- My first, second, and third instinct here is to say this is pretty obvious and sloppy fraud. But it did remind me of the famous case discovered by David Kriesel where Xerox scanners changed documents in surprising ways. The caption on the YouTube video linked here is entertainingly accurate.
https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres...
"On the scale of things too horrible to contemplate, "document-altering scanner" is right up there with "flesh-eating bacteria". Since 2006, Xerox scancopiers literally are making stuff up. They, for example, replace digits with others in scans. The replacement digits are layouted perfectly into the page, so the errors are hard to see. Sounds unbelievably insidious, but it's true. Drug prescriptions, construction plans, just anything can be affected. "
- 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'm scared that the "AI" marketing will make it much harder convincing non-technical coworkers and execs that "garbage in, garbage out" is a real concept, and that our systems need to model/capture the differences in quality.
"Feedback from unverified e-mail addresses? Fifth-hand analyses by vendors? All data is good! The more the better! Just put it all into the AI and it'll fix it!"
- The guy who uncovered this, Sholto David, is basically just awesome?
Watch him cycle from Wales -> China in 90 days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdgHZPfivVA
This isn't his first fraud rodeo either. For his discovery of serious fraud by the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in 2024, he received $2.6 million.
Be more like Sholto, exercise your free will!
- 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-...
- https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/marine-sarah-fei...
$40m for this person in the US
- worth it for a lifetime of looking over your shoulder? maybe...
- If you believe the conspiracy theories, that Boeing whistleblower “took his own life” before testimony and any potential payout.
- Short sellers have become the biggest SEC whistleblowers if they discover suspected fraud - it’s a more lucrative and less risky than shorting:
https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2d7d14lmtfwc1e...
- This is systematic fraud, and anyone trying those antibodies with falsified data will waste money and time. A lot of papers have been retracted for similar issues. Thermo Fisher is a major worldwide supplier of antibodies, so this has quite a big practical impact.
- 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.
- There aren't any display images in science.
Manipulating images for presentation is an automated process unless you're ripping someone off. The changes would be uniform across whole sets.
The problem with trying to pass off a fake image is that you need to be more knowledgeable in each dimension of the effort than the recipients are in just one. If anyone remembers the folks identifying East German video from background hum it's kind of like that.
- "a sales manager making a bad call when images are not available"
It seems nearly impossible to imagine that to be the case. I'd have to disregard the kinds of manipulation entirely. What sales manager would create a whole western block sequence by copying, rotating, and flipping a single element?
- The only reason I think biotech companies are not yet raising hell (and invoking the False Claims Act) is that Thermo Fisher's antibodies are already known to be notoriously bad, and everyone serious seems to have to validate everything themselves.
- Exactly what is the "data" that's being shown here? Is it essentially some kind of marketing material showing "this sort of thing is what you should expect to see" or is it actually data or for compliance? If it's essentially marketing material or an instructional example that isn't meant to be representative it being magically clearer than real life doesn't seem like a great sin (unless it's being claimed it is representative). If it's something to be relied upon for compliance or as data to be used, that's pretty damming.
- 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
- It definitely isn't a good look but I'm not entirely sure where this lands on "the line drawing on my IKEA instruction manual doesn't look like the furniture" to "VW diesel emissions report" spectrum. I'd appreciate if any bioscientists in the audience could clear that up a bit.
- Images like this show how specifically the antibody binds to the antigen. Generally, the ideal is to have very specific binding. As such, this type of image (Western blot) would only have single bands in any vertical lane. Any other bands show that the antibody is binding to other molecules.
The evidence of painting out the background is likely someone cleaning up other bands, where the antibody has bound to something other than the intended target. So, they are making out the antibody is better than it actually is.
Copy-pasted bands could be evidence of attempting to make a weak band look stronger, or even adding a band where one didn't exist - potentially the entire blot is fabricated.
Either way, like someone else said, this is like fabricating parts of a data sheet.
