Fabrication Within Science

By: Ryan Hoang

On July 21, 2022, the prominent journal, Science, published an article that shook the scientific community to its core. Titled, “Blots on a field? Potential fabrication in research images threatens key theory of Alzheimer’s disease”, the article uncovered the many fabricated
Western blots created by Dr. Sylvain Lesné, a prominent neuroscience researcher at the University of Minnesota. In doing so, the article exposes fraud in science, and has the potential to damage the relationship between the public and scientific community as a whole.

Within the article, author Charles Piller writes about how Professor Matthew Schrag at Vanderbilt University, uncovered these fake Western blots created by Lesné. Essentially, by using complex image-processing techniques, Schrag was able to identify two Western blots of Aβ*56 which had altered images. In the field of Alzheimer’s, Aβ, or “A-beta” is a commonly known protein that has been long thought to cause Alzheimer’s disease, and was first identified within Alzheimer’s disease patients by Alois Alzheimer in 1906. Aβ*56, however, was a specific oligomer, or type of Aβ that, according to Lesné, may have been the true driving force behind Alzheimer’s. Lesné went on to publish “A specific amyloid-beta protein assembly in the brain impairs memory” in the prominent journal, Nature in 2006, highlighting the importance of Aβ*56. The paper went on to have over 3000 citations, which signified its massive importance within the field of Alzheimer’s.

However, within the paper, it appeared that the two blots of the protein had been replicated side-by-side, and had been digitally altered. This came as a massive shock towards the Alzheimer’s community, as Western blots are typically utilized to quantify and identify proteins within a sample of biological tissue separating each protein by size. In faking the results
of the Aβ*56 Western blot, Lesné may have conjured up a whole field of Alzheimer’s research that had no basis in the actual biology itself. Many other studies attempting to establish the connection between Aβ*56 and Alzheimer’s failed to find the protein within Alzheimer’s disease
human tissue and mice models.

Soon after the discovery of these potential falsifications, the community at large was in uproar. The public decried the vast expenses spent on studying Aβ as a whole, and the striking failures of certain anti-Aβ drugs, such as aduhelm, which was controversially approved by the FDA earlier in 2022. However, many individuals from the public made these allegations against Alzheimer’s research without distinguishing between Aβ and Aβ*56. In doing so, the public may have been easily mislead into criticizing and scrutinizing all of Aβ research, when it appears that the research impacted by these fabricated images may be very limited in scope to only a single specific oligomer of Aβ. This could lead towards a breakdown in the critical relationship between the public and the scientific community, which has been a symbiotic one, allowing for the discovery of new information to flow readily from the scientific community.

Still, given the large number of citations associated with the paper, and the amount of money divested into Aβ*56, it is clear that some part of the public’s uproar is justified. As future scientists and researchers, each member of this community must hold themselves personally
accountable for the data and images that are produced. Unfortunately, many issues remain within the scientific community that are unlikely to change. Within the current system of science, most labs depend on grant money from the federal government through institutions like the NIH
to continue their research and pay their staff. This leads to a culture of “publish or perish” which drives scientists to pump out massive numbers of papers in order to secure grant funding that will keep their labs, and consequently their entire careers and livelihoods, afloat. It is clear that
this culture within science must be re-examined, as this publish or perish culture may lead towards the motive to falsify data and have low quality controls within science overall. This culture may have been what ultimately drove Lesné to fabricate his data in the first place, as he
chose to pursue the prestige of a publication and money accompanying it. Without stricter protocols in place to review scientific papers and even money to potentially redo experiments, it is possible that poor data continues to flow out of these research labs for the foreseeable future.

However, a few promising trends within the scientific community have emerged recently. Within the Biden administration, there has been a push against the publishing companies to ensure that science papers are able to be easily accessed by members of the public, rather than closed off behind academic paywalls and university affiliations. In doing so, hopefully, the
public will be able to closely examine and critique the scientific papers coming out of these research labs and be able to interact more closely with the scientific community.

Overall, it is unclear to what extent Lesné’s actions may cause upon the Alzheimer’s research community, and the science/medical community as a whole. Nevertheless, when referring to other key scientific discoveries like that of climate change and vaccines, it is clear that public trust in science and the scientific community has never been lower. A single fraud could potentially unwind years of work done by thousands of scientists across the world into fields like Alzheimer’s, and further erode the public’s trust in science and medicine. Within the age of disinformation and “fake news”, it is vital that the future generations of scientists and physicians continue to ensure that only quality research and data end up published. However, quality control and management within individual research labs is only a temporary bandage to the overall problem. Going into the future, it is clear that we must reevaluate the “publish or perish” culture that pervades throughout the scientific community, and creates an environment where scientists are motivated to publish large quantities of papers so that they may provide food on the table. Without doing so, it is possible that further research may be exposed for fraud, and thus damage the reputation of the scientific community and Alzheimer’s research for the future.

Ryan Hoang is a third year Microbiology, Immunology, & Molecular Genetics major at UCLA and is a THINQ 2022 intern.

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