Cyberstalking pits Harvard professor against PubPeer

A deluge of bizarre and malicious emails targeting a professor at Harvard Medical School has left him reeling, while raising questions about the smear campaign’s use of a popular online forum where scientists publicly critique research.

Joseph Loscalzo sent a letter to PubPeer, the online forum, in September describing an “aggressive cyberstalking and harassment campaign” that “has relentlessly targeted myself and my colleagues” for many months with “misleading and often inaccurate comments.” He called PubPeer “a vehicle” for the attacks, alleging anonymous comments raising concerns about at least 15 papers were posted “in bad faith” and then used to defame and badger him in emails to other researchers, journals, and universities.

Loscalzo, physician-in-chief emeritus and former chair of the department of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, asked PubPeer to remove the offending comments and impose a six-month moratorium on anonymous posts about his work. The letter was obtained by Retraction Watch.

PubPeer has gained prominence in recent years as a place where amateur sleuths have flagged data manipulation and other scientific misconduct involving high-profile scientists, including most recently Stanford President and neuroscientist Marc Tessier-Lavigne, who resigned earlier this year after an investigation confirmed data manipulation in papers he co-authored.  (Full disclosure: Ivan Oransky, a co-founder of Retraction Watch, is a volunteer member of PubPeer’s board of directors.)

The online forum denied responsibility for how posts on its website are used and the intentions behind them. “We’re not yet president of the internet,” said Boris Barbour, who helped launch PubPeer. “All we can do is tend our own garden and make sure that what is on PubPeer is fair according to our guidelines.”

As for what goes onto the site, he explained, it is either posted “by a trusted commenter and subject to post-moderation as required, or will be examined before it’s posted.” To protect users, “we’re set up not to know who’s commenting and not to know if it’s the same person,” Barbour added.

He said PubPeer had removed “a few comments” that required more context or explanation, but most appeared to be valid points “about relatively minor things.”

“It’s not as if it’s revenge porn or some fabrication or something,” Barbour said, adding that the organization would not halt legitimate comments. “We to date have never yet practiced a moratorium under legal threat.”

Loscalzo is not the only researcher to complain about the nonprofit organization. Nobel Prize winner Thomas Südhof of Stanford University, who earlier this year earned two corrections and an editorial expression of concern following PubPeer posts, has accused the forum of lacking transparency and censoring comments. In 2021, a pair of controversial researchers in France filed a police report against the highly regarded scientific sleuth Elizabeth Bik and Barbour for harassing them by exposing problems with their research on the website. Bik said the complaint never resulted in legal action.

And in 2014, a cancer researcher at Wayne State University, in Detroit, brought claims against anonymous PubPeer commenters, subpoenaing the site for the commenters’ names, after allegedly losing a job offer due to posts raising concerns about his papers. He was unsuccessful.

Loscalzo declined several requests for an on-the-record interview. But Brigham and Women’s Hospital said in an emailed statement: “The allegations raised by these anonymous accounts are meritless and the ongoing cyber harassment of a member of our faculty and research team is extremely concerning.”

Loscalzo is a former collaborator of Piero Anversa, who left Harvard in 2015 after having fudged dozens of studies, according to a subsequent investigation, to make it look as if adult stem cells could repair damaged hearts. No evidence has implicated Loscalzo in the deception, but his tormentor, or tormentors, have weaponized PubPeer in an ever-widening online campaign to discredit him. 

The letter, dated Sept. 19, 2023, cites three examples of “many malicious emails,” all of which were sent from untraceable Proton Mail accounts using aliases. 

For instance, an email sent this summer by someone impersonating one of Loscalzo’s coauthors asked the editor of Circulation Research “to withdraw” a recent paper by the two researchers after “PubPeer comments brought to our attention to possible research integrity issue on our article [sic].”

Another email, sent to several faculty members at Brigham and Women’s, began: “Many people know Loscalzo Lab has a lot of academic and other ethical misconduct issues,” and linked to comments on PubPeer about his research.

