The incredible eyes of Elisabeth Bik: How pattern-matching exposes scientific fraud

14 November 2022

As I am in the early- to middle-part of my COVID infection, I've decided that my contribution this week is essentially a redirection to a New York Times Opinion piece by Dr. Elisabeth Bik. Dr. Bik is a microbiologist at Stanford University and the Dutch National Institute for Health with a better-than-average ability to detect patterns. While the NYT article makes it seem that she is the sort who reads scientific papers for fun, her special talent has not made her popular with some of her peers. Her particular skill is identifying image manipulation, whereby photos of blots, agar plates, bacteria from one experiment are flipped, stretched, or cropped to give the appearance of a proven hypothesis or novel finding. Admittedly, Bik doesn't just rely on her eyes for this task. Like other sleuths she utilises software to do some of the work for her, specifically the freely available 29a.ch, but argues that human eyes are still needed to weed out the false positives.