The Ten Craziest Facts You Should Know About A Giraffe:

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Palko points us to this story:

USC oncologist David Agus’ new book is rife with plagiarism

The publication of a new book by Dr. David Agus, the media-friendly USC oncologist who leads the Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine, was shaping up to be a high-profile event.

Agus promoted “The Book of Animal Secrets: Nature’s Lessons for a Long and Happy Life” with appearances on CBS News, where he serves as a medical contributor, and “The Howard Stern Show,” where he is a frequent guest. Entrepreneur Arianna Huffington hosted a dinner party at her home in his honor. The title hit No. 1 on Amazon’s list of top-selling books about animals a week before its March 7 publication.

However, a [Los Angeles] Times investigation found at least 95 separate passages in the book that resemble — sometimes word for word — text that originally appeared in other published sources available on the internet. The passages are not credited or acknowledged in the book or its endnotes. . . .

The passages in question range in length from a sentence or two to several continuous paragraphs. The sources borrowed from without attribution include publications such as the New York Times and National Geographic, scientific journals, Wikipedia and the websites of academic institutions.

The book also leans heavily on uncredited material from smaller and lesser-known outlets. A section in the book on queen ants appears to use several sentences from an Indiana newspaper column by a retired medical writer. Long sections of a chapter on the cardiac health of giraffes appear to have been lifted from a 2016 blog post on the website of a South African safari company titled, “The Ten Craziest Facts You Should Know About A Giraffe.”

Never trust a guy who wears a button down shirt and sweater and no tie.

The author had something to say:

“I was recently made aware that in writing The Book of Animal Secrets we relied upon passages from various sources without attribution, and that we used other authors’ words. I want to sincerely apologize to the scientists and writers whose work or words were used or not fully attributed,” Agus said in a statement. “I take any claims of plagiarism seriously.”

From the book:

“I’m not pitching a tent to watch chimpanzees in Tanzania or digging through ant colonies to find the long-lived queen, for example,” he writes. “I went out and spoke to the amazing scientists around the world who do these kinds of experiments, and what I uncovered was astonishing.”

All good, except that when he said, “I went out and spoke to the amazing scientists around the world,” he meant to say, “I went on Google and looked up websites of every South African safari company I could find.”

“The Ten Craziest Facts You Should Know About A Giraffe,” indeed.

And here are a few relevant screenshots:

I have no idea what that light bulb thingie is doing in that last image, but here’s some elaboration:

“Research misconduct,” huh? I guess if USC ever gives Dr. Agus a hard time about that, he could just move a few hundred miles to the north, where they don’t care so much about that sort of thing.

53 thoughts on “The Ten Craziest Facts You Should Know About A Giraffe:”

  1. I’m curious about the “I went out and spoke to amazing scientists …” statement. Should we rely on conversations with scientists or on their peer reviewed published papers to get useful information? I have encountered an easy to understand tendency for medical workers to be excited about their work. I liken it to having someone tell you about their amazing grandchildren. The publishing process cools the enthusiasm and the hype. Of course, using published data requires attribution.
    I looked at the Amazon page for Dr. Agus’ books. I found celebrity endorsements from Lance Armstrong, Murray Gell-Mann, and Al Gore. I was impressed by that.

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  2. Also on the plus side, a few hundred miles to the north, there were consequences for the ex-president of Stanford for putting his name on manufactured data..

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  3. Appalling. Also, in ““I was recently made aware that in writing The Book of Animal Secrets we relied upon passages from various sources without attribution, and that we used other authors’ words,” who is “we?” From looking at the cover, Agus is the only author. Or is that a lie, too? I suppose that’s a novel plagiarism defense: “the guy I hired to make it look like I wrote a book was dishonest.”

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  4. He refers to “we”, but is the only listed author. Who actually wrote the book?

    Maybe these passages were being used as a kind of lorem ipsum text and never got removed?

