Recently, a young women with whom I’m acquainted (who tends not to have time/interest in explaining science to me) has gotten involved in a public battle over the authenticity of ‘Western Blots’ and speculation that an up-and-coming publicly-traded BioTech ‘startup’ and, specifically, their lead scientist, faked the blots in major scientific publications in order to try and show that the candidate drug is effective.
As a layperson I find the writing about Western Blots online to be confusion and would love to read a simple explanation of what they are, why they’re important and how they could be ‘faked’.
The drug company is already being compared to Theranos so it seems quite interesting to understand the controversy.
Google is your friend. From here.
What is a western blot?
“The term “blotting” refers to the transfer of biological samples from a gel to a membrane and their subsequent detection on the surface of the membrane. A western blot experiment, or western blotting (also called immunoblotting, because an antibody is used to specifically detect its antigen) was introduced by Towbin, et al. in 1979 and is now a routine technique for protein analysis. The specificity of the antibody-antigen interaction enables a target protein to be identified in the midst of a complex protein mixture. Western blotting can produce qualitative and semi-quantitative data about the protein of interest.”
Any test result can be faked if no one is looking close enough.
Simply speaking, Western blots are when you blot a protein sample on a gel, run an electric current through it, which makes all the proteins run down the gel according to their size and charge, transfer the proteins from the gel to a membrane. Then you probe the membrane with an antibody specific to your protein of interest, ans you develop the membrane by different means (radiation, chemiluminescence, or other) onto film (or these days you can directly image if you have the right machine), where you get a visible band at showing your protein. The size of the band can be a quantitative measure of how much of your protein you have in the gel if it’s properly calibrated.
There important because they are physical evidence of how much of a specific protein you have in your experiment. We run Westerns on a daily basis in my lab.
As to how they’re faked, photoshop is the most common way. Easy to see if you’re looking for it. Harder to tell is if you run a blot against some other protein and present that blot as the real one.
Here is a recent image (see here for source) purporting to show just a bit of the fraudulent activity of the scientist in question. Can anyone help me understand what accusations are being made?
The bands highlighted in the red box are vertical, not horizontal. This suggests that they are are all derived from a single sample (where there are multiple bands) rather than single bands from 4 different samples.
It’s likely a fake, but not the clearest example of it to a non-specialist.
Here’s a better example, where the bands purporting to come from different samples are clear duplications.
Or on another sample than what you claim.
Truth be told if you want to cheat at science its not to hard (outside of clinical trials). Peer review pretty much works on the honor system of assuming that the researchers did what they said. But after you publish an amazing finding to burnish your reputation, other people are going to try to build off your success and if none of them get the same results that you did, then you will lose all of the prestige you gained and then some.