faisal Price and Northwestern University announcing the award of the 2023 King Faisal Prize in Medicine and Science to Chad Mirkin. One of the false claims was that spherical nucleic acids were the basis for more than 1,800 commercial products.Well,…

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Legal threat against me: a correction at PNAS, a follow-up at Retraction Watch, and pieces in Chemistry World, Science, and at the In The Pipeline Blog

PNAS did not publish the letter to the Editor I had submitted (and which led to a legal threat against me), but they did request that the authors publish a correction adding some of the references that I had cited in my letter. Eventually a correction was published on the 2nd of August, but as I told Retraction Watch for their follow up piece, “this correction does nothing to correct the main…

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Kavli prize winner threatens to sue me for defamation

Regular readers of this blog might remember that in November 2015, I published a post entitled PNAS: “your letter does not contribute significantly to the discussion of this paper”. That short post related how the then Editor-in-Chief of PNAS, Inder Verma, had dismissed our critique (available thanks to BiorXiv) of a PNAS paper. The justification of the EiC was patently absurd: it could have been…

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Stripy Nanoparticles Revisited

Challenging published results is an onerous but necessary task. Today, our article entitled Stripy Nanoparticles Revisited has been published in Small, three years after its initial submission to this journal (3/12/09) and about three  and a half years after the first submission (to Nature Materials, 21/07/09). As its title indicates, the article challenges the evidence for the existence and…

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Neuroskeptic: Postpublication “Cyberbullying” and the Professional Self

@Neuroskeptic writes: The Science piece describes two controversies. Controversy #1 is the scientific question of the reality of those stripes. That is not the topic of this post. Controversy #2 surrounds the way that Controversy #1 has been conducted. Stellacci’s critics say that they’re engaging in post-publication peer review of Stellacci et al’s claims. Stellacci, however, has described…

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Our First Pre-Registration is Live! Replication of...

After months of efforts, my co-authors and I are absolutely delighted to share this preprint, which is special in many ways: Said, Maha, Mustafa Gharib, Samia Zrig, and Raphaël Lévy. 2023. “Replication of “Carbon-dot-based Dual-emission Nanohybrid Produces a Ratiometric Fluorescent Sensor for in Vivo Imaging of Cellular Copper Ions”” OSF Preprints. November 29. doi:10.31219/osf.io/kf9qe. This…

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Editors and scientific journals are reluctant to correct the scientific record; episode 999

In the context of the post-publication peer review initiative of the NanoBubbles project, we posted a detailed comment at PubPeer on Two-Photon Ratiometric Fluorescent Sensor Based on Specific Biomolecular Recognition for Selective and Sensitive Detection of Copper Ions in Live Cells; Analytical Chemistry (2013). We also contacted the Editor-in-Chief because some of the findings were suggestive…

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82% self-citation and grave misrepresentation in an ACS Nano Focus article

82% self-citation and grave misrepresentation in an ACS Nano Focus article

This post is cross-posted at PubPeer. Mirkin and Petrosko review with enthusiasm and even a certain amount of lyricism the properties and applications of Spherical Nucleic Acids, an expression coined by Mirkin to describe particles prepared in the Mirkin group. Out of the 186 cited references, 160 or 82% have Mirkin as an author. Of the 36 other references, 16 are reviews, books or pre-1920…

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Gold injections - how to use the scientific literature to sell snake oil to patients

Gold injections - how to use the scientific literature to sell snake oil to patients

To know more about the adventures of Dr Doxey, an unscrupulous charlatan ready to do anything to sell his worthless elixir, read the Lucky Luke Western album by Morris. To know more about Goldic, a real story that does not happen in Lucky Luke’s imagined Wild West, but in the present time, in the UK, Germany and possibly other places, where doctors will take your money in exchange of a…

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Need for transparent and robust response when research misconduct is found (another example)

On the 22nd of February, Dorothy Bishop published an open letter to CNRS Need for transparent and robust response when research misconduct is found signed by leaders and activists in the field of scientific integrity, which has now a response from the CEO Antoine Petit. That letter was prompted by a case in which I am the whistleblower and I hope to be able to say more about certain aspects of…

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What do scientific prizes celebrate?

What do scientific prizes celebrate?

Another scientific prize has been awarded to Chad Mirkin for his work on oligonucleotide-modified gold nanoparticles (or Spherical Nucleic Acids, aka SNAs, as Mirkin calls them since 2012)… whilst SNA company Exicure continues on its “death spiral“. The prize is the 2023 King Faisal Prize (KFP) in Medicine and Science. The KFP and Northwestern press releases show a certain disconnect from…

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