    I just want to know the explanation, because it seems minimal effort would be required to rephrase these passages and include attribution.

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    • It is indeed possible to learn an amazing set of material on this blog. In particular, Anoneuoid used the phase “lorem Ipsum”–and without highlighting it in any way, indicating that it is common currency. So, I scurried around to find

      “In publishing and graphic design, Lorem ipsum is a placeholder text commonly used to demonstrate the visual form of a document or a typeface without relying on meaningful content. Lorem ipsum may be used as a placeholder before final copy is available. It is also used to temporarily replace text in a process called greeking, which allows designers to consider the form of a webpage or publication, without the meaning of the text influencing the design.”
      Just to make the puzzlement deeper, there is something called a Toyota Ipsum

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Ipsum

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      • “It is indeed possible to learn an amazing set of material on this blog. In particular, Anoneuoid used the phase “lorem Ipsum”–and without highlighting it in any way, indicating that it is common currency. So, I scurried around to find”

        I came across it when I was coding my website and trying to see what various fonts looked like. “lorem impsum” was used by the font foundry for display.

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    • “We”: I thought it was known that some authors hire other writers and researchers who then get no formal credit. No?

      Of course it’s “I” when the book is a popular hit, but “we” when it’s contents turn out to be *hit.

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  5. When Andrew wrote, “I guess if USC ever gives Dr. Agus a hard time about that, he could just move a few hundred miles to the north, where they don’t care so much about that sort of thing.” he was referring to UC Berkeley and Mathew Walker. Of course, the problem when scheduling a blog so far in advance is that life intervenes.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/19/us/stanford-president-resigns-tessier-lavigne.html?action=click&algo=clicks_raw&block=trending_recirc&fellback=false&imp_id=8366005704082471&impression_id=ce14ef50-2766-11ee-86cb-7fc301345116&index=0&pgtype=Article&pool=published-assets-db-4-ls&region=footer&req_id=6528157148714928&surface=eos-most-popular-story&variant=holdout_most-popular-story

    Once again, Stanford, a near geographical neighbor of UC Berkeley, is in the negative news, and this time about data manipulation/falsification of research rather than the admission scandal of a few years ago. And, no less than by the president of the institution, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, who has just resigned because of this. And, it refers to something really important, curing Alzheimer’s Disease, with the data manipulation involving “tiles” and “blots.” I leave it to others to explain what tiles and blots are and why they are relevant to finding a cure for dementia.

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    • My wife was at UCSF across the hall from Tessier-Lavigne in the early 2000’s, I’m pretty sure I sat through a Tessier-Lavigne lab meeting once because I was hanging out in the conference room. I personally have very little information about this scandal, but my wife probably has more as she’s heard the discussions among biologists.

      My understanding second hand through my wife is that what really happened in the T-L case was that a graduate student or postdoc (i’m not sure which) falsified images in order to further their own interests, and of course hid that information from T-L intentionally. T-L relied on the idea that his lab members weren’t lying to him, and they published various work in the normal manner.

      The “blots” I believe refer to “Western Blots” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_blot where protein is run through a gel to separate it by size and then immunochemistry is used to visualize it with stains. “Tiles” may just refer to images in an array of images. It’s a common thing in biology papers to show 2 to 10 images in a tiled pattern to allow for visual comparisons.

      If the story is true, to me, T-L is like the CEO of a company where the vice president in charge of accounting embezzled a bunch of funds and ran off. It’s bad but he’s a victim like everyone else. It’s not reasonable to think that he should have caught a lab member who was intentionally falsifying data. To be suspicious of every lab member would lead to a lab that couldn’t function.

      This kind of thing is a nightmare for biology PIs because you *have* to trust your lab members not to lie to you. A bio lab couldn’t function otherwise.

