Upstate Medical University researcher fabricated data to benefit his own company

October 10, 2013

UPDATE!!

Stem cell scientist says data in retracted paper “is not falsified or fabricated”

=========================

Researchers are not angels.

Just normal human behaviour from a man in a white coat.

GeroldFeuer2.jpg

Gerold Feuer, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Upstate Medical University

Syracuse.com:

A scientific journal has retracted a study by an Upstate Medical University researcher accused of using fake data.

The paper was authored by Gerold Feuer, who was found guilty last year of using state money and employees to benefit his private biotechnology company.

The article, first published in 2008, was retracted Oct. 4 by the journal Stem Cells. It focused on a virus that causes cancer in humans.

The retraction notice was published today by Retraction Watch, a blog that reports on retractions of scientific papers. The notice said the article was retracted after an investigation by Upstate’s research misconduct committee showed data used in the study had been “fabricated and/or falsified.”

Feuer, 53, of the town of Onondaga, landed $6.2 million in state grants in 2009 for stem cell research at Upstate. He oversaw a lab that bred mice without immune systems, then “humanized” them with stem cells to mimic the human immune systems. The mice are used in research studies.

Upstate suspended Feuer without pay in late 2010 while investigating his management of a research contract and the way he was operating his lab at Upstate. In 2008 Feuer had started his own private company to develop the same kind of mice for use in testing by universities and companies.

Upstate brought 53 charges of misconduct against Feuer, accusing him of using Upstate’s employees to perform services for his company and charging the cost to a state grant.

An arbitrator reviewed the case and in an Aug. 20, 2012 decision found Feuer guilty of 30 of the 53 misconduct charges. But the arbitrator said Feuer never intended to personally profit from the arrangement and should be reinstated.

Upstate reinstated Feuer, a tenured professor of microbiology and immunology, Feb. 18 at an annual salary of $116,196 and placed him in an undisclosed off-campus assignment.
It’s unknown what effect the latest misconduct finding will have on his employment status, said Darryl Geddes, an Upstate spokesman.

Upstate officials said they completed a separate investigation in April that found Feuer and Prabal Banerjee, a co-author of the paper, guilty of scientific misconduct. Banerjee now works for Feuer’s company, HuMurine Technologies Inc. Upstate officials said two other researchers involved in the study, Michelle Sieburg and Elizabeth Samuelson, did not do anything wrong.

Upstate has requested retractions of two other papers by Feuer published in other journals.

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Posted in Academic misconduct, Behaviour, scientific misconduct | 1 Comment »

Some Nobel prizes are quite base

October 10, 2013

Now we come to the less important Nobel Prizes; Literature today, Peace tomorrow and Economics on Monday. I see a clear hierarchy of “nobility” for the 6 awards:

  1. Medicine or Physiology
  2. Chemistry
  3. Physics
  4. Literature
  5. Economics, and
  6. Peace.

The first two still remain fairly true to Alfred Nobel’s intentions. I put Medicine on a higher plane of “nobility” than Chemistry but would have no great quarrel with the order being reversed. Physics definitely has become less “noble”. The whole field has been somewhat degraded by the advent of Big Science and the use of massive “sledgehammers” to try and hammer the universe into submission. But this approach only gives incremental (and often infinitesimal) advances and represent no breakthroughs in thought. I suspect that the real advances will still come from individuals and not by the bureaucratic approach to Big Science where the concept seems to be that advances are directly proportional to the amount of money spent.

I used to believe in the Literature Prize but of late it has become a little subservient to political correctness.

The two “base” prizes with little trace of any nobility are those for Economics and for Peace. Economics is more about social behaviour and there is very little “science” about it. Economic theories have – at best – been of short lived utility.  At worst they have led to global crises.

The Peace prize, of course, has just become a nonsense and brings disgrace to Nobel’s intentions.

