Re: An alarming amount of image manipulation - time to fight back

Posted by Bill Oliver-3 on
URL: http://confocal-microscopy-list.275.s1.nabble.com/Re-Ana-alarming-amount-of-image-manipulation-tp592857p1317634.html

On Fri, 10 Oct 2008, Turner, Scott wrote:

> I was not making "appeals to authority" (I don't know anything about the
> qualifications of the committee at U of Minnesota) but simply making the
> point that the news article gave a misleading impression of the
> committee's findings... [snip]


Well, I looked at the article, and you are right.  Looking at this as an image processing guy who only stumbled through a lab using electrophoresis now and then, it's pretty clear that some of those illustrations have been banged on pretty hard. It's more than simple color balancing and optimization.

And, yes, it's clear that 5c and 6b are the same data.

That's pretty sloppy.

However, in my lifetime, particularly in dealing with resident physicians and the occasional grad student, it's usually wrong to "construe" a lack of ethics when recognizing that stupid errors are much more common.

If everybody that made an error in an illustration was "construed" to be unethical, there aren't a whole lot of folk who would have jobs.

But once again, the issue is with the *illustration,* not the underlying findings.  If the authors had said something that *wasn't true* in their underlying data, I would would be more sympathetic with the committee's torch-and-pitchfork approach to dealing with such issues.  But this idea that a mistake in an illustration constitutes a severe ethical violation is dangerous ground.  How far do you really want to go in this kind of inquisition?  Ask not for whom the bell tolls, and all that.


billo