I had the exact same experience both as a grad student and when at Harvard, of reviewers sitting on a paper and quickly replicating the work to scoop you. Peer review is BS and narrative control.
LOL Alex, you are so much more patient and more dedicated than I am. I absolutely applaud your willingness to lay all this out.
I share your angst completely. It's a mess and it has always been a mess and I gave up a long time ago.
Here's a quick heuristic to test whether someone is a qualified peer reviewer: do they want to do it? If the answer is yes, then they are more than likely unqualified. Like all heuristics, this is not 100% accurate. But it's close enough for rock and roll and rock and roll is more effective than science bureaucracy by miles and miles.
In the best of times a mind with your brilliance and integrity would experience what Mozart experienced in Amadeus. But understand, The Great Euthanizers and their global public-private partnership and $10 Trillion in the bank are “executing” on every conceivable front now and “ science “ is just one of them.
Thank you for your great courage, clarity, charity, commitment, and sacrifice.
Almost time to write a short update including Michael Eisen's statements reg. that he thought they would have fired him anyway if he'd published this paper, that eLife does not like controversy, and that they had received a review and were promised another one? What do think?
That’s a good idea, Val. Do you happen to have the screenshots of Dr. Eisen’s statements? I didn’t want to drag him into this because he seemed to have done everything he could for a fair process, but if he made them in public then I’d be happy to add them in context here.
Alex, I’m no scientist, not even close but when I watched Dr.Jay Bhattacharya interview you, I saw a young person full of integrity, honesty and exceptionally brilliant. Never let anyone take that from you.
I observed early in this mess, something was different about this virus. It attacked multi systems and it wasn’t weakening. Then I read Elaine DeWar’s “The origin of the deadliest pandemic in 100 years.” The book left no doubt in my mind that this was created in a lab and it leaked. The corruption, the cover-ups and misinformation abound.
Thank you for your hard work, you’re a breath of fresh air.
I recognize that peer review is broken, but in my experience, I have always managed to publish my work, except in the case of my study on cancers caused by mammograms in the United Kingdom. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/238527v1.full
I have never heard of similar censorship, except in the case of the lab leak. Only one conclusion can be drawn from these findings: publications that address dual-use research of concern must receive the imprimatur of the Department of Defense.
This is a fascinating story well told. The only questionable part to me is the comment,
"After acceptance, eLife sent us a $2,000 invoice, but we did not have the funds to pay for it unless we could ensure their presentation of our work was professional."
If the work was so important you should have just paid the money and not worried about the formatting. I have had to pay this amount from my personal income recently to get a paper published (due to lack of laboratory funds) and it does hurt, but it was worthwhile to get the paper out there (after an extended review process) and for the postgraduate student involved.
Would you pay $2,000 to have your paper be published alongside misinterpretations of your work, misrepresentations of fact of the matter, and unprofessional, unjustified attacks on the sincerity of your science?
That’s the situation we were reasonably concerned about, as we had people calling our work “confected nonsense”, “bullshit”, “kindergarten molecular biology”, and more, so we really had no idea what the peer reviews would look like, or how scientists entrenched in the zoonotic origin theory might try to abuse their privileges as public peer reviewers to diminish the seriousness of our work.
I think that, if I thought my work was important enough, then yes, I would pay it.
There will always be critics. But the truth must out. Anyway, you have done a great job, in any case, of supporting with evidence what has always been the most probable reality - that the virus came from a lab.
For what it’s worth, our work is out there thanks to the preprint system and it has made a major impact already. In a way, it doesn’t need to be peer reviewed, so perhaps we’re already showing the uselessness of the peer review system. Emily Kopp at US Right To Know and others connected dots between our work and DEFUSE drafts without our work being peer-reviewed, and now there’s enough awareness of the pattern that others who are looking into this issue also have a new thing to scan for.
When I submitted our article, I argued that there’s institutional value in a peer reviewed journal hosting our paper - that the worst case scenario would be if we were right and yet nobody could publish our work. Now, I believe that’s only a worst case scenario for our journals, not science, and maybe science doesn’t need journals anymore but can suffice with preprints, as fields like math and physics have been doing for some time now.
