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stormwyrm [soylentnews.org] writes:

There have been many rumblings about scientific fraud in China, and now there are rumbles that the problem is systemic, and goes all the way to the top. Cao Xuetao [wikipedia.org] (曹雪涛), one of China's top immunologists, former president of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, president of Nankai University, and most importantly Chairman of research integrity for all Chinese research, has himself been implicated in scientific fraud and misconduct. A careful examination of Chairman Cao's published scientific papers seems to show how some of his data was fabricated or falsified. This was noticed since much of his papers have pictures, either of western blots, gels, flow cyclometry images, and microscopy images. Some of the fabrication appears to have been done by sending the same sample multiple times through analysis, producing images that are similar but not completely identical, while others are clear Photoshop cut and paste jobs. From the For Better Science article [forbetterscience.com]:

And now it comes out, Cao’s research works contain elaborately falsified research data. The discovery was made by data integrity sleuth Elisabeth Bik [forbetterscience.com], assisted by Smut Clyde [forbetterscience.com] and others. It all started with a fraudulent paper, Wang et al Clin Cancer Research 2005 [aacrjournals.org] from Cao’s lab, which Bik reported [scienceintegritydigest.com] to the publisher AACR in 2014. Despite 4 falsified figures, only an embarrassing correction [aacrjournals.org] was issued in March 2015. So now Bik had another look [scienceintegritydigest.com] at Chairman Cao’s collected works.

[...]Also on 17 November, Chairman Cao publicly replied to his critic Bik, on PubPeer [pubpeer.com]:

[...]Nevertheless, there is no excuse for any lapse in supervision or laboratory leadership and the concerns you raised serve as a fresh reminder to me just how important my role and responsibility are as mentor, supervisor, and lab leader; and how I might have fallen short.

[...]There was even English language coverage [chinadaily.com.cn], as the dams broke. China’s top scientist Cao can now brace himself for retractions, especially since he unwisely published a number of problematic papers in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. Where he already had to retract one [jbc.org] in 2015, for massive data fakery.

There is a further follow-up [forbetterscience.com], investigator Elisabeth Bik's own blog post [scienceintegritydigest.com], and commentary [theness.com] by Dr. Steven Novella.

Original Submission