Academia is BROKEN! Harvard Fake Cancer Research Scandal Explained

if you're at Harvard right now I sincerely hope that you're doing okay because my goodness Harvard seems like an absolute bloody nightmare as a recap first there was the Franchesca goino Scandal that resulted in one of the top researchers in all of Harvard University being put on administrative leave due to allegations of data fraud then a few weeks ago the president of Harvard University Claudine gay has to step down due to lots of different pressure for many different reasons that I covered in this video over here then just last week four top researchers at the Dana Farber Institute of cancer research that's Harvard's cancer research lab were accused of data fraud and those allegations led to 31 papers having to be corrected and six of them being retracted and I was going to make a video covering that scandal with the Dana Farber Institute but just two days ago two days before filming another major Scandal happened with another top Harvard researcher and this one is Khaled sha so Khaled sha is a Harvard Medical School professor and he is also the vice chair for research at the department of neurosurgery at briam and Women's Hospital and he is facing a lot of heat for dozens of allegations of image manipulation and research misconduct across a large number of papers so in today's video I'm going to be breaking down the allegations against khed sha because some of the image manipulation that you're going to see is like shockingly amateur and it's amazing that this managed to get through peer review but to be honest at this point I'm not surprised that you know pretty much anything can get through peer review so I'm going to present the evidence side by side but if you want all sides of the news that you read then you should sign up for the sponsor of today's video which is ground news I use ground news literally every day on both my phone and my computer because for me it is the best way to navigate the reporting bias that exists in mainstream media today for example if you look at this story which is just yet more chaos at Harvard this is a story saying that Harvard's Dei or diversity officer has been accused of 40 instances of plagiarism in the wake of Claudine gay Scandal now as you can see on ground news this story was almost completely ignored by left leaning media but very well covered by right-leaning media so if you're somebody who typically only consumes left leaning media then this is likely a story that would be in your news blind spot AKA a story that you would have never seen but thanks to ground news's blind spot feature it's easy to see news stories that are only covered by one side of the political Spectrum another reason why I love using ground news as well is because of the tags that they add to every headline so that you can see the political leaning the funding source and the level of factuality for each different new source that you're reading for example if you look at NBC which was the only left leading publication to report on this story and I know that because of ground users Handy Tags that they we can see that they went with this headline Harvard Dei Chief is the newest Target of plagiarism accusations but if we compare that headline with a right leaning source which I know is right leing thanks to ground uses Handy Tags for example Breitbart Breitbart went with this title another cheater Harvard Chief diversity officer accused of plagiarism a lot more perjorative a lot more emotional so with ground news and their Handy Tags it's easy to compare headlines and see how the same story is reported about differently depending on the political leaning of the organization that you're reading that news from so if you want to be properly informed of the bias that exists in the news that you read then be sure to sign up for the Vantage plan with ground news the Vantage plan is the plan that's going to give you access to all of those features that I just talked about if you use my link in the description which is ground. news/ you'll get 30% off the Vantage plan thank you ground news for sponsoring today's video let's talk about the accusations against Khaled sha so Khaled sha is a cancer researcher and he does a lot of different Research into many different treatments and therapies for cancer but he's best known for his research into stem cell therapy for treatment of brain bra cancer for example if you look at this paper titled Target receptor identification and subsequent treatment of reected brain tumors with encapsulated and engineered allogenic stem cells this is a paper written by kesar and what looks like 50 million other co-authors so this paper has a lot of jargon but from what I can understand this is essentially what they're saying in this paper they claim to have invented a special type of cancer fighting Cell called the mscb if which which is a cell that they made from stem cells and what they claim in this paper is that mscb if can be applied directly to a tumor and what it does is release a toxic substance which is only harmful to cancerous tumor cells but not harmful to normal healthy tissue but not only that they claim that they've managed to put these cells into a gel and so when you apply this gel to the Target area those cells don't wash off or fall off instead they stay in place and work on that specific tumor in order to destroy it and not only that but they said they've engineered these cells in such a clever way that after their job is done they have a builtin self-destruct switch so after they've released their toxic substance which destroys the tumor cells they also destroy themselves so that they don't then end up you know going around to other healthy tissue and potentially damaging other parts of the body absolutely incredible if it was true the problem is though of course and of course that's the reason why I'm covering it on this video is that this paper which