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From a sublime “Dreamliner” to the ridiculous

October 10, 2013

Nightmares (for Boeing) are made of this:

Reuters: Japan Airlines Co was forced to turn around its Tokyo-bound flight from Moscow on Thursday due to a problem in the Boeing 787 jet’s lavatory, a spokesman for the Japanese carrier said. … 

JAL spokesman Takuya Shimoguchi said the toilet malfunction on the flight from Moscow was likely caused by an electronic glitch. The airline was working on repairs on the ground, he added.

The flight, carrying 141 passengers, departed Moscow on Wednesday evening and returned after about five hours, he said.

Shares in JAL, which made headlines this week by signing with Boeing rival Airbus for the next generation of long-haul jets, were up 2.1 percent on Thursday morning, outperforming the broader market.

Updated 10th October:

BBC: 

Japan Airlines (JAL) says it has turned around two of its Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft during flights due to technical problems.

On one plane one of the two anti-ice systems, which prevent ice building up around the engine, failed.

Meanwhile, an electrical glitch made six toilets unusable on another flight.

These are the latest technical issues to hit the Dreamliner, which saw the entire fleet being grounded earlier this year following battery problems.

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Oh Rapture! Global Warming doomsday will come in 2047 (if Apophis does not come first)

October 10, 2013

Rapture in 2047!.

A peer reviewed paper in Nature that Camping would be proud of!

Global Warming “science” is now reduced to this. An end-of-the-world prediction from Global Warmists for 2047 now must be added to the long list of Doomsday predictions none of which – so-far – have come to pass.

Camilo Mora, Abby G. Frazier, Ryan J. Longman, Rachel S. Dacks, Maya M. Walton, Eric J. Tong, Joseph J. Sanchez, Lauren R. Kaiser, Yuko O. Stender, James M. Anderson, Christine M. Ambrosino, Iria Fernandez-Silva, Louise M. Giuseffi, Thomas W. Giambelluca. The projected timing of climate departure from recent variability. Nature, 2013; 502 (7470): 183 DOI: 10.1038/nature12540

AP:Starting in about a decade, Kingston, Jamaica, will probably be off-the-charts hot — permanently. Other places will soon follow. Singapore in 2028. Mexico City in 2031. Cairo in 2036. Phoenix and Honolulu in 2043.

And eventually the whole world in 2047.

  • Harold Camping predicted the ending of the world and the Day of Rapture – three times – and has now retired in confusion.
  • Teacher Wang predicted the end of the world on 11th May 2011.
  • The Mayan Doomsday should have happened in 2012.
  • A prediction by Kenton Beshore is that Rapture will occur no later than 2021
  • Another Doomsday has been predicted for 13th April 2036 when asteroid Apophis could hit earth.
  • Global Warming Doomsday (this prediction) is set for 2047.
  • If that does not occur then Isaac Newton’s prediction based on his studies of the Bible is set for 2060.
  • According to James Kasting, Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere will not support life in the year 500,000,000.
  • So-called scientists have attempted to use statistics and the Doomsday Argument to calculate when Doomsday will come based on how many people have lived and how many are left to live!
  • A list of predicted Doomsday dates (past and future) is here.

But this Global Warming Doomsday is real.

A Press Release from on High has been issued:

“WE are living and dying in difficult times” said GOD. “WE can no longer support four establishments just for humanity. There are many other priorities in the Universe WE need to consider and address.

The cost of maintaining a separate Hell and the increasing cost of Energy is getting prohibitive – especially since the liability for maintaining high temperatures stretches through Eternity. WE are therefore merging Purgatory with Heaven and Hell with Earth.  The mergers will be completed by 2047. The regions on Earth with the greatest number of Sinners will be heated up to Hell-like temperatures first and by 2047 the entire Earth would have reached the status of Hell. Wind-power and solar-power are insufficient to this Purpose. We shall be making increased use of Fossil Fuels and Greenhouse Power.

Since the majority of those living are Sinners and destined for Hell anyway, this will also ease the logistics of moving the few Worthy humans to Heaven”.

