Just another snowflake of potential fraud in the avalanche of corruption being revealed in this Great Awakening.
A snippet from the end of the article:
Despite finding false data and manipulated images, Rollins pressed that it doesn't necessarily mean that scientific misconduct occurred, and the institute has not yet made such a determination. The "presence of image discrepancies in a paper is not evidence of an author's intent to deceive," Rollins wrote. "That conclusion can only be drawn after a careful, fact-based examination which is an integral part of our response. Our experience is that errors are often unintentional and do not rise to the level of misconduct."
The very simple methods used to manipulate the DFCI data are remarkably common among falsified scientific studies, however. Data sleuths have gotten better and better at spotting such lazy manipulations, including copied-and-pasted duplicates that are sometimes rotated and adjusted for size, brightness, and contrast. As Ars recently reported, all journals from the publisher Science now use an AI-powered tool to spot just this kind of image recycling because it is so common.
I'm sorry. I've written papers. There's no excuse for this. This person is either so stupid they mixed the images up, and shouldn't be trusted to do research, or they're flat out lying.
And since there's piles of money on the table, I don't even have to guess.