How much of Thermo Fisher's antibody data has been manipulated?
reeserichardson.blog413 points by mhrmsn 19 hours ago
413 points by mhrmsn 19 hours ago
My first, second, and third instinct here is to say this is pretty obvious and sloppy fraud. But it did remind me of the famous case discovered by David Kriesel where Xerox scanners changed documents in surprising ways. The caption on the YouTube video linked here is entertainingly accurate.
https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres...
"On the scale of things too horrible to contemplate, "document-altering scanner" is right up there with "flesh-eating bacteria". Since 2006, Xerox scancopiers literally are making stuff up. They, for example, replace digits with others in scans. The replacement digits are layouted perfectly into the page, so the errors are hard to see. Sounds unbelievably insidious, but it's true. Drug prescriptions, construction plans, just anything can be affected. "
> They, for example, replace digits with others in scans. The replacement digits are layouted perfectly into the page, so the errors are hard to see.
Is this with JBIG2? I remember reading about JBIG2 also used in the FORCEDENTRY zero click exploit that which was (?) used in the Pegasus spyware. Unrelated tidbit, I guess.
The Xerox problem was with image compression. The compressor would look at an incoming block, decide it was similar enough to one already noted and reuse the existing token. With small fonts and similar characters one difference was within the tolerance and after seeing something like 888 it could then decide 8B8 was the same thing. As it could only happen when things lined up perfectly the alterations would also be lined up perfectly.
> They, for example, replace digits with others in scans. The replacement digits are layouted perfectly into the page, so the errors are hard to see.
I dealt with this where our fax number had a 6 in it and it would sometimes get changed into an 8, which happened to be a valid fax number for another company, ugh. And this was confidential info too…
Always a funny phone call when they insist they sent it to the number on the cover page we sent and then they send us a copy and xerox made it wrong.
And now practically every phone camera "enhances" the image via AI that might invent details. Most famously Samsung adding details to photos of the moon.
I'm scared that the "AI" marketing will make it much harder convincing non-technical coworkers and execs that "garbage in, garbage out" is a real concept, that not all "data" is good, and that our systems need to keep track of which kind is going where.
"All data is useful, the more the better! Just put it all into the AI and it'll sort it out."
Is this really pervasive? E.g. To my knowledge the "AI" enhancement that iPhones do automatically is limited to the usual sorts of post-processing for contrast, color, etc. There is an AI editing mode that leans more into generative fill capability that would be analogous to the Samsung incident but I don't think it's happening automatically to every photo you take.
I still remember Samsung faking images when using digital zoom...
https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/13/23637401/samsung-fake-moo...
Yes, I believe that is what the person I replied to was referring to specifically.
Nice! Just because you’re the top comment, I feel it is helpful to quick readers to point out that it has 0 to do with what happened here. :)
The guy who uncovered this, Sholto David, is basically just awesome?
Watch him cycle from Wales -> China in 90 days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdgHZPfivVA
This isn't his first fraud rodeo either. For his discovery of serious fraud by the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in 2024, he received $2.6 million.
Be more like Sholto, exercise your free will!
I didn't realize whistleblowers could recover part of fraud settlements:
> The civil settlement includes the resolution of claims brought under the qui tam or whistleblower provisions of the False Claims Act by Sholto David. Under those provisions, a private party can file an action on behalf of the United States and receive a portion of any recovery. David will receive $2,625,000 under today’s settlement.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/dana-farber-cancer-institute-...
Short sellers have become the biggest SEC whistleblowers if they discover suspected fraud - it’s a more lucrative and less risky than shorting:
https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2d7d14lmtfwc1e...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/marine-sarah-fei...
$40m for this person in the US
worth it for a lifetime of looking over your shoulder? maybe...
If you believe the conspiracy theories, that Boeing whistleblower “took his own life” before testimony and any potential payout.
Gather round kids and grab your muskets. The Qui Tam Clan ain't nuthin to fuk wit.
Are you sure?
Did he donate the money away? In the video you sent, he seems quite anxious about his nightly budget.
EDIT: ah it seems his trip was before that
We noticed this years ago when looking at -- IIRC -- ikaros antibodies. They were clearly faked. Lacking any sort of platform to gain attention we moved on to Abcam and our lab just sort of maintained a mental map of who not to purchase ANYTHING immuno- from.
This is systematic fraud, and anyone trying those antibodies with falsified data will waste money and time. A lot of papers have been retracted for similar issues. Thermo Fisher is a major worldwide supplier of antibodies, so this has quite a big practical impact.
1. Obviously unethical and fraudulent behavior.
2. It should be determined whether the fraud was just the display image (imagine a sales manager making a bad call when images are not available) or involved the underlying research (more systemic and worrying).
3. It would be interesting to examine occurrence of faked images along with apparent unreliability/irreproducibility of research that has used those products.
There aren't any display images in science.
Manipulating images for presentation is an automated process unless you're ripping someone off. The changes would be uniform across whole sets.
The problem with trying to pass off a fake image is that you need to be more knowledgeable in each dimension of the effort than the recipients are in just one. If anyone remembers the folks identifying East German video from background hum it's kind of like that.
"a sales manager making a bad call when images are not available"
It seems nearly impossible to imagine that to be the case. I'd have to disregard the kinds of manipulation entirely. What sales manager would create a whole western block sequence by copying, rotating, and flipping a single element?
Someone else here mentioned proofers, people that prepare marketing materials, as a potential source. I am in no way defending Thermo here. I just meant that the extend of the fraud needs to be determined, from some non-scientist making a decision for short term profits, frustrated that no one saved the picture, or because the pictures showed how ugly the western blots actually are, versus wholesale fabrication of the research from the bottom up.