The trouble with pre-prints is that a lot of dodgy nonsense can get through, you end up with more uncertainty than you have with *good* peer review. With *bad* peer review, you still end up with the raft of dodgy nonsense. The answer is to find a journal with good peer review, if that's possible, and to keep an eye on RetractionWatch - https://retractionwatch.com/ - but *that* has its pitfalls as well: https://retractionwatch.com/2024/02/19/paper-claiming-extensive-harms-of-covid-19-vaccines-to-be-retracted/ - they appear to be staunch defenders of Scientistic Orthodoxy, to wit: "A few days after the paper appeared, we asked John Adler Jr., the editor in chief of Cureus, if the track record of the authors concerned him. His response seemed to admit to the risk, but he also defended the journal’s vetting of the paper:
Yes I am aware that many of these authors are skeptical zealots when it comes to the dangers of vaccines. Our editorial response was extra vigilance during the peer review process with 8 different reviewers weighing in on publication or not, including a few with strong statistics knowledge. Therefore, a credible peer review process was followed and the chips fell where they may. That is all I can say. If you or other readers were to note fatal flaws in this article now that it is published, i.e. failure to accurately report financial COIs [conflicts of interest], totally erroneous statistical analysis, fake data etc. we will of course re-evaluate at any time.
Adler then took a jab at other journals:
The decision process Cureus made, contrasts sharply with Elsevier’s seeming editorial decision to just censor the article using ad hominem concerns.
In a Feb. 9, 2024 letter to the journal and the publisher, John P. Moore, a microbiologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, and Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist at Yale School of Public Health, in New Haven, Conn., expressed their “serious concerns” about the article. Among their objections:
The authors utterly lack relevant professional qualifications that would enable them to assess the scientific publications they draw on and/or attempt to criticize. The authors self-describe their affiliations under the rubric of “Independent Research”, or list private foundations, or in one case report an academic discipline unrelated to biology. In short, the authors cannot draw on years of training in biological science, but appear to be self-taught via the “University of Google”.
They continue:
The point here is that the Cureus review merely regurgitates claims about mRNA vaccines that have circulated on the internet and been debunked over and over again, including by fact-checking organizations (e.g., Factcheck.org, and the USA Today and Politico factcheck teams).
They conclude:
By bringing this highly problematic review to your attention, we hope that you will conduct a thorough review of how it was accepted for publication in Cureus under the Springer Nature imprimatur. How appropriate was the peer review process? How did the editor act? Is the acceptance of this review symptomatic of a wider problem at the journal? Finally, if you share our views that this review is so flawed as to be dangerous to public health, you may well decide that it should be retracted." ... And so forth and so on.
Institutional science may have just dug its own very politicized, very bought-out grave, by ensuring that only one point of view is put forward. So RetractionWatch may end up being as useless as peer review. It looks like there is going to be a real fork in the road, between science that appears to work based on observation and hypothesis, and science which uses marketing, propaganda, and rhetoric... And "peer review" by "fact-checking organizations (e.g., Factcheck.org, and the USA Today and Politico factcheck teams)" is laughable and beyond contempt.
Back 36 years ago, when print publications were by sheet-fed offset, a publication charge would be reasonable - you had to send text and graphics, they'd have to compose the text and graphics, doing a cut-and-paste on boards, then photographing that and burning plates, then running off proofs, which they'd send back to you. You'd mark corrections if any, they'd go through the same process, run off more proofs, then hopefully they'd have it right, at which point you could call them and tell them so, and they'd go ahead, and send you a sheaf of reprints which you could send out on request. And peer review was accomplished by mailing out copies of manuscript and graphics.
The way things are now, such a charge is wildly unreasonable, it's just profiteering. You send them a PDF of your paper, graphics included, they email that to peer reviewers, get the reports back, and either reject it, accept it without changes, or send you a list of changes to be made - by email. You either agree or not, if you agree they go ahead and put the resultant PDF on their website, and that's the end of it, and it takes maybe an hour's worth of work at most - you could run it out of a home office. And the comments wouldn't cost the website anything, either. As for the commentary from the peanut gallery - "misinterpretations of your work, misrepresentations of fact of the matter, and unprofessional, unjustified attacks on the sincerity of your science" - you might as well publish it on Facebook...
