St . Antonius Hospital
Which employer did Elisabeth Bik work for from 1997 to 2001?
Elisabeth Bik Elisabeth Margaretha Harbers-Bik ( born 1966 ) is a Dutch microbiologist and scientific integrity consultant . Bik is known for her work detecting photo manipulation in scientific publications , and identifying over 4,000 potential cases of improper research conduct , including 400 research papers published by authors in China from a paper mill company . Bik is the founder of Microbiome Digest , a blog with daily updates on microbiome research , and the Science Integrity Digest blog . Early life and education . Bik is born in the Netherlands . She attended Utrecht University majoring in biology , and continued there for her doctorate . Her dissertation was about developing vaccines for new classes of Vibrio cholerae involved in cholera epidemics across India and Bangladesh . She conducted her doctorate and her postdoctoral studies at the molecular microbiology department in the National Institute of Health and the Environment in Bilthoven . Career . Public sector . After receiving her Ph.D. , Bik worked for the Netherlands National Institute for Public Health and the Environment and St . Antonius Hospital in Nieuwegein , where she organized the development of new molecular techniques for identifying infectious agents . Academia . In 2001 , Bik moved to California to work at Stanford University in the laboratory of David Relman , where her work focused on human microbiomes , previously unidentified microbial species in them , and their diversity across individuals . Her work explored other mucosal microbiomes , confirming that the human oral microbiota contains distinct genera from the gut microbiota . While at Stanford , Bik worked on an Office of Naval Research project to study the microbiome of dolphins and sea lions in San Diego . She found that their microbiome was distinct from other mammals , and influenced by the sea they lived in . Private sector . In 2016 , Bik left Stanford to work for uBiome , a biotech company involved in the sequencing of human microbiomes , before leaving the company in 2018 to work full-time on analyzing scientific papers for image duplication and other malpractices . Science integrity . In 2014 , she started the blog Microbiome Digest , where she provided easy-to-understand commentaries on recent scientific papers . The blog soon became a success , and Bik enlisted help from her colleagues on Twitter to manage the content . She is also an active contributor to Retraction Watch and PubPeer , highlighting scientific papers that present falsified , duplicated , and questionable data , such as in western blot images . Together with Arturo Cassadevall and Ferric Fang , Bik published an mBio paper investigating the prevalence of these questionable practices within published scientific papers , where they found nearly 400 papers with intentional figure manipulation ( i.e . about 800 duplicate images ) . She estimates half of these were created with the intention to mislead . Bik is active on the social media micro-blogging platform , Twitter , where she posts potentially duplicated figures for her more than 90,000 Twitter followers ( ) to investigate . Her investigations have exposed significant levels of scientific misconduct in several journals . In 2018 , Bik was featured on the pop science podcast Everything Hertz . In 2019 , Bik announced via Twitter that she was taking a year off paid work to investigate scientific misconduct , the subject on which she coauthored a preregistered test suggesting that academic culture , peer control , cash-based publication incentives and national misconduct policies , but not pressure to publish , may affect scientific integrity , with nationality being a stronger predictor than individual attributes . Her analysis of 960 recent papers published in Molecular and Cellular Biology found that 59 ( 6.1% ) contained inappropriately duplicated images , from which 5 papers were subsequently retracted and 41 papers had corrections published , and led to a pilot image screening program at the journal identifying problems with 14.5% of subsequent submissions . In February 2020 , Science reported that Bik had identified over 400 research papers published in China over the previous three years , apparently all originating from the same paper mill company providing full service production of articles describing fake research for medical students on demand . Bik said , students in China need to have a paper published to get their MD , but they do not have time to do research , so that is an unrealistic goal . In March 2020 , commenting on the publication of the results of a clinical trial by Didier Raoult on the effect of hydroxychloroquine against COVID-19 , she identified a conflict of interest and strongly criticized the methodology of the study . The learned society that owns the journal in which the results were published admitted that the publication was not at the level expected by the society , in particular due to a lack of justification of the criteria for patient selection and triage . However , the society rebutted allegations of a conflict of interest , stating that the peer review process prior to publication was respected because Jean-Marc Rolain , being one of the co-authors of the article and editor of the journal , did not participate in the evaluation . The publisher Elsevier then announced an additional independent evaluation to determine whether the concerns about the article were well founded . On May 5 , 2021 , the French association Citizen4Science made of scientists and citizens , published a press release including a link to a petition denouncing the harassment of scientists and defenders of science integrity , specifically mentioning Elisabeth Bik and calling on the French authorities to intervene and journalists to look into the matter . The included petition was signed by thousands of citizens throughout the world . On May 22 , 2021 , The Guardian reported that Raoult began legal proceedings against Bik by filing a case with the French state prosecutor . As a result , Lonni Besançon , a French postdoctoral research fellow at Monash University , Australia drafted an open letter in support of Bik and also post‑publication peer review . Within four days , the letter had attracted 500signatories and currently counts more than 1000 . Awards . In November 2020 Bik was awarded the Peter Wildy Prize by the Microbiology Society for communication of microbiology in education and to the public . External links . - Microbiome Digest blog