The issue of the recent request by the University of Minnesota to have Catherine Verfaillie retract her publication is worse than tragic: it has all the elements of a Puritanical witch-hunt, and all for the charge of changing the brightness level of three images. Let me be quick to say that Morayma Reyes, the graduate student who was picked out for the "offense," changed brightness levels to conform the image for publication, exactly what a printer at the printing press would do (but somehow comes clean), and exactly what I advised her to do.
Believe me, no list of ethical rules by the Microscopy Society could EVER be written to have changed this outcome--which was clearly an investigation for political reasons--except one rule: no post-processing period (which is done anyway at the press: are they accountable, too?).
It is especially disheartening because Dr. Reyes is among the best researchers I have worked with. I cannot forget the day when she called me into a room long after regular working hours and asked me to look through the microscope. I saw a beating heart before this had ever been done with the use of stem cells. I turned to her and commented, "This is too large for a rat heart and too small for a rabbit. What is it?" She smiled triumphantly and said, "We made it on a scaffold."
I agree wholeheartedly with Johan: fight back. Especially for this so-called violation on research that has since been corroborated by other labs.
Jerry
Johan Henriksson wrote:
On Wed, 8 Oct 2008, John Oreopoulos wrote:
My apologies again if this discussion thread becomes heated. I
thought I'd pass on another news bit about image manipulation, this
time revolving around brightness and contrast:
Is this not something the journal should specify and the reviewers
should be looking for in the first place? It seems to me again that
all of this could be avoided if the authors simply state and describe
all image manipulations when submitting for publication
John Oreopoulos
From the story you reference, the researcher did some minimal image
processing that in no way altered the conclusions of the paper, and
was hit on a religious objection that has no practical basis. Doesn't
sound to clever to me.
The position these purists are taking is simply silly. Were the same
criteria in place before digital imaging, it would be "unethical" to
produce prints from negatives -- or for that matter to even *develop*
negatives at all -- since all development and all printing
*necessarily* involve "image processing." When was the last time you
created a print without affecting contrast and brightness? Never? Hmmm....
by this logic, the only "ethical" way to include images would be as a
table of sensor readouts in the supplementary material. I wonder who
would be happy about that.
my stand point here is firm, any image manipulation is allowed. it is
better by *default* to assume image processing. but the original image
should always be made available in that case. the method description
should come in form of a script to redo the operation using an open
source package. I think this is how biologists should work with their
data anyway because it allows them to redo the operation very easily on
other images. as an additional advantage, checking correctedness can be
almost automatic, the journal simply reruns the script. the only thing
left to argue about is the choice of operations, left to the reviewers.
currently we have too many black boxes; deconvolution operations is one
group of very important but hard to describe algorithms (the number of
biologists here who has implemented it, raise your hand). I would not in
any way be satisfied with a method description "was deconvolved with
XXX" because I most likely do not have the package. you cannot expect a
reviewer to suddenly shell out 10k usd just to verify a picture.
/Johan
--
Jerry (Gerald) Sedgewick
Program Director, Biomedical Image Processing Lab (BIPL)
Department of Neuroscience, University of Minnesota
312 Church St. SE, 1-205 Hasselmo Hall
Minneapolis, MN 55455
(612) 624-6607
Author: "Scientific Imaging with Photoshop: Methods, Measurement and Output."
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