makes amazing claims is full of data fraud and we're going to go through some of that data fraud right now I just just want to give a quick shout out to one of my subscribers who sent me a very handy PowerPoint of all of the evidence of image manipulation in college Char's papers which I independently verified as being correct so I won't name You by name because I didn't ask if I could but thank you so much you know who you are this made my job a lot easier so let's have a look at some of the evidence of image manipulation so in this paper the one that I just told you about there are multiple instances of image manipulation within the same paper for example if we look at this first one so the image on the right is the one from the paper that I just told you about and as you can see it is exactly the same as an image on the left which is taken from a completely different paper researching a different thing from a completely different team that doesn't include khed sha so they've literally just you know cut this little bit of image out and pasted it into their own paper and pretended like that is the result that they got from their study and this certainly isn't an accident because within the same plot there is yet another image taken from the same paper and they've pasted that one into their paper as well pretending like that is the result that they got khed sha and his co-authors also seem to have borrowed images from khed Sha's other papers for example if we look at this image again the one from the paper I told you about is on the right this one is very similar to this one on the left from another one of khed Sha's papers it looks identical except that you know one of them has a much higher resolution one of them has a lower resolution but you can see from the distribution of the dots this is the same image and these next ones are the reason why I wanted to cover this story cuz I think it's like so hilariously lazy this image in the third row is actually taken from a website that sells antibodies like it's like it's the product photo that the thing that they're selling they go like look we sell antibodies this is what they look like and they've just taken that image from the website and pasted it into their paper and this doesn't just happen once this happens another time so this is supposed to be an image of the stem cells that they used in their paper this is found on page 48 of that very handy PowerPoint that my subscriber sent me and as you can see that this image is just a section of an image taken from this website called science cell that sells stem cells so again they've just used a product photo from presumably where they bought the stem cells from and put it into their paper being like hey this is the image we took of the stem cells we got and in case you are wondering the image below that one that I just showed you is also taken from the same website and is also a product photo also within the exact same paper there's also evidence of copying images from this other paper which is done by what looks like Chinese researchers it looks like they're investigating completely different things but they've just taken these brain cross-section images and pasted them into their own paper purple is purple green or what is this teal teal is teal they're exactly the same images but just in two different papers from two different years from two different completely different sets of res Searchers also again within the exact same paper there's also evidence of them copying their own images within the same plot which is absolutely insane to me so if you look at these three columns these are supposed to be showing like different treatment groups I presume and so this one on day one highlighted in green here looks the same as the one in the second treatment group on day 42 it's exactly the same image within the same plot and I'm like you know if you're going to commit image fraud and data manipulation at least at least put the image in different plots so it's not so obvious I mean you're literally putting the two images almost side by side so it's like it's pretty obvious that these are the same image right and uh I don't know it's it's it's unbelievably lazy and it's crazy that such lazy image manipulation can get through peer review and there were many more issues with that same paper that I didn't just talk about I'll have my editor put up images of those now and there's also lots of evidence of similar types of data fraud in other papers so the one I just talked about was from 2022 which is really recent but there's even evidence of similar data fraud happening in a paper published in 2023 and also earlier papers as well some of them are similar to what I just talked about some of them are to do with uh blots which we've talked a lot about so if you don't know Western blot is a procedure that we've talked about before it's a technique in biological science that is used to detect different types of proteins essentially the thicker and darker the blot the more present that protein is in your sample and we've seen lots of evidence of image manipulation when it comes to Western block experiments in the past we talked about it when it came to Mark Tessier LaVine who is the president of Stanford University who had lots of evidence of Western block manipulation in his papers and also we talked about it with Greg semenza who's the Nobel prizewinning scientist who also had Western blot data manipulation in his papers so once again with khed Sha's papers from Harvard we also see lots of evidence of Western blot manipulation for example if we look at this paper all the way back from 2001 we can see that there is evidence of image manipulation here what are these hard lines in your your blot strip there should be no such hard lines in your blot strip that clearly looks fishy that looks like someone has pasted a blot into a strip that is otherwise not supposed to be interrupted like that and