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 A lot of papers have been retracted for similar issues.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.
noodlesUK 2 hours ago [-]
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.
eig 1 hours ago [-]
I'd treat this about the same as datasheets for mechanical or electrical parts.
When I buy an electronic component as a regular consumer I expect the datasheet "typical" values to be accurate 90% of the time. I can imagine larger industrial customers would really raise a stink if it's worse than that. However, any critical components in my circuit must be verified and "binned", and that's on me.
mbreese 16 minutes ago [-]
This is the thing. Yes, the marketing material is bad. But, no one in lab trusts an antibody just because of where you bought it. A new antibody always gets tested and validated before use.
That is to say, this looks bad for Thermo Fisher. But, that’s as far as the damage should go.
H8crilA 2 minutes ago [-]
Why would you even generate fake pictures of this type? Don't you already have real ones? I mean, it's actually more work, unless you don't have the real ones.
voidUpdate 2 hours ago [-]
> "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
noodlesUK 2 hours ago [-]
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.
JR1427 50 minutes ago [-]
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".
flobosg 2 hours ago [-]
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.
raverbashing 1 hours ago [-]
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
codedokode 17 minutes ago [-]
It is obvious that they edited the images to make blobs look shorter vertically. And in some cases, simply copy-pasted non-existing blobs.
flobosg 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
raverbashing 1 hours ago [-]
> 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)
flobosg 1 hours ago [-]
Usually, journals require raw, unmodified data to be deposited as supplementary information.
bonsai_spool 1 hours ago [-]
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
jhart99 2 hours ago [-]
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.
M95D 55 minutes ago [-]
Monoclonal antibodies can't be produced by animals.
And this is just fraud that was done with incompetence, so easily caught. How much is done competently?
chromatin 55 minutes ago [-]
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.
DonsDiscountGas 3 hours ago [-]
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 (edit) Western blot, not just the exactly matching background. Would be curious to hear others thoughts.
Amorymeltzer 2 hours ago [-]
Without engaging in your point, small nitpick: These are images of Western blots[1], not PCR.
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.
sgc 50 minutes ago [-]
Not according to the complete comment:
More like 10%, but my search has not been systematic. I am mostly looking where I know I will find image issues based on image filenames and “Find Similar Images” searches.
They are clearly saying they think this is likely above average.
voidUpdate 28 minutes ago [-]
Someone call bobbybroccoli, they've got a new video to make :P
LastTrain 45 minutes ago [-]
Have the samples found so far, in general, been edited in a way to increase value or potential sales volume? Or are they just more pretty?
Faaak 24 minutes ago [-]
More pretty, which would signify that the sample has less impurities -> better value
BoredPositron 25 minutes ago [-]
Some are just completely fabricated so it's hard to say if they have equivalent uglier images with real data...
fp64 17 minutes ago [-]
My most generous interpretation would be: the marketing/website team didn't get the pictures in time from the respective teams, so without much thinking they edited some. Like those print-on-demand t-shirt websites that don't have real models wearing the real shirts but crappy photoshop composites.
arcade79 1 hours ago [-]
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.
pu_pe 1 hours ago [-]
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.
codedokode 21 minutes ago [-]
I disagree. If you look at the photos the painting used to make black blobs shorter. As I understand, black blob vertical position is the weight of a molecule, and they want to hide the fact that there are heavier or lighter molecules. So originally there was a long blob, and they made it look shorter.
rcxdude 1 hours ago [-]
The background painting could maybe be explained like this (depending on what was hidden), but I don't think the duplicated blobs have a good explanation, especially because some were rotated to try to hide the manipulation.
eig 1 hours ago [-]
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.
2 hours ago [-]
Rendered at 13:05:13 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
When I buy an electronic component as a regular consumer I expect the datasheet "typical" values to be accurate 90% of the time. I can imagine larger industrial customers would really raise a stink if it's worse than that. However, any critical components in my circuit must be verified and "binned", and that's on me.
That is to say, this looks bad for Thermo Fisher. But, that’s as far as the damage should go.
(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
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".
> 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.
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
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.
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)
> 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
> “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 (edit) Western blot, not just the exactly matching background. Would be curious to hear others thoughts.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_blot
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.