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Misdirection on a field

Charles Piller’s July 21st article “BLOTS ON A FIELD?” tells the story of how a researcher, Dr. Schrag, came to conclude that papers on AB56 by Dr. Lesne et al. may contain falsified data. Mr. Piller without evidence claims the AB56 papers to be extremely important for Alzheimer’s Disease research and uses this narrative as…More

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CUNY emails

A source was kind enough to provide us with emails that were FOIA’d from CUNY. Selected excerpts of these emails were used by a handful of twitter folk to undermine Dr. Hoau Wang and spread FuD around the investigations currently underway (at CUNY). Part 1 – Finances Stock holdings (June 2021) Dr. Wang signed a…More

An Expression Of Concern

On 12/17, J. Neurosci followed up an erratum published 10/11 with an Expression of Concern. The first thing to point out is that the editor of the journal has been subjected to constant harassment by the Twitterati, some of whom have influential positions. Nevertheless according to COPE guidelines, accommodations must be made and in this…More

Of shorts and blots

This article looks at specific accusations in the citizens petition supplement attachment 1 Example #1: “Manipulated WB”. The CP claims that different WBs were “spliced together” to make a figure in a 2005 paper. They point out a “bowtie” effect of several bands as supporting evidence. However, anyone with WB experience has seen this bowtie…More

Notes from a Molecular Biologist

The author of this post received a Ph.D. degree in Molecular Biology and has been an academic researcher since 2003. His laboratory studies cancer and other human diseases and routinely run western blots (~1,000/year) for their studies. I thought it might be helpful to post an expert’s review of the concerns raised in the Labaton Sucharow…More

Citizen Petition Supplement

The petition against Cassava Sciences was supplemented on Sep 8. We shall examine some questions arising from this supplement and provide our comments in this post. Concern #1: Authenticity and Availability of Phase 2a Data—Western Blots The petition claims the original western blot images should be available at Cassava’s premises Can someone point us to…More

SavaDx Poster and Plasma Ptau-181 Data

Note: this is part 2 of the Science Integrity series At the AAIC conference in July 2021, Cassava Sciences presented a poster showcasing encouraging results from SavaDx, their novel plasma diagnostic/biomarker to detect Alzheimer’s disease. SavaDx measures changes in levels of a protein named altered filamin A (FLNA) which is linked to AD disease mechanism.…More

Science Integrity – Part 1

Dr. Elizabeth Bik is a renowned science consultant who runs a blog and a twitter account where she discusses manipulated images in scientific publications. Her work is widely respected in the scientific community. Her twitter bio reads Scientific discussions should not be held in the courtroom In this post we will examine her recent actions…More

The Hyper Growth Story

Any statements on hyper growth must be prefaced by answers to the accusations on the petition Presence of a Whistleblower This one is obvious – there wasn’t any. The petitioner used the term once and that too in the title of the petition. It was merely a ploy to garner increased attention. They being short…More