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      • Daniel:

        One thing that makes me suspicious is the tone of Tessier-Lavigne’s announcement, which seems most focused on minimizing the problem. If someone embezzled a bunch of my funds and ran off, I’d be angry and I wouldn’t be trying to minimize it. This is not to say that Tessier-Lavigne knew about the fake data, just that it looks like he was more concerned about appearances (in this case, appearance of research success) than about scientific truth or the process of science.

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        • My guess is that he’s furious privately, but trying to keep scandal down for the reason that Stanford University as an institution is pressuring him. For example they could be threatening lawsuits against him or offering him a payment if he resigns without much fuss etc.

          If you had a private conversation with him I imagine he’d be furious and wouldn’t minimize it at all.

        • Why would Stanford be pressuring him via threats of lawsuits not to blame others underneath him? I don’t see how Stanford comes off better with just their president taking all the blame. Andrew has covered stories of universities ignoring serious problems with research they produced, but this (the existence of the scandal, if not the full details of culpability) isn’t being covered up and is instead entirely public.

        • Completely a guess on my part, but usually large institutions like to just quietly wait out controversy rather than keep it in the media. That’s certainly the main method that USC uses :-\

      • +1. In many areas of biological and ecological science, we more or less have to trust the integrity of everyone involved from PIs through postdocs, graduate students, undergraduate employees and various volunteers. I always try to instill a strong ethos of science as fundamentally a community with a shared commitment to certain values. But I’m not surprised that here and there, someone is going to violate this trust. We gotta keep it sacred! I think that reforming the CV advancement model and all the things we talk about here can and do help, but it’s slow going out there in the wild…

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        • The only reason you need to trust everyone is because it is rare to do direct replications.

          One of the basic tenents of science is trust no one, not even yourself (nullius in verba). We can easily see the consequences of abandoning this principle by looking at what happens when direct replications *are* attempted (~25% success rate).

          But no one actually cares enough to fix this problem, in fact NIH/etc actively discourage direct replications for lacking novelty. But even this excuse is wrong. Paradoxically, checking each others results has become a very novel type of experiment.

        • Anoneuoid, direct replications are possible for some kinds of research but not others. An archaeological excavation can happen precisely once. And until Mr. Wells finishes his time machine nobody can do back to Borneo in 1873 and observe the same environment that a bored colonial official observed (today the climate is different, human land use is different, there are new invasive species and chemicals, other species have gone extinct or gone extinct locally …).

      • My understanding from the NYT article is that the problems went well beyond simply relying on someone else’s integrity.

        Apparently problems were noticed and reported by other scientists and brought to T-L’s attention. He failed to do anything at all about them.

        So I think this case is about more than just trusting an associate.

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        • It may well be. I don’t have access to the NYT article nor do I have first hand knowledge of the specifics from other sources. I do think there’s a tendency to find it hard to imagine your postdoc or student just fabricated stuff so there’s probably a bit of incredulity involved, and then in a public position like president of a university there’s a lot of politics and he may have bowed to that. If he did that part is 100% on him and it’s not good behavior.

        • Note that I’m not really sure how T-L played into it. I wouldn’t want to say he was blameless at all! only that there is a big concern about the problem of employees and students falsifying data in ways that could easily be undetected by a perfectly legitimate PI.

        • Daniel
          If there are 5 papers coauthored with the same individual where the manipulated data appears, then I find it more disturbing regarding T-L’s role. Yes, there has to be trust in a lab environment, but repeated violations of that trust cross a line from being deceived to at least being a poor supervisor. At least, since I think it sound like sloppy practice, and even perhaps not totally accidental.

          I’m not saying any of this is true, and I don’t know whether a single individual was involved in the 5 cases. But the whole episode strikes me a more serious than simple blame on an unscrupulous post-doc. It did result in serious action (resigning as president of Stanford is not a small matter), but there is considerable money at stake.