The "debate" turned into a question of who could debate, not a question of what is the truth. Sometimes people win debates without commitment to the truth, and I see that happening here with the zoonotic proponent misrepresenting many critical pieces of evidence and their limitations, while the "opponent" wasn't quick enough on their feet to point out the major flaws of these analyses and the judges don't appear to have the appropriate qualifications or background education to evaluate this decision objectively.
To determine the truth collectively and objectively - a common task in theoretical ecology (the formal field of my PhD) - we need to create the appropriate frameworks for comparing theories. The best approach is often a Bayesian one, and Bayes factors are good but only if they are accurately estimated. The zoonotic proponent misrepresented Bayes factors of the wet market & early outbreak phylogeny (both of which are nearly 1), and failed to properly contextualize the low odds of not just the odds of a furin cleavage site (estimated in a manner that controls for variable scientific attention to motifs) but also the odds of zoonosis to begin with. A proper Bayesian treatment of this issue makes it clear that a lab origin is overwhelmingly more likely.
So, the debate didn't meet the standards of rigor that I personally use to make these sorts of decisions. Nothing new was said, many old but disproven things were said without proper critique, and ultimately a decision of two judges lacking the appropriate skillset and full access to information is not the kind of thing I bet money on.
I had the exact same experience both as a grad student and when at Harvard, of reviewers sitting on a paper and quickly replicating the work to scoop you. Peer review is BS and narrative control.
LOL Alex, you are so much more patient and more dedicated than I am. I absolutely applaud your willingness to lay all this out.
I share your angst completely. It's a mess and it has always been a mess and I gave up a long time ago.
Here's a quick heuristic to test whether someone is a qualified peer reviewer: do they want to do it? If the answer is yes, then they are more than likely unqualified. Like all heuristics, this is not 100% accurate. But it's close enough for rock and roll and rock and roll is more effective than science bureaucracy by miles and miles.
As a former academic, I am so glad that we now have Substack to get out the message.
In the best of times a mind with your brilliance and integrity would experience what Mozart experienced in Amadeus. But understand, The Great Euthanizers and their global public-private partnership and $10 Trillion in the bank are “executing” on every conceivable front now and “ science “ is just one of them.
Thank you for your great courage, clarity, charity, commitment, and sacrifice.
Hey Alex,
wonderful summary!
Almost time to write a short update including Michael Eisen's statements reg. that he thought they would have fired him anyway if he'd published this paper, that eLife does not like controversy, and that they had received a review and were promised another one? What do think?
Thanks for being who you are,
Val
That’s a good idea, Val. Do you happen to have the screenshots of Dr. Eisen’s statements? I didn’t want to drag him into this because he seemed to have done everything he could for a fair process, but if he made them in public then I’d be happy to add them in context here.
This could be a key one: https://x.com/HL3133/status/1761588086612406448?s=20
Or this one on controversy: https://x.com/mbeisen/status/1761407584349966648?s=20
BRAVO, Alex!
Yours is an excellent commentary and a model for others to emmulate.
Alex, I’m no scientist, not even close but when I watched Dr.Jay Bhattacharya interview you, I saw a young person full of integrity, honesty and exceptionally brilliant. Never let anyone take that from you.
I observed early in this mess, something was different about this virus. It attacked multi systems and it wasn’t weakening. Then I read Elaine DeWar’s “The origin of the deadliest pandemic in 100 years.” The book left no doubt in my mind that this was created in a lab and it leaked. The corruption, the cover-ups and misinformation abound.
Thank you for your hard work, you’re a breath of fresh air.
Honest posts like this contributing to open scientific discourse are what really make Substack worthwhile.
Thanks, Alex!
