This is an excerpt of an investigation by STAT, the health and medicine news site that’s a partner to the Globe. For a full version of this story and related coverage, visit STAT.
PONTYPRIDD, Wales — The blog post that has shaken the leadership of Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, one of the world’s preeminent cancer research centers, was written some 3,000 miles away, in a bare-walled, sparsely decorated flat, save for a stack of statistics books and a collection of Rubik’s Cubes.
It’s here that Sholto David, an unemployed scientist with a doctorate in cell and molecular biology, spends his time poring over research papers looking for images with clues that they’ve been manipulated in some way to portray misleading findings — perhaps duplicated, spliced or cropped, or partially obscured.
As he’s toiled away over the past three years, often long past midnight, he’s flagged issues on more than 2,000 papers on a site called PubPeer, where researchers can critique and discuss published studies. His comments are sometimes met by a study’s author dodging the questions raised, and sometimes result in a correction or retraction. Often though, they’re met with no response.
But earlier this month, David helped ignite a furor after publishing a blog post that outlined purported errors he and other researchers noticed with images in dozens of papers from top Dana-Farber researchers, including the institute’s chief executive, COO, and research integrity officer. His tone was mocking, at times scathing: A paper co-authored by CEO Laurie Glimcher “includes some impressive contributions to art, but perhaps not to science,” he wrote; he described papers as “calamitous” or an “epic fail.” Some of the manipulations, David alleged, seemed deliberate. “Dana-Farberications,” the headline called them.
On Monday, three weeks after the blog post was published, Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber said it has plans to retract six of the papers and correct 31 of them.
David’s Jan. 2 post on the For Better Science blog was his latest foray into challenging what he sees as inferior research. On his YouTube channel, where he dissects problems in papers and with alternative medicine practitioners, he has episodes of “Science Police,” the opening of which shows him running down a trail and popping out of a river in a police vest and hat, like the geekiest spoof of “COPS” imaginable. With cheesy graphics, he puts authors who’ve had to retract papers for poor research in “science prison.”
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