An intrepid journalist from AP (SB) asked the Lord whether a new Glacial Age on earth could subvert His Plans. “That is not a problem” said God. “We have arranged for temperature to be a cyclic parameter just like politics. Increasing temperatures and reducing temperature shall only form a circular process. Infinite heat can be equated to infinite cold. We shall arrange that when Glaciation is necessary It shall be perceived by gullible Global Warmists as the burning Fires of Hell”.

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Heated dispute within Nobel Committee delayed the Physics prize

October 9, 2013

I observed yesterday that the delay in awarding the Nobel prize in Physics could have been due to some committee members wanting to award the prize also to CERN. That supposition seems to have been correct. The PR apparatus of the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN is responsible for a lot of hype based on a somewhat inflated opinion of the organisation. They have been lobbying hard for over a year for the Physics Nobel. The PR and lobbying by CERN had clearly got to at least one member of the award committee (Anders Bárány). His view was rejected and he is now complaining that the award was “unfair”

And despite all the PR spin and all the hype they have not yet found the Higgs particle. And there are more questions left to be answered than ever before.

Big Science hype to keep Big Science funding going arouses my suspicions. For an organisation like ATLAS or CMS or CERN to have been named would have been a travesty. Almost at the level of naming the EU or the IPCC for a Peace Prize.

Fortunately good sense prevailed and the Physics prize still maintains some brand value – which the Peace Prize has lost.

Svenska Dagbladet reports (my free translation):

There was a major altercation between the members that postponed yesterday’s announcement of the Nobel Prize in Physics was postponed by over an hour according to Vetenskapsradion . Before the vote, several members questioned why no part of the award was for the two laboratories which had detected the Higgs particle.

One of those objecting was Mr Anders Bárány who wanted more than just theorists  Peter Higgs and Francois Englert to be rewarded  rather than the two research teams , ATLAS and CMS being merely mentioned in the Academy of Sciences press release.

“I think it is extremely unfair. It is the first time that the explanatory text has made such a mention. I do not think they should be happy with it “, he said to Vetenskapsradion.

Peter Higgs and Francois Englert  were praised for their discoveries about the Higgs particle – but other heavyweight Higgs scientists, Carl Hagen, Gerald Guralnik and Tom Kibble were excluded. Their names had been mentioned in preliminary discussions on the physics prize, because they are considered to have made ​​significant finds around the particle around the same time as Higgs and Englert.

Carl Hagen, admitted yesterday that he was disappointed at the Academy’s decision. “The wind went out of me, of course, a little bit because the Swedish Academy of Sciences decided to stick with their old rule of three winners. It is not a true picture of how things are , but I congratulate Higgs and Englert , they must be very pleased”, Hagen said to TT.

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Posted in Behaviour, Physics, Science, Sweden | 1 Comment »

Svante Pääbo an outsider for the Chemistry Nobel today

October 9, 2013

I leave it to real Chemists – such as here – to make predictions. And one can always fall-back on Thomson Reuters who correctly predicted the Physics prize yesterday:

CHEMISTRY

A. Paul Alivisatos  and Chad A. Mirkin and Nadrian C. Seeman
For contributions to DNA nanotechnology

Bruce N. Ames
For the invention of the Ames test of mutagenicity

M.G. Finn and Valery V. Fokin and K. Barry Sharpless
For the development of modular click chemistry

But based on a throw-away comment by somebody on Swedish Radio this morning and based on my interest in paleo-anthropology, Svante Pääbo may be an outside bet. He is a participant in Nobel Week in December and this bio is from there:

Svante Pääbo

A Swedish biologist specializing in evolutionary genetics, Dr Svante Pääbo investigates ways that the archaic genome can be explored to understand our own history better.

Svante Pääbo has developed technical approaches that allow DNA sequences from extinct creatures such as mammoths, ground sloths and Neandertals to be determined. He also works on the comparative genomics of humans, extinct hominins and apes, particularly the evolution of gene activity and genetic changes that may underlie aspects of traits specific to humans such as speech and language.

In 2010, his group determined the first Neandertal genome sequence and described Denisovans, a sister group of Neandertals, based on a genome sequence determined from a small bone found inSiberia.