if we look at B the strip directly below it we can see again this is unbelievably lazy we can see that the the blots in part one and two are exactly the same as the blots in part five and six except that five and six have been zoomed in a bit and we know they're exactly the same because not only are the blots exactly the same shape which should never happen organically but also the noise around the blots are also exactly the same and so we know that they they are exactly the same so you might be wondering who we have to thank for finding all of these examples of image manipulation and once again it's Elizabeth Bick the same person who busted Mar tessia LaVine the same person who busted Greg simenza the Nobel Prize winner well she's also busted khed sha in this case and I always wondered like how does she do it right like does she just have this like photographic memory of what every plot looks likes that when she reads a paper she can go that one looks familiar to me so I still use mostly my eyes since uh about 3 years I'm using software and there are several packages on the market so I'm using uh two of them image twin and proi to to help me find these duplications and image twin has a database of images so you can sometimes find duplications of an image within one paper with another paper where they appear to either have used that image from another paper or maybe both of them came from the same source so that seems to be the case of what's happened to khed sha here there's just tons of examples from a huge long career of image manipulation throughout this person's career of course for legal reasons I have to say there is currently no evidence suggesting that khed sha was the one who was doing the image manipulation himself there is only the fact that there seems to be a lot of image manipulation on a lot of different papers across many different years that khed Sha's name is attached to in all of these papers Khaled Sha has multiple co-authors often times he is only the final author on the paper which suggests that he is not the one doing you know all of the you know leg work in the beginning that might be the case that might not be the case you know there's really kind of no hard rules around this but sometimes he is the primary or first author on the paper which suggests that he is the one doing the ground workor but again there's no sort of evidence of that so yes you know Kalesa maybe is unlucky maybe he always happens to work with people who love doing image manipulation or maybe there's something about working with k that encourages this kind of behavior who knows um I don't want to get sued what's interesting as well is I heard Dan the grap Vine and I won't tell you who told me this because I don't think they want to be named but I heard from someone at Harvard that apparently the culture at Harvard has recently shifted in Wake of all of these allegations of research misconduct apparently the culture used to be at Harvard for top researchers to try and get their name on absolutely as many papers as possible because the thinking was if we can get our researchers on as many papers as possible that will make them look super productive that'll increase the number of total citations that they've received and therefore raise their Prestige as researchers within their field and as a result you know by association raise the status of Harvard University and so the culture used to be if you're a top researcher get your name on as many papers as possible even if your involvement in that paper is like minimal to barely anything and so that's how we end up seeing people like Franchesco Gino and maybe khes sha as well getting their name on so many different papers where they after the fact after all of this you know allegations come out they come out and say well actually I didn't have that much involvement in the paper but my name is on it because it is right and and they they were encouraged to do that by the culture at Harvard but apparently in Wake of all of these allegations that culture has now shifted and at Harvard University researchers are encouraged to be extra careful because while getting your name on a lot of papers is slightly good for your reputation what's awful for your reputation is for a scandal like this to come out about your research and so now they're being extra conservative and being like only put put your name on stuff that you actively have a you know a huge role on and that you have proper oversight of and that you've checked through thoroughly that you're confident is good research because more of these scandals come out the worse Harv's reputation gets and to be honest Harv's reputation is totally in the toilet right now now as far as I can tell there's been no formal action taken against sha so far he hasn't yet been put on on administrative leave or or anything like that but uh I wouldn't be surprised if that happens in the near future so no real point to make here just wanted to report this story because I think it's so interesting to learn about just how easy it is for people to do this image manipulation like how blatantly obvious they make it they're almost like tempting peer reviewers to catch the mountain by putting them in the same plot like this um but you know finally caught thankfully so just want to say a big thank you to Elizabeth Bick for being amazing and doing the research that she does and uh thank you to you guys for watching today's video so I'll catch you guys in the next one be sure to check out ground news Link in the description and I'll see you next time bye-bye oh and also one more thing if you're like 17 or 18 and you're like thinking of applying for Harvard maybe reconsider

Channel: Pete Judo

Views: 569,866

Keywords: science, scientific fraud, fraud, academia, peer review, behavioral, behavioral economics, psychology

Id: wT-Vgtm2KLM

Length: 15min 2sec (902 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 10 2024