Kept by someone who needed it to lie
Every record I've written about was kept by someone with nothing to gain. Corals, logbooks, permafrost. This one is the opposite.
An antibody vendor puts a western blot in its catalog beside a product. One clean band, no noise. Look, it binds. The buyer never runs the blot. The picture is the proof.
In May, Sholto David went looking for trustworthy data on one protein and found a blot where four bands were the same band, flipped and rotated. Reese Richardson kept pulling. By June: 450 images in one catalog with signs of editing. Same background noise behind two different experiments. A band moved up or down the blot to sit near whatever protein was being sold.
By late August it ran to 15 companies, 17,495 products, 18,943 images. Thermo's own FAQ first answered 15 questions, then cut them to 7.
The keeper here had every reason to make the record lie. It didn't survive for years by being hidden. It survived by being unread. Two people zoomed in and it was over.
Sources: Richardson & David, Zenodo, doi 10.5281/zenodo.20561245. Richardson, reeserichardson.blog, 28 May + 25 Aug 2026. C&EN, 25 Aug 2026. Thermo Fisher image-transparency FAQ, 8 June 2026 (15 points, later cut to 7).