> people that prepare marketing materials, as a potential source
Scientific advertising and marketing is a small, specialized field, done by people with fairly solid technical backgrounds (we produce a whole lot of advanced STEM degrees, there's plenty of folks available with this sort of background).
So I just want to be crystal, crystal clear here: there's no way in hell anyone involved in this pipeline should have any confusion as to whether "improving" gel photographs by painting out details and/or copying and pasting blots is fraud. "Proofer" or not.
The only reason I think biotech companies are not yet raising hell (and invoking the False Claims Act) is that Thermo Fisher's antibodies are already known to be notoriously bad, and everyone serious seems to have to validate everything themselves.
Exactly what is the "data" that's being shown here? Is it essentially some kind of marketing material showing "this sort of thing is what you should expect to see" or is it actually data or for compliance? If it's essentially marketing material or an instructional example that isn't meant to be representative it being magically clearer than real life doesn't seem like a great sin (unless it's being claimed it is representative). If it's something to be relied upon for compliance or as data to be used, that's pretty damming.
It is intentional fabrication: it requires a lot more brain cycles to surreptitiously produce false data, it would literally be less work to Prepare the Western blots and scan them. Its the stuff they sell, so they have ready access to the products and would be much easier and cost-effective to simply perform (if it worked). Only if the product is known not to perform as specified is there a profit incentive for fabricating such "evidence".
It's more than just false advertising, it's criminal negligence wasting research attention, research time (repeating experiments to understand whats not working), naive nameplate quotations in the scientific literature also corrupts the scientific record (the author knows they are simply restating the nameplate specifications, but the reader may confuse it as a claim by the author).
Wondering if its sort of OK because it might just be marketing material, think of how the tobacco and other lobbies manipulate the scientific record. I mean technically it is marketing material... if one cynically views the scientific record as a poster wall where the highest bidder is allowed to plaster their spam all over the place.
> "This image is supposed to demonstrate that the antibody being sold works as intended. It is labeled as “Advanced Verification” data on Thermo Fisher’s site"
(links to https://www.thermofisher.com/uk/en/home/life-science/antibod...)
I think it is technically marketing material, but if you have to fabricate your marketing material, that's not a good sign that the material is accurate. If I buy a car based on an advert where it shows the car going at 300 mph, and in real life it maxes out at 30mph, that's misleading advertising and something should be done about it.
Given that "at Thermo Fisher, a single vial containing a 0.1 mL aliquot of antibody solution typically costs 400 to 500 USD", you'd want to have accurate marketing material before buying it
It definitely isn't a good look but I'm not entirely sure where this lands on "the line drawing on my IKEA instruction manual doesn't look like the furniture" to "VW diesel emissions report" spectrum. I'd appreciate if any bioscientists in the audience could clear that up a bit.
Images like this show how specifically the antibody binds to the antigen. Generally, the ideal is to have very specific binding. As such, this type of image (Western blot) would only have single bands in any vertical lane. Any other bands show that the antibody is binding to other molecules.
The evidence of painting out the background is likely someone cleaning up other bands, where the antibody has bound to something other than the intended target. So, they are making out the antibody is better than it actually is.
Copy-pasted bands could be evidence of attempting to make a weak band look stronger, or even adding a band where one didn't exist - potentially the entire blot is fabricated.
Either way, like someone else said, this is like fabricating parts of a data sheet.
It doesn't excuse it, but like someone else said, scientists would never just trust an antibody they bought. They'd do their own tests. Labs will also share notes amongst each other, along the lines of "that antibody is bad, and also strongly binds XYZ. You should try this other one instead".
From the article:
> This image is supposed to demonstrate that the antibody being sold works as intended. (…) Antibodies are near-ubiquitous but notoriously fickle laboratory reagents in biomedical research. For many applications, it is absolutely crucial that the antibodies that you use are selective (i.e., the antibody binds strongly to the target protein) and specific (i.e., the antibody binds to the protein of interest and little else).
Antibodies showing a different picture (Western blot) than what is expected can drastically change the interpretation of the results as well as the conclusion of a study, for example. It may also encourage scientific fraud by authors by forcing them to unknowingly/coincidentally make to a blot image the same (or similar) fraudulent modifications performed by the vendor.
Now I’m curious about how much of the blot photoshopping present in retracted papers can be attributed to these misleading verification data.
I would be more worried if the blotted area was different (the dark blob) - or if data in a datasheet (something like test specificity, level of detection, etc) was wrong
Now, if while preparing the images they needed to do some editorial choices (or it is well possible a person in the editorial group was told to 'enhance the images' but wasn't aware of the details) because of limitations in doing the experiment then this is probably not a big deal
> I would be more worried if the blotted area was different (the dark blob)
Or if more than one blob is present (i.e. blobs at different molecular weights) for a supposedly selective and specific antibody that should show exactly one blob on the blot.
> Now, if while preparing the images they needed to do some editorial choices
Editorial choices on raw scientific data are a big no-no.
> Editorial choices on raw scientific data are a big no-no.
I don't think you can find a picture in an article that hasn't been photoshopped in one way or another (which is mostly ok as long as it is not misleading)
Edit: TF's reply is interesting https://www.thermofisher.com/es/es/home/life-science/antibod...
Basically they say they are reviewing the images
Usually, journals require raw, unmodified data to be deposited as supplementary information.
Yes, as supplementary information
(Also journals are usually more rigorous than marketing material)