Pääbo has received four honorary doctorates and several scientific prizes and is a member of numerous academies. He is currently a Director at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and a Guest Professor at the University of Uppsala, Sweden.

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In a democracy, oppositions must oppose, governments must govern

October 9, 2013

I was listening yesterday to President Obama’s press conference where he accused the Republicans of “extortion”.

“But I also told him that having such a conversation, talks, negotiations shouldn’t require hanging the threats of a government shutdown or economic chaos over the heads of the American people. …. 

….. members of Congress, and the House Republicans in particular, don’t get to demand ransom in exchange for doing their jobs. And two of their very basic jobs are passing a budget and making sure that America’s paying its bills. They don’t also get to say, you know, unless you give me what the voters rejected in the last election, I’m going to cause a recession.

…. So let me explain this. If Congress refuses to raise what’s called the debt ceiling, America would not be able to meet all of our financial obligations for the first time in 225 years.”

He sounded petulant. It sounded like “Give me back my ball” to me.

But the fundamental foundation of any democracy is that ruling parties govern, to the extent that they have the ability and as they may be constrained by the opposition. It is a fundamental of preventing excesses by a majority against a minority that oppositions oppose to the best of their ability. Oppositions must oppose as best they can. Governments must govern given such opposition. It is the task of government to make the compromises necessary to be able to govern. And the bottom line is that the Republicans in the House are opposing and that Obama and his Democrats are failing to govern.

I certainly don’t know enough about the issues involved to have any decided opinions. But I do think that the US debt is an indicator of many years of profligacy. Obamacare itself may be a wonderful thing but the opposition in the House don’t think so. Passing any budget (and it is actually approving an increase of a debt limit) cannot just be a formality where the ruling party merely gets its way and the opposition knuckles under. One could argue that passing a “balanced budget” is some kind of a fiduciary responsibility of the representatives but this is not such a question. It is for the passing of a grossly “unbalanced budget” and to, thereby, increase the national debt.

So when an opposition does what it is supposed to and succeeds in opposing any measure proposed by a ruling party, it is actually evidence of a failure to govern. There can be no failure of the responsibility of the opposition to oppose.

What Obama seems to be complaining about is that he has not the ability to find the compromises to be able to overcome the opposition!

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Genetic study shows Ashkenazi Jews descend from men from the Levant and their European wives

October 8, 2013

Social distinctions between Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews. and the Ashkenazim still persist and of course the Ethiopian Jews are a class apart. This latest study published in Nature Communications which shows that the Ashkenazim derive from male ancestors from the Levant who moved to Europe and took local women as wives will not be without its detractors.

Marta D. Costa, Joana B. Pereira, Maria Pala, Verónica Fernandes, Anna Olivieri, Alessandro Achilli, Ugo A. Perego, Sergei Rychkov, Oksana Naumova, Jiři Hatina, Scott R. Woodward, Ken Khong Eng, Vincent Macaulay, Martin Carr, Pedro Soares, Luísa Pereira and Martin B. Richards, A substantial prehistoric European ancestry amongst Ashkenazi maternal lineages, Nature Communications 4, Article number: 2543, doi:10.1038/ncomms3543

Abstract:The origins of Ashkenazi Jews remain highly controversial. Like Judaism, mitochondrial DNA is passed along the maternal line. Its variation in the Ashkenazim is highly distinctive, with four major and numerous minor founders. However, due to their rarity in the general population, these founders have been difficult to trace to a source. Here we show that all four major founders, ~40% of Ashkenazi mtDNA variation, have ancestry in prehistoric Europe, rather than the Near East or Caucasus. Furthermore, most of the remaining minor founders share a similar deep European ancestry. Thus the great majority of Ashkenazi maternal lineages were not brought from the Levant, as commonly supposed, nor recruited in the Caucasus, as sometimes suggested, but assimilated within Europe. These results point to a significant role for the conversion of women in the formation of Ashkenazi communities, and provide the foundation for a detailed reconstruction of Ashkenazi genealogical history.