I recognize that peer review is broken, but in my experience, I have always managed to publish my work, except in the case of my study on cancers caused by mammograms in the United Kingdom. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/238527v1.full
I have never heard of similar censorship, except in the case of the lab leak. Only one conclusion can be drawn from these findings: publications that address dual-use research of concern must receive the imprimatur of the Department of Defense.
https://twitter.com/daniel_corcos/status/1760903393390821417
When Kary Mullis invented PCR, the most prestigious journals rejected it. Both Nature and Science rejected it. Enough said.
The swamp is so damn deep.
D.C., the universities, the MIC, the Courts, the Lawyers. Damn the CIA and everything corrupted by it.
Excellent
This is a fascinating story well told. The only questionable part to me is the comment,
"After acceptance, eLife sent us a $2,000 invoice, but we did not have the funds to pay for it unless we could ensure their presentation of our work was professional."
If the work was so important you should have just paid the money and not worried about the formatting. I have had to pay this amount from my personal income recently to get a paper published (due to lack of laboratory funds) and it does hurt, but it was worthwhile to get the paper out there (after an extended review process) and for the postgraduate student involved.
Would you pay $2,000 to have your paper be published alongside misinterpretations of your work, misrepresentations of fact of the matter, and unprofessional, unjustified attacks on the sincerity of your science?
That’s the situation we were reasonably concerned about, as we had people calling our work “confected nonsense”, “bullshit”, “kindergarten molecular biology”, and more, so we really had no idea what the peer reviews would look like, or how scientists entrenched in the zoonotic origin theory might try to abuse their privileges as public peer reviewers to diminish the seriousness of our work.
I think that, if I thought my work was important enough, then yes, I would pay it.
There will always be critics. But the truth must out. Anyway, you have done a great job, in any case, of supporting with evidence what has always been the most probable reality - that the virus came from a lab.
For what it’s worth, our work is out there thanks to the preprint system and it has made a major impact already. In a way, it doesn’t need to be peer reviewed, so perhaps we’re already showing the uselessness of the peer review system. Emily Kopp at US Right To Know and others connected dots between our work and DEFUSE drafts without our work being peer-reviewed, and now there’s enough awareness of the pattern that others who are looking into this issue also have a new thing to scan for.
When I submitted our article, I argued that there’s institutional value in a peer reviewed journal hosting our paper - that the worst case scenario would be if we were right and yet nobody could publish our work. Now, I believe that’s only a worst case scenario for our journals, not science, and maybe science doesn’t need journals anymore but can suffice with preprints, as fields like math and physics have been doing for some time now.
The trouble with pre-prints is that a lot of dodgy nonsense can get through, you end up with more uncertainty than you have with *good* peer review. With *bad* peer review, you still end up with the raft of dodgy nonsense. The answer is to find a journal with good peer review, if that's possible, and to keep an eye on RetractionWatch - https://retractionwatch.com/ - but *that* has its pitfalls as well: https://retractionwatch.com/2024/02/19/paper-claiming-extensive-harms-of-covid-19-vaccines-to-be-retracted/ - they appear to be staunch defenders of Scientistic Orthodoxy, to wit: "A few days after the paper appeared, we asked John Adler Jr., the editor in chief of Cureus, if the track record of the authors concerned him. His response seemed to admit to the risk, but he also defended the journal’s vetting of the paper:
Yes I am aware that many of these authors are skeptical zealots when it comes to the dangers of vaccines. Our editorial response was extra vigilance during the peer review process with 8 different reviewers weighing in on publication or not, including a few with strong statistics knowledge. Therefore, a credible peer review process was followed and the chips fell where they may. That is all I can say. If you or other readers were to note fatal flaws in this article now that it is published, i.e. failure to accurately report financial COIs [conflicts of interest], totally erroneous statistical analysis, fake data etc. we will of course re-evaluate at any time.
Adler then took a jab at other journals:
The decision process Cureus made, contrasts sharply with Elsevier’s seeming editorial decision to just censor the article using ad hominem concerns.