It doesn't excuse it, but like someone else said, scientists would never just trust an antibody they bought. They'd do their own tests. Labs will also share notes amongst each other, along the lines of "that antibody is bad, and also strongly binds XYZ. You should try this other one instead".
- (forgot to say I'm a former post-doc in Cell Biology)
- From the article:
> This image is supposed to demonstrate that the antibody being sold works as intended. (…) Antibodies are near-ubiquitous but notoriously fickle laboratory reagents in biomedical research. For many applications, it is absolutely crucial that the antibodies that you use are selective (i.e., the antibody binds strongly to the target protein) and specific (i.e., the antibody binds to the protein of interest and little else).
Antibodies showing a different picture (Western blot) than what is expected can drastically change the interpretation of the results as well as the conclusion of a study, for example. It may also encourage scientific fraud by authors by forcing them to unknowingly/coincidentally make to a blot image the same (or similar) fraudulent modifications performed by the vendor.
Now I’m curious about how much of the blot photoshopping present in retracted papers can be attributed to these misleading verification data.
- I would be more worried if the blotted area was different (the dark blob) - or if data in a datasheet (something like test specificity, level of detection, etc) was wrong
Now, if while preparing the images they needed to do some editorial choices (or it is well possible a person in the editorial group was told to 'enhance the images' but wasn't aware of the details) because of limitations in doing the experiment then this is probably not a big deal
- > I would be more worried if the blotted area was different (the dark blob)
Or if more than one blob is present (i.e. blobs at different molecular weights) for a supposedly selective and specific antibody that should show exactly one blob on the blot.
> Now, if while preparing the images they needed to do some editorial choices
Editorial choices on raw scientific data are a big no-no.
- > Editorial choices on raw scientific data are a big no-no.
I don't think you can find a picture in an article that hasn't been photoshopped in one way or another (which is mostly ok as long as it is not misleading)
Edit: TF's reply is interesting https://www.thermofisher.com/es/es/home/life-science/antibod...
Basically they say they are reviewing the images
- Usually, journals require raw, unmodified data to be deposited as supplementary information.
- Yes, as supplementary information
(Also journals are usually more rigorous than marketing material)
- > Yes, as supplementary information
Still part of the article.
- Do you work in biology?
> would be more worried if the blotted area was different (the dark blob) - or if data in a datasheet (something like test specificity, level of detection, etc) was wrong
These images are provided on the datasheet and form the basis for the level of detection / specificity claims
- It is obvious that they edited the images to make blobs look shorter vertically. And in some cases, simply copy-pasted non-existing blobs.
- This is 'used car salesman' levels of fraud on that scale. People rapidly acknowledge these antibodies work or they don't. There are websites with reviews of them. However in addition to getting ripped off for a few hundred bucks, these antibodies are generally produced by immunizing animals and by faking this data they are unnecessarily increasing the discomfort to these animals for a fraudulent reason. Look up the Santa Cruz antibody scandal for more of that.
- Monoclonal antibodies can't be produced by animals.
- 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.
- This is the thing. Yes, the marketing material is bad. But, no one in lab trusts an antibody just because of where you bought it. A new antibody always gets tested and validated before use.
That is to say, this looks bad for Thermo Fisher. But, that’s as far as the damage should go.
- Why would you even generate fake pictures of this type? Don't you already have real ones? I mean, it's actually more work, unless you don't have the real ones.
- I’m not going to defend Fisher here. It was a stupid thing for someone to do.
But unless you’re in the field, you won’t realize exactly how big ThermoFisher actually is. They are the major supplier of everything for molecular biology work. From freezers (the Thermo part) to plates and pipettes (Fisher) to enzymes and antibodies. In many ways they are like Amazon. They sell everything. Some of it from outside companies, but a good deal of sales are from in-house brands. They could use their position as a reseller to know which products sell the best and with the highest margins.