There is a belief that all Ashkanazim are descended from just 4 women who migrated to Europe but this study contradicts that. The NYT reports that some opposition to the results is already evident:

….. The finding establishes that the women who founded the Ashkenazi Jewish community of Europe were not from the Near East, as previously supposed, and reinforces the idea that many Jewish communities outside Israel were founded by single men who married and converted local women.

The study, published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, is based on a genetic analysis of maternal lineages. A team led by Martin B. Richards of the University of Leeds in England took a fresh look at Ashkenazi lineages by decoding the entire mitochondrial genomes of people from Europe and the Near East. ….

This uncertainty seemed to be resolved by a survey published in 2006. Its authors reported that the four most common mitochondrial DNA lineages among Ashkenazis came from the Near East, implying that just four Jewish women were the ancestresses of nearly half of today’s Ashkenazim. Under this scenario, it seemed more likely that the Ashkenazim were the result of a migration of whole communities of men and women together. ….

With the entire mitochondrial genome in hand, Dr. Richards could draw up family trees with a much finer resolution than before. His trees show that the four major Ashkenazi lineages in fact form clusters within descent lines that were established in Europe some 10,000 to 20,000 years ago. The same is true of most of the minor lineages.

“Thus the great majority of Ashkenazi maternal lineages were not brought from the Levant, as commonly supposed,” Dr. Richards and colleagues conclude in their paper. Overall, at least 80 percent of Ashkenazi maternal ancestry comes from women indigenous to Europe, and 8 percent from the Near East, with the rest uncertain, the researchers estimate. …

Dr. Richards estimates that the four major lineages became incorporated into the Ashkenazi community at least 2,000 years ago. A large Jewish community flourished in Rome at this time and included many converts. This community could have been the source of both the Ashkenazim of Europe and the Sephardim of Spain and Portugal, given that the two groups have considerable genetic commonality, Dr. Richards said.

EurekAlert: In the vast majority of cases, Ashkenazi lineages are most closely related to southern and western European lineages – and that these lineages have been present in Europe for many thousands of years.

This means that, even though Jewish men may indeed have migrated into Europe from Palestine around 2000 years ago, they brought few or no wives with them. They seem to have married with European women, firstly along the Mediterranean, especially in Italy, and later (but probably to a lesser extent) in western and central Europe. This suggests that, in the early years of the Diaspora, Judaism took in many converts from amongst the European population, but they were mainly recruited from amongst women. Thus, on the female line of descent, the Ashkenazim primarily trace their ancestry neither to Palestine nor to Khazaria, but to southern and western Europe.

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Posted in Europe, Evolution, Israel | 2 Comments »

Physics Nobel today – Higgs? but (hopefully) not CERN! Update – awarded to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs

October 8, 2013

UPDATE 2!

There is more speculation doing the rounds as to why the awards were delayed by one hour.

There are some suggestions that this time was used to kill the ridiculous notion of having CERN – the organisation – as the third award winner! If that was the reason then it was time well spent!

The deliberations of the awards committee will not be released for 50 years.

=============================================

UPDATE!

The Physics Nobel award has been awarded to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs

NO CERN thankfully.

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  • 106 Nobel Prizes in Physics have been awarded between 1901-2012.
  • 47 Physics Prizes have been given to one Laureate only.
  • 2 women have been awarded the Physics Prize so far.
  • 1 person, John Bardeen, has been awarded the Physics Prize twice.
  • 25 years was the age of the youngest Physics Laureate ever, Lawrence Bragg, when he was awarded the 1915 Physics Prize together with his father.
  • 55 is the average age of the Physics Laureates the year they were awarded the prize.

==============================================

The speculation this morning on Swedish Radio is that the Higgs Boson will be recognised. There was some speculation that Higgs himself could lose out but that CERN – as an organisation – could be a winner. I hope not. The Radio commentators all seem to have the impression that the Higgs particle was discovered by CERN last year. But my understanding is that nothing was actually found. Something – not inconsistent with a Higgs particle – was indicated and the Higgs particle was “tentatively confirmed to exist on 14 March 2013” (though “tentative” and “confirmation” is a contradiction in terms).

