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 A lot of papers have been retracted for similar issues.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.
I have no idea about this catalogue, however, looking at the article and how the image manipulation has happened - it looks very much like "repro" work back in the day.
Anything that large companies published in/as magazines, etc, back in the 80/90s first went to a design company. Then to a repro company for the "finishing touches" to make it look nice. Faces were touched up, photo artifacts was removed, everything was to look neat and tidy.
This looks so much like that. I wouldn't be surprised if Thermo Fisher still ran everything that is to be published through a marketing/repro cycle, who has tampered with this without realizing what it looks like.
It'll be interesting to see if any actual data has been changed, or just the presentation of the data.
No marketing or design company would duplicate a band from another experiment (taking care to rotate it to make it look different nonetheless). Even in that unlikely scenario, Thermo Fisher is still responsible for the scientific data they publish.
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.
> "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"
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.
> 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
> 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
These images are provided on the datasheet and form the basis for the level of detection / specificity claims
This is 'used car salesman' levels of fraud on that scale. People rapidly acknowledge these antibodies work or they don't. There are websites with reviews of them. However in addition to getting ripped off for a few hundred bucks, these antibodies are generally produced by immunizing animals and by faking this data they are unnecessarily increasing the discomfort to these animals for a fraudulent reason. Look up the Santa Cruz antibody scandal for more of that.
From the comments on the article by the author it looks more like 10% so far and they haven't systematically looked. That means ~10% if a probable floor of how much fraud there is.
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.
I have no idea about this catalogue, however, looking at the article and how the image manipulation has happened - it looks very much like "repro" work back in the day.
Anything that large companies published in/as magazines, etc, back in the 80/90s first went to a design company. Then to a repro company for the "finishing touches" to make it look nice. Faces were touched up, photo artifacts was removed, everything was to look neat and tidy.
This looks so much like that. I wouldn't be surprised if Thermo Fisher still ran everything that is to be published through a marketing/repro cycle, who has tampered with this without realizing what it looks like.
It'll be interesting to see if any actual data has been changed, or just the presentation of the data.
No marketing or design company would duplicate a band from another experiment (taking care to rotate it to make it look different nonetheless). Even in that unlikely scenario, Thermo Fisher is still responsible for the scientific data they publish.
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.
> "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.
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 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.
Do you work in biology?
> 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
These images are provided on the datasheet and form the basis for the level of detection / specificity claims
This is 'used car salesman' levels of fraud on that scale. People rapidly acknowledge these antibodies work or they don't. There are websites with reviews of them. However in addition to getting ripped off for a few hundred bucks, these antibodies are generally produced by immunizing animals and by faking this data they are unnecessarily increasing the discomfort to these animals for a fraudulent reason. Look up the Santa Cruz antibody scandal for more of that.
Concerning but not really surprising. They offer about hundred thousand antibodies, a few hundred frauds is likely the tip of the iceberg.
> “Similar image” searches using Google Lens, Bing Images or DuckDuckGo betray hundreds more that we have yet to document
In my experience these would return any image of an antibody PCR, not just the exactly matching background. Would be curious to hear others thoughts.
Without engaging in your point, small nitpick: These are images of Western blots[1], not PCR.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_blot
From the comments on the article by the author it looks more like 10% so far and they haven't systematically looked. That means ~10% if a probable floor of how much fraud there is.