The extent of the smear campaign is unclear. But the emails targeting Loscalzo are likely to number in the hundreds, if not more. During the past several months, Retraction Watch alone has received dozens of messages from Proton Mail accounts that were later deleted. Many claimed to be from South Korean academics, but included text lifted from Wikipedia about the sender; several pointed to comments on PubPeer and urged investigations of Loscalzo. Some struck a professional tone; others appeared unhinged.

“Loscalzo Lab people are crazy and full of the mentally disturbed,” wrote a self-described “former postdoctoral fellow” in the lab. 

Simultaneously, even more outlandish emails began arriving in Retraction Watch inboxes. They also came from Proton Mail accounts. Many were signed by a “Jennie Lee,” who described herself as a “manager and coordinator” of what appeared to be a campaign to defend Loscalzo called “Together Joe – We are stronger together with Joe Loscalzo.” Several ended with a nursery rhyme, of sorts, consisting of five stanzas and titled “Joey Lo and His Morning Report.”

One email read, in part: “We will do our best to protect Dr. Loscalzo from constant slander, research integrity allegations, and defamation directed at Dr. Loscalzo. Please ignore any malicious emails sent to Retraction Watch and also ignore malicious PubPeer comments by bad actors.” 

Whether these emails, which were sent out widely, were a bona fide attempt to shield the professor or a twisted part of the plot against him is unclear. Leonid Schneider, in an Oct. 23, 2023, post on his blog For Better Science, suggested Loscalzo had sent the emails himself using sock-puppet accounts. Schneider also posted a drawing of Loscalzo as a heavy-breasted drag queen.

Who is behind the scores of inimical Proton Mail emails also remains unclear – but in the letter to PubPeer, the researcher speculated that the onslaught has roots in a case involving a South Korean medical student who briefly worked in his Brigham lab. “In South Korea, this student was the subject of false allegations of research misconduct by other South Korean scientists,” Loscalzo wrote in his letter. “The allegations were formally dismissed by his university after an internal investigation, and the scientists who brought forward the allegations were discredited. Shortly thereafter, which is why we believe the conduct is related and retaliatory, the cyberstalker began harassing the student, as well as me and other colleagues who have worked with me and/or the student.”

The former student appears to have worked in the lab of a prominent cardiologist at Yonsei University in South Korea. Earlier this year, the cardiologist, Hui-Nam Pak, was found guilty of duplicate publication, a type of academic misconduct, by his institution. Since Retraction Watch first wrote about Pak last February, hundreds of hateful comments defending Pak and vilifying whistleblowers have flooded the blog; many were not posted because they violated commenting policies. 

Even Bik seems to have been snared in the campaign. She said she started looking into papers Loscalzo had coauthored after receiving a tip from someone using a Proton Mail account and signing off with an Asian name. Among several issues she flagged on PubPeer in October, she said only one seemed potentially serious: an image in a 2003 paper she said appeared to have “been digitally altered.” 

“It’s not like the Stanford president or like other cases I’ve followed,” she said, referring to Tessier-Lavigne. “I did search a lot of [Loscalzo’s] papers and I didn’t really find much other than the eight or seven that I reported, but it seemed to be all minor problems.”

After this story published, Bik told us she had found additional problems with Loscalzo’s papers, including these two, following our interview in October. She said some “look very serious.”

In an email, Loscalzo dismissed any suggestion of image manipulation, adding that “if there was an error, it was unintentional. Importantly, the internal consistency of the other experiments in the [2003] paper strongly supports the conclusions, which have since been independently confirmed by other research groups.”

Meanwhile, the cyberattacks continue. After declining several interview requests, Loscalzo forwarded an email showing that on November 8, someone using a Proton Mail account had submitted a manuscript titled “Abilify Network medicine: Drug repurposing of aripiprazole in cardiovascular diseases” to Preprints.org, a server for archiving scholarly works in advance of publication. Loscalzo and several of his colleagues were listed as authors, but had never heard of the article, he wrote in an email to Preprints.org.

“No doubt, after the paper is published, the plan would be for the malicious culprit to post errors on PubPeer that would be used to defame us yet again,” Loscalzo said.

Update, 12/7/23, 1500 UTC: We have corrected a passage in this story characterizing the status of a police report filed against Barbour and Bik, and have added two sentences with an update on findings Bik made after our reporter spoke to her in October.

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