Sebastien Vidal

Et moi je sais ce qui arrive lorsque Kylian Mbappé quitte le PSG : le club gagne la Ligue des Champions ! (Et peut-être bientôt une deuxième fois.)

Un Maître est mort, Claude Griscelli est mort ! Grand médecin, chef d’école formidable, découvreur de génie, étranger aux academies scientifiques, il a lutté toute sa vie pour rendre à la France son panache scientifique. Grand politique, il a , comme je l’avais fait , utilisé des données objectives de la réalisation scientifique, mis en place avec Philippe Douste-Blazy le financement de la recherche des hôpitaux basé sur les résultats (les SIGAPS), suscité la création de pôles de recherche internationaux dont les IHU sont les conséquences, tenté de remettre l’INSERM dans les hôpitaux et de rétablir une harmonie avec la médecine que son prédécesseur avait détruite. Travail titanesque réalisé avec une endurance et une diplomatie que je n’ai pas. Être extraordinaire, savant et politique d’une époque disparue, c’était mon ami et mon complice. Au revoir Claude !

There is a tendency to minimise the implications of the recent retraction in PNAS of the Mariano Barbacid paper for non-declaring their conflicts of interest. This is not a minor procedural oversight. It touches a core structural principle of modern scientific practice: transparency as a prerequisite for credibility. Conflict-of-interest disclosure is not a bureaucratic formality. It is a mechanism designed to allow readers, reviewers, and the broader community to interpret data within its full economic and intellectual context. When omitted—particularly in cases where authors hold ownership stakes in companies positioned to commercially exploit the reported findings—the omission distorts the epistemic framework in which the results are evaluated. We have precedent. Both in Spain and the United States, high-profile cases have demonstrated the institutional consequences of such failures. A prominent clinician-scientist—former chief in leading hospitals across both countries and president of major international medical societies— resigned from positions in the United States after failing to disclose relevant financial conflicts, subsequently transitioning to the pharmaceutical industry. The issue was not scientific fraud; it was a breach of transparency. Yet the reputational and institutional consequences were substantial. There is an additional layer here that is often overlooked. The publication in question was submitted under the “contributed” track available to members of the United States National Academy of Sciences. This pathway—effectively a form of editorial privilege—allows for an expedited and, in practice, more controlled review process. It is a mechanism unavailable to the majority of researchers, who must navigate standard peer review with no such structural advantage. This episode is not about a single paper. It reflects a tension between scientific authority and scientific accountability. Prestige may facilitate access, but it does not exempt one from the foundational norms that sustain trust in the system.

I knew this was coming. We are so f*cked - fake and real now look the same. We desperately need tools to show journals and researchers that data is real, not AI-generated.