Remember the game “fact or opinion” from grade school? The teacher makes a statement like, “the sky is blue,” or “vanilla ice cream is better than chocolate,” and students decide whether it’s a fact or an opinion. The game is meant to show that only observable or scientific facts are objective (the sky is blue), while value judgments are mere opinions (vanilla is better than chocolate). Things we can see, hear, taste, touch or smell are non-negotiable. Everything else? Well, it depends on who you ask.
But what if the teacher instead said, “Falsifying scientific papers is always wrong.” Is that a fact or an opinion?
The question is not hypothetical. Recently, the National Institutes of Health found one of its top neuroscientists guilty of scientific misconduct. The Associated Press reported that Dr. Eliezer Masliah, who served as neuroscience director at NIH’s National Institute on Aging, apparently used manipulated or duplicated images in an untold number of studies.
Specifically, Masliah published the same “figure panels” supposedly showing experimental results in different studies of different people’s brains and cells. Some even appear to be edited in a way that duplicated or “cloned” pixels within an image or between images. In other words, they did not show what the papers claimed they showed and what everyone who read them assumed they showed.
Although the NIH has already notified two journals of the misconduct they were tricked into publishing, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The journal Science reported that Masliah has published numerous papers about synapse damage in Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, some when he was a researcher at the University of California. Reviewers now say that more than 100 papers co-authored by Masliah as far back as 1997 contain suspect images, and some of these papers have already played a role in developing medications and treatments.