Whistleblower finds possible misconduct in his own papers

摘要

When Vanderbilt University neuro-scientist and physician Matthew Schrag went public earlier this year with concerns about apparently doctored images in scores of Alzheimer's papers-including seminal research underpinning one aspect of the dominant amyloid hypothesis of the disease-he anticipated that his motives and analyses would be dissected. "I also expected every project that I ever participated in to be carefully scrutinized, and that my work would stand up to that scrutiny," he says. So Schrag assumed there would be an innocent explanation when, a few weeks after a Science investigation reported his disturbing findings of apparent misconduct, he received automated emails from PubPeer, a web forum where scientific wrongdoing charges are often leveled. They notified him that two of his own articles from more than 15 years ago had been flagged as containing dubious images.