Quote:
Originally Posted by uke_master
By the way, if he thinks she suppressed and plaigarized his work, then he should write to the journals that published the papers. If there is sufficient evidence the process is to retract these papers. There is a mechanism to fight exactly this, so I'm hardly going to take his claims at face value if he hasn't done this.
This is orthogonal to the actual argument, but I am interested how it may play out, so I will elaborate further what he claims happened (at least as well as I can remember)
1. He claims as a grad student he listened to a lecture given by a cancer researcher on telomere end shortening in somatic cells following each mitotic division and wondered whether this might be proof of concept of a mechanism of an evolutionary adaptation against cancer.
2. He looks into the science further and discovers that the scientific literature claims mice have unusual long telomeres. This knowledge is based entirely on study of Jackson mice.
3. He wonders if mice don't actually have unusually long telomeres, and if this is a product of artificial selection in Jackson laboratories.
4. He calls Carol Greider, who is the leading expert in telomere research, and asks if she knows if this may be the case. She says she doesn't, but agrees it is an interesting question and will assign one of her grad students to look into it. She confirms that they looked at another strain of mice, and it did have significantly shorter telomeres.
5. He goes on to write a draft of a conceptual paper outlining his theories based on this information. He sends a draft to Carol Greider to look at. He says she completely pans it with critiques he did not find reasonable. (He says he still has the copy of the paper and her critiques).
Here is a link to the abstract of the final paper. Note, this is not the version that he sent to Greider.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11909679
6. He submits the paper and it is sent out for blind peer review. He says one of the reviewers was especially harsh and in his opinion their critiques were unreasonable. He suspects it was Greider but has no way of knowing. He tells the journal he feels the critiques were unreasonable and asks them to adjudicate. They respond by accepting his paper for publication without addressing the critiques at all. He says this is an extremely unusual process and leads him to believe the journal agreed the critiques were unreasonable.
7. He goes on with his life, and later discovers Greider published a paper documenting that Jackson mice had shortened telomeres relative to another strain of laboratory mice. He is not acknowledged at all on this paper.
8. At all points in the process, he feels his very real concerns of the implications for Jackson mice (which at this time are the mice being used for all biomedical research) having artificially elongated telomeres is not being addressed adequately by the research community and there may be something more sinister behind The antagonism to his concerns.
Last edited by Kelhus999; 01-31-2020 at 11:16 AM.