#smartflare

[raphavisses]

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…

[raphavisses]

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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[raphavisses]

Do planes fly and other difficult scientific questions

Do planes fly and other difficult scientific questions

The Scientist magazine reported on the ACS meeting incident. Here is Chad Mirkin’s response to their questions:

Mirkin disagrees with Levy’s assessment of the endosome entrapment. “Levy’s narcissistic approach is akin to, ‘I bought an airplane, and I can’t make it fly. Therefore, planes don’t fly, despite the fact that I see them all above me,’” he tells The Scientist.

Mirkin stresses the number…

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[raphavisses]

Guest post: my experience with the SmartFlares, by James Elliott

Guest post: my experience with the SmartFlares, by James Elliott

This is a guest post by James Elliott, manager of the Flow Cytometry Facility at the MRC Institute (LMS) in Hammersmith.

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I thought it may be useful to add to the discussion about SmartFlares, their marketing and the difficulties in disseminating negative results by passing on my own experience.

We tested the system back in 2013. Sorting primary murine T cells and thymocytes on the basis of…

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[raphavisses]

Scientific terrorist

At the 2018 American Chemical Society National Meeting in Boston, I asked a question to Chad Mirkin after his talk on Spherical Nucleic Acids. This is what I said:

In science, we need to share the bad news as well as the good news. In your introduction you mentioned four clinical trials. One of them has reported. It showed no efficacy and Purdue Pharma which was supposed to develop the drug…

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[raphavisses]

Mind-boggling plagiarism of this blog

In January 2015, someone went to the effort of creating a fake raphazlab blog as the stripy nanoparticles controversy was descending from a scientific debate into the gutters of online discussions.

Fast forward three years. The Spherical Nucleic Acids controversy is slowly heating up. Chad Mirkin continues to win prizes after prizes, but he is unseemly asked to comment on the failing SmartFlare…

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[raphavisses]

A RESPONSE FROM CHAD MIRKIN’S GROUP [follow up #1/n]

A RESPONSE FROM CHAD MIRKIN’S GROUP [follow up #1/n]

Some readers might wonder why I am going on about this, so let me tell you: this is a considerably more important story than Stripy Nanoparticles Revisited. If, as I am arguing, some of this science is shaky, then it is not only the way we evaluate scientists and spend public money which are put into question, but the foundation of ongoing clinical trials.

Back to basics: in the section of…

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