Having explored this subject for a few years, not as an academic, medical researcher - but as a problem solver and general investigator with an interest in health and integrity - I can say that I have regularly been pointed to and found studies on 'both sides' of this controversy which have been found to be seriously lacking or blatantly fraudulent. What I have learned is that the general standard of science across the board of the vast number of papers that are regularly published can often be too low to give those papers any standing. There are some peer review board members who openly state that they themselves no longer value the peer review system as it is so corrupted with people being bought off and other issues.
All that said, I find it curious that a group would falsify results that are 'anti-vaccine' (in some senses), since there typically isn't much money to be made in doing so.. Unless the idea here is that the fruit and veg growers of the world have bought off some scientists to deceive us into dangerously empowering our own immune system with higher levels of nutritional intake. There are a few other possibilities that come to mind too.
The square block of grey on the image that is alleged to have been tampered with does look like a deliberate insertion - however, JPEG artifacts can be odd at times and I found that when I analysed the image by adjusting light/dark levels - the block was not a pure block of the same tone of grey - rather it actually does have artifacts in it too. These could have been the result of JPEG compression being applied when the image was uploaded to the web though. We would need to access the original image to find that out.
Given that this post represents an accusation of scientific misconduct and possibly fraud - what steps are being taken to expose this to those who may take action?
I would also like to know.
Falsifying results to confirm your a priori assumptions in a published paper is a good method (if it fails to be recognized by the referees) to get grab of further grants to sustain your position.
Seems unlikely that it is a JPEG compression artifact since it appears at EXACTLY the right spot for them to make their conclusions.
As this Ex VP of Pfizer (giant pharma corporation) makes clear - it is almost exclusively the case that such manipulation of science is the result of bribes from pharma corporations. There would need to be an investigation of who was offering grants for continuation of the work of the researchers.
I don't know how it works in Canada, but in Germany most academic researchers get their grants from governmental and privately funded (donation-based) charity organizations.
The level of subterfuge involved means that it is not always obvious on the surface where money is coming from - 'charities' are notoriously corrupt and a favourite vehicle for a variety of frauds. That said, I don't know anything about funding of research in Germany.
I don't know either way - I would accept that it was deliberate fraud, but I always remain open in the face of the unknown. We could flip the logic around and say 'it's likely to be a JPEG compression artefact, since the square appears at EXACTLY the right spot for it appear to be fraud science' - without a full investigation I think there is an element of this that is effected by pre-existing bias.
This is by far not the only flaw of the study, @irime only touched the tip of the iceberg. You could write two equally long articles about the other issues. I am surprised how this paper went through peer-review as this. Likely, the selected referees (probably only two) were not fit enough to judge it as the methods of the study are not much related to inorganic biochemistry.
The authors wrote a whole review supporting their view and their view only while the data they actually present is rather scarce and weak even if assumed they didn't fake any results.
Fair enough - if that is the case then it should be taken as a general warning about blindly trusting the accuracy of published scientific studies, in general - as much as with this specific study and topic. I have seen many cases where studies were exposed to be nonsense and they were often the ones being used to promote the mainstream medical positions - including the pro-vaccine ones.
Yes, each time a dubious study like this is published, the reputation of scientifically obtained results and the trust into the self-regulatory apparatus of the scientific community is undermined further.
I agree and after many years of investigating all manner of frauds and criminal behaviour that weakens humanity, I can say that the old Roman Court method of asking 'Who benefits?' is valid.
Who really benefits from filling the human mind space with false information?
The benefit for researchers looking for grants is relatively small in comparison to the benefits they would gain from doing real research that benefits humanity - so if this really is a case of researcher greed/fraud just for grants, then these 'researchers' must be among the most limited of thinkers around.. Given that the risks are high for them, I question that this was the real motive.
I would very much like to see a real, independent investigation into this that is thorough and transparent - but I won't hold my breath. Like it or not, the vested interests and massive money involved in the 'scientific research' arena means that completely pure actions that are untainted by anyone within the system appear to be quite rare.
I'm a computer engineer and I have studied, among other things, digital image and video processing and I can assure without any doubt that no JPEG or other image compression technique can present that kind of compression artifact.
If you are really trying to say that, not only you are wrong, but you are delusional.
I am also a computer engineer and I have also studied these topics - as I said, I can completely accept that this is a case of fraud science and I am not judging that this definitely is a compression artefact. I am though, aware that compression artefacts do not always conform to expectation and since you can clearly see some artefacts within the image after level adjustment, in the interests of a thorough investigation - the original image should be sought.
How would you prove that no compression algorithm can or would produce such an outcome?
Have a look at the algorithms then. It is not possible for artifact to produce such big artifacts. What they can do (and in fact you can see them in the images above) is to introduce noise around the edges or small blocks near areas of the image with many different colors due to the quantization step that tries to reduce to much the number of colors to compress the image more.
Artifact should be consistent on the same image. Look at the image. There are lot of artifacts because it has probably been zoomed and compressed quite badly. How can it be that a perfect rectangle appears exactly where it is needed (how convenient) and it has no artifact around its borders?
I don't understand if you are kidding and just like to start useless and meaningless discussion, or if you are serious.
Provide me with an image of your choose and settings for the JPEG compression (or other standards if you prefer) that produce similar results as the ones in the article, and I will believe that you may be right.
It is true that I have not looked at the actual compression algorithms, but it is also true that it is typical for proprietary algorithms to be used by software that is not in the public domain, so I have no way of knowing if the algorithms that I look at are the same as might be used by someone else.
I have no intention to start meaningless discussion - I have simply been involved in some forensic examination of images previously where artefacts were shown to have been created which did not conform in any way to expectations of the investigators - yet they were there.
I am not saying you are wrong, I am just saying that for my own preference, if I were examining this, in the interests of being thorough and not jumping to conclusions (since jumping to conclusions is the single most common cause of human dysfunction that I am aware of) - I would be looking for the original image before personally saying that I was sure either way. I have no problem with you being sure without such investigation - we all have our own parameters for the levels of investigation we will accept of such things before we will consider something to be proven.
Wauw, I also thought JPEG artifacts but not that obvious, well done. I must say after reading all through the article and comments there's good work being done but that bias is prevalent.
@ura-soul and @kafkaanarchy84:
As I wrote at the bottom of my article, I am not the first person to write a rebuttal of this article, and these researchers have been previously flagged for engaging in scientific misconduct and reporting fraudulent results.
Therefore, a quick search for the articles of these authors by those who could be considering using it as a reference would reveal that this information is not trustworthy. Furthermore, in the case of someone with some training in experimental Molecular Biology, like myself, it is very obvious that the methods used are substandard and the experiments are poorly designed, to begin with.
What I don't get is if they were deliberately trying to doctor their Western blot because of the results, why did they not just run another blot and forget to put their primers in to get zero signal rather then do a hack job of cutting and pasting digitally. I personally don't know what to make of the square as it looks unique with fairly smooth edges however it is not uniform itself either.
Who's to say that its the authors who tampered with the image? How many other people did the image go through in order to get published? But that is just the irrational conspiracy theorist in me possibly looking to get a reaction.
Something that we haven't really talked about, assuming that the data is real, is the fact that there was some neuroinflammation in the brain as a result of stimulating the immune system distally. While it doesn't prove a link to autism, it also commonly has neuroinflammation in the brain.
Also @irime I didn't see any studies in the "bonus link" which even mention aluminum so i don't see how you can say it is evidence for aluminum being safe.