He hunts sloppy scientists. It finds a lot of prey.

Are you done hunting scientists for the day?

I haven't had time today. But if I spent a few hours reading articles, I would probably write four or five comments about errors in scientific articles. It's not hard to find these problems, and it's not hard to find them at any institution. They can all be found if anyone wants to read the scientific literature.

What motivates you to spend time on it?

I'm not an anti-vaxxer, I'm not a mindless conspirator or anything like that. I am a scientist myself and I think it is important that the science is good.

Part of your focus is on images that are mislabeled, or used twice in a newspaper, but as evidence for different things, lazily cut and pasted from one place to another. Is there an easy way to tell an image is wrong?

You just have to look at the photo and read the labels. For example, if you look at a microscopic image of cells, you will see the position, location, orientation, and shape of the cells. And if you look at another photo of cells and they're all in the same position, with the same shape and orientation, you know this is the same image, right? It is not a complicated process.

You also discovered errors in Western blots. What are those?

This is a type of scientific experiment used to identify and quantify specific proteins. The images are important in many scientific articles. They look gray in the background and have black bands. If you look at them very closely, you can usually tell if it's a copy and paste job or not. These things aren't always obvious to people who don't watch a lot of western blots.

Let's turn to Dana-Farber. After finding errors in several of the researchers' articles, what conclusion do you draw about the scientific methods of that leading institute?

It is important to remember that Dana-Farber researchers publish many papers. But they're still a lot of mistakes, and they happened over a long period of time. This tells me that for a long time people haven't paid enough attention to getting the basics right. How many careless mistakes can top institutions make? There are probably not many. I think most people expect that Harvard scientists don't make copy-and-paste mistakes very often.