In any event, I think the Nobel should stick to individuals and not go the way of the discredited Peace Prize and name an organisation like CERN. Professor Higgs would be acceptable even though it would be preferable to wait – but not CERN.

We shall see. (The announcement is due in about 3 hours).

Thomson Reuters predictions:

PHYSICS

François Englert and Peter W. Higgs
For their prediction of the Brout-Englert-Higgs boson

Hideo Hosono
For his discovery of iron-based superconductors

Geoffrey W. Marcy and Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz
For their discoveries of extrasolar planets

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Posted in Physics, Science, Sweden | 1 Comment »

2013 was a “good” year for the cryosphere – but could it be the beginning of the end of this interglacial?

October 8, 2013

According to the NSIDC – which is an important part of orthodox officialdom – 2013 was a better year for the cryosphere since:

“This summer, Arctic sea ice loss was held in check by relatively cool and stormy conditions. As a result, 2013 saw substantially more ice at summer’s end, compared to last year’s record low extent. The Greenland Ice Sheet also showed less extensive surface melt than in 2012. Meanwhile, in the Antarctic, sea ice reached the highest extent recorded in the satellite record”.

What makes for “good” or “bad” depends upon what the fears are. If global warming is the fear then – as the NSIDC states – it was a good year. But if a cooling cycle or even a coming ice age is the fear then the increasing ice extent, the short summer, the extended winter last year and the increased snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere are all just early warning signs of what is to come.

We don’t know if we are in:

  1. a run-away global warming period (as the global warming orthodoxy will have us believe), or
  2. a series of global warming and cooling cycles, each about 20 – 30 years long and responding to the decadal ocean cycles, or
  3. the beginning of the end of this interglacial (which is overdue).

The global warming pause of the last 17 – 18 years suggests that “run-away” global warming is unlikely. The slight decrease in global temperatures over the last 7 – 8 years is not conclusive but is also evidence that the effect of increasing carbon dioxide on global temperature is far from certain. Even if it exists it is very small  and is clearly not yet properly understood. Catastrophe scenarios may attract funding but reduce the credibility of the doom-sayers.

If we are just in a regular cooling cycle then the increasing ice level is nothing to be afraid of. Even if 2 or 3 decades of cooling give us another Little Ice Age, it will be followed by a warming cycle. It will not necessarily mean the start of the end of the current interglacial. But it will mean 20 – 30 years of cooling and the increased use of fossil fuels will be required. Fracking and methane hydrate recovery from the deep sea will be needed along with the continued – and increased – mining of coal. Wind and solar energy can play their little part in the niches that they are suitable for. Nuclear energy will have to make a come-back.

But if the Earth is now responding – by mechanisms unknown – to the Milankovitch cycles – and has started its many thousands year journey into glacial conditions, then we would be well served by developing the strategies and technologies for prospering in such times. We will gradually lose habitat in the North to growing ice sheets but we will gain new habitat as the sea level sinks. But these changes will take place over many generations (50 – 100) and we will have time to adapt. One lost generation – as the last 20 years of global warming hysteria will be – will be of little consequence. Humans have lived and prospered through glacial conditions before and will again. One big difference will be the availability of affordable and abundant energy which gives us the ability – not to stop the advance of the ice sheets – but to be able to continue to access resources and minerals under the ice sheets. We may even have colonies living on top of the shallower ice sheets. But there will also be new opportunities. The increase of habitat as the sea levels drop (by upto 150m) will be in exceptionally fertile areas for food production. Mineral and energy resources currently under the sea will become even more accessible. As with the last glacial period it will probably be a period in which human ingenuity is challenged and innovation will flourish.

The coming of a new glacial period will be no catastrophic change. We will have plenty of time to adapt. And in the 1,000 or 2,000 years it will take to establish glacial conditions, humans will probably have found new frontiers and established new colonies in space. And in 50 or 100 generation humans will continue to evolve. The humans coming out of the next glacial will not be quite like us.

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