In a company of this size, it’s easy to have one group feel pressure and cheat on running the gels to confirm results. Particularly when the real results are ambiguous or dodgy. It’s not a good look, but I doubt it will put a dent in people from buying things (non-antibodies) from them.
- [dead]
- Would it be the same idea as an x ray of a critically welded part?
- 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.
- [flagged]
- https://www.thermofisher.com/us/en/home/life-science/antibod...
> Moving forward, where an original image is not present or available, the Company will ensure that website users are informed that antibody images may have been optimized for presentation and clarity on the website.
wut. Bro if you don't have an original valiation image then the answer is not to say "oh we'll make sure we communicate that we're making up a random image" - it's to say you don't have the damn image. It's validation data wtf. It's not a pretty background image it's validation data if you don't have the data wtf are you "optimizing for presentation?" This faq is unreal - pure CYA except by someone who doesn't seem to know what they're trying to cover. If you've got cut and pasted/rotated bands that's just fake data. Not "optimized for presentation."
Yes labs should and usually do always validate new antibodies as well. It's a waste of time and taxpayer money for them to spend their time on bad antibodies they purchased based on fake validation data. And just fundamentally - don't make up validation data. If it's not there it's not there. What are you optimizing for presentation if there's no original!? What does that say about the rest of your process?
- > 6. Did Thermo Fisher manipulate or fabricate antibody data?
> No.
Listen to these guys. What assholes.
- There have been efforts to standardize antibody reagent testing that are sorely underfunded/undervalued, https://ycharos.com/ (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41596-024-01095-8)
- And this is just fraud that was done with incompetence, so easily caught. How much is done competently?
- Concerning but not really surprising. They offer about hundred thousand antibodies, a few hundred frauds is likely the tip of the iceberg.
> “Similar image” searches using Google Lens, Bing Images or DuckDuckGo betray hundreds more that we have yet to document
In my experience these would return any image of an antibody (edit) Western blot, not just the exactly matching background. Would be curious to hear others thoughts.
- Without engaging in your point, small nitpick: These are images of Western blots[1], not PCR.
- 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.
- Not according to the complete comment:
They are clearly saying they think this is likely above average.More like 10%, but my search has not been systematic. I am mostly looking where I know I will find image issues based on image filenames and “Find Similar Images” searches.
- I have no idea about this catalogue, however, looking at the article and how the image manipulation has happened - it looks very much like "repro" work back in the day.
Anything that large companies published in/as magazines, etc, back in the 80/90s first went to a design company. Then to a repro company for the "finishing touches" to make it look nice. Faces were touched up, photo artifacts was removed, everything was to look neat and tidy.
This looks so much like that. I wouldn't be surprised if Thermo Fisher still ran everything that is to be published through a marketing/repro cycle, who has tampered with this without realizing what it looks like.
It'll be interesting to see if any actual data has been changed, or just the presentation of the data.
- 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.
- Have the samples found so far, in general, been edited in a way to increase value or potential sales volume? Or are they just more pretty?
- 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...
- It's like 90% biomedicine papers are like this.
- My most generous interpretation would be: the marketing/website team didn't get the pictures in time from the respective teams, so without much thinking they edited some. Like those print-on-demand t-shirt websites that don't have real models wearing the real shirts but crappy photoshop composites.
- why isn't their stock tanking
- Holy shmoly... I'm a biologist who has used Thermo antibodies before, and this is seriously disappointing to see.
- Reminds me a lot of the Schon scandal. TLDR is (now-obviously-a-fraud) generational physicist kept publishing breathtaking work about semiconductors, was caught because two of his error distributions were identical
- Western Blot is a hideous technique
- Someone call bobbybroccoli, they've got a new video to make :P
- Quite shameful of Thermo Fisher. Therapies are based on accuracy. Did they damage people by lying to them?
Also, how many other scientists just bought into that and used this for their own "analysis"?
317 points by mhrmsn 11 hours ago | 68 comments