Last week, Think Gene published an editorial (“Tweaking” Experimental Data, Josh Hill, 5.20.08 ) about the gross prevalence of “photoshopping” experimental data in scientific research.

Knock on wood, Kristin Roovers, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, was recently busted for dishonestly manipulating data to get published. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports:

But when an editor of The Journal of Clinical Investigation did a spot-check of one of her images for an article in 2005, Roovers’s research proved a little too perfect.

The image had dark bands on it, supposedly showing different proteins in different conditions. “As we looked at it, we realized the person had cut and pasted the exact same bands” over and over again, says Ushma S. Neill, the journal’s executive editor. In some cases a copied part of the image had been flipped or reversed to make it look like a new finding. “The closer we took a look, the more we were convinced that the data had been fabricated or manipulated in order to support the conclusions.”

…

“This is one of the dirty little secrets—that everybody massages the data like this,” says Mr. Farid, a computer-science professor at Dartmouth College who has been working with journal editors to help them detect image manipulation… Yet changing some pixels for the sake of “clarity” can actually change an image’s scientific meaning.

I have created a commemorative “Shoop’d Edition” cover of Nature for the occasion, included above. Enjoy!