In a Feb. 9, 2024 letter to the journal and the publisher, John P. Moore, a microbiologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, and Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist at Yale School of Public Health, in New Haven, Conn., expressed their “serious concerns” about the article. Among their objections:
The authors utterly lack relevant professional qualifications that would enable them to assess the scientific publications they draw on and/or attempt to criticize. The authors self-describe their affiliations under the rubric of “Independent Research”, or list private foundations, or in one case report an academic discipline unrelated to biology. In short, the authors cannot draw on years of training in biological science, but appear to be self-taught via the “University of Google”.
They continue:
The point here is that the Cureus review merely regurgitates claims about mRNA vaccines that have circulated on the internet and been debunked over and over again, including by fact-checking organizations (e.g., Factcheck.org, and the USA Today and Politico factcheck teams).
They conclude:
By bringing this highly problematic review to your attention, we hope that you will conduct a thorough review of how it was accepted for publication in Cureus under the Springer Nature imprimatur. How appropriate was the peer review process? How did the editor act? Is the acceptance of this review symptomatic of a wider problem at the journal? Finally, if you share our views that this review is so flawed as to be dangerous to public health, you may well decide that it should be retracted." ... And so forth and so on.
Institutional science may have just dug its own very politicized, very bought-out grave, by ensuring that only one point of view is put forward. So RetractionWatch may end up being as useless as peer review. It looks like there is going to be a real fork in the road, between science that appears to work based on observation and hypothesis, and science which uses marketing, propaganda, and rhetoric... And "peer review" by "fact-checking organizations (e.g., Factcheck.org, and the USA Today and Politico factcheck teams)" is laughable and beyond contempt.
Back 36 years ago, when print publications were by sheet-fed offset, a publication charge would be reasonable - you had to send text and graphics, they'd have to compose the text and graphics, doing a cut-and-paste on boards, then photographing that and burning plates, then running off proofs, which they'd send back to you. You'd mark corrections if any, they'd go through the same process, run off more proofs, then hopefully they'd have it right, at which point you could call them and tell them so, and they'd go ahead, and send you a sheaf of reprints which you could send out on request. And peer review was accomplished by mailing out copies of manuscript and graphics.
The way things are now, such a charge is wildly unreasonable, it's just profiteering. You send them a PDF of your paper, graphics included, they email that to peer reviewers, get the reports back, and either reject it, accept it without changes, or send you a list of changes to be made - by email. You either agree or not, if you agree they go ahead and put the resultant PDF on their website, and that's the end of it, and it takes maybe an hour's worth of work at most - you could run it out of a home office. And the comments wouldn't cost the website anything, either. As for the commentary from the peanut gallery - "misinterpretations of your work, misrepresentations of fact of the matter, and unprofessional, unjustified attacks on the sincerity of your science" - you might as well publish it on Facebook...
Alex how do you feel about this debate, which fell strongly towards natural origin:
https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/lableak-truther-loses-100000-in-his
The "debate" turned into a question of who could debate, not a question of what is the truth. Sometimes people win debates without commitment to the truth, and I see that happening here with the zoonotic proponent misrepresenting many critical pieces of evidence and their limitations, while the "opponent" wasn't quick enough on their feet to point out the major flaws of these analyses and the judges don't appear to have the appropriate qualifications or background education to evaluate this decision objectively.
To determine the truth collectively and objectively - a common task in theoretical ecology (the formal field of my PhD) - we need to create the appropriate frameworks for comparing theories. The best approach is often a Bayesian one, and Bayes factors are good but only if they are accurately estimated. The zoonotic proponent misrepresented Bayes factors of the wet market & early outbreak phylogeny (both of which are nearly 1), and failed to properly contextualize the low odds of not just the odds of a furin cleavage site (estimated in a manner that controls for variable scientific attention to motifs) but also the odds of zoonosis to begin with. A proper Bayesian treatment of this issue makes it clear that a lab origin is overwhelmingly more likely.
So, the debate didn't meet the standards of rigor that I personally use to make these sorts of decisions. Nothing new was said, many old but disproven things were said without proper critique, and ultimately a decision of two judges lacking the appropriate skillset and full access to information is not the kind of thing I bet money on.
Thanks for your reply!