There is a new video explaining the case

The PubPeer drama and the defense is at Südhof Website.

I added some comments at the PubPeer thread above regarding scientific integrity, compression artifacts, stiching bugs, corner cloning and other paltry excuses.

Post publication peer review is a serious and apparently necessary enterprise. Forensic image analysis is a scientific discipline like molecular biology – see Sencar et al, Beck, Miura et al. for this. Following the ground breaking work of Bik, Bucci and other image analysis experts it is now an integral part of scientific integrity studies. I would therefore hesitate to dismiss identical background areas as “Dr Bik’s A.I.-powered software”. Image duplication software is not even AI powered as it uses rather conventional techniques and can even be verified by the naked eye. Low quality scanner and poor cameras are also not leading to the observation above. Text recognition (Xerox bug) as discussed by #19 is not involved here, neither is this the Thermo Fisher quantification bug nor is this a new case of corner cloning by the publisher. Funny other excuses at PP in similar cases are artefacts by sandwich impressions of other membranes, fingerprints & dirt traces, pen artefacts and explanations like “the scanner mixed up a double exposure””, “we could scan only smaller areas and made an error when pasting pieces together”.

Here are the inks to
– Nikon stitching bug
– Xerox text recognition bug
– Thermo Fisher quantification bug
– corner cloning type 1 (label exchange?), type 2 (scale exchange?)  and type 3 (rotational cut?)

It’s a pain, Stanford has the knowledge while this does not prevent msiconduct.