        • Dale, yes I think the main controversy is 5 papers with the one coauthor. it’s certainly a concern about how he ran his lab to some extent. I’ve heard that he ran his lab in a way that he would give a lot more time to people who found “exciting” stuff so there was maybe a strong incentive to make up something exciting if you wanted to get out of his lab and into your next career step. But also we have to assume that a postdoc who was actively *hiding* the fact that they were falsifying data would not be easily detectable, just like an embezzling accountant who controls the books could easily get away with stuff for a while and then run off with your money.

          To me it’s more about how well did he respond to the criticism. I’ve heard from my wife that there is some controversy over whether he tried to retract or publish corrections to the articles and the **journals** absolutely refused to let him. I think the whole thing is complicated, and want to emphasize more that even if T-L didn’t do a good job, with active fraud and issues like journals preventing people from doing the right thing, it wouldn’t be at all impossible to discover one day as a PI who generally DOES do a good job that you’ve been duped and have no good options but to lose your entire career. I don’t like that at all and you can imagine the chilling effect it’s having on good non-fraudulent PIs in my wife’s field.

        • @Daniel Lakeland

          This is from Science:

          “The two Science papers and the Cell paper all list Tessier-Lavigne as a senior or corresponding author and Elke Stein, also then at UCSF, as either first or last author. Stein’s LinkedIn page says she is currently a visiting scholar at Stanford, but she is not listed in its directory; she does not appear to have published any neuroscience papers since 2012. And Stein is not on the Nature or EMBO Journal papers, making Tessier-Lavigne the only author on all the challenged articles. He is a middle author on the Nature and EMBO Journal papers.”

      • A lot of the experimental data in biology is quite easy to falsify. I had just left Cornell when the Mark Spector scandal broke (about 1981). Spector was a grad student in Efriam Racker’s lab and faked most of his research results. The data was shockingly good and Spector was being invited to give talks all over the country. Several papers were retracted and Racker later wrote that such behavior of an otherwise talented scientist comes from an unbalance mind.

        I had my own experience when I was writing a review article with a colleague. He was giving me all this data to include in the article (I was the principle author) and I told him this was a f**cking review article and the stuff he had needed to be peer reviewed. It later turned out that the data he had was all fake and I was right in my strong stance.

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  6. Raghu, Anon:

    Sometimes only one author is listed on the cover but there are multiple authors listed inside. The book has not yet appeared—I guess now maybe it never will, to the possible distress of endorsers Jane Goodall, Sanjay Gupta, etc.—so I can’t flip thru in Amazon to see the cover page and preface which might give information on Agus’s coauthors.

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    • The “co-authorship” is odd in this case. A story on the CBS news website https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dr-david-agus-accused-plagiarism-prompting-recall-the-book-of-animal-secrets/ states “Writer Kristin Loberg, who co-authored all four books, took responsibility In a statement to the L.A. Times and said Agus was not to blame.” But when I look at one of the four books on Amazon, “A short guide to a long life,” Loberg isn’t listed as a co-author. The title page lists Agus and an illustrator but I don’t see Loberg listed. Does “co-author” mean something different at USC? Kristin Loberg is listed on some other books on Amazon, e.g., some books by an author named David Perlmutter. Odd.

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        • Carlos:

          What I got out of that article is that Agus has a very good publicist, as the article puts him in a good light, complete with flattering photograph and a third-party quote absolving him of all blame—but even with a very good publicist, some of the facts and claims don’t line up:

          At one point, the article says, “Agus says he dictated the substance of the book; Loberg added the color.”

          But then when he read the book, he would’ve noticed that he never dictated the “substance” of “Ten Craziest Facts You Should Know About a Giraffe.”

          Is Agus really saying he never read his own book?? What kind of recommendation is that: a book so boring that even its author didn’t read it! I’m starting to wonder if Jane Goodall and the other blurbers ever read the book either.

          Also there’s something weird about the above-linked news article because the author, Joel Stein, is a journalist—and he had someone ghostwrite his own memoir. If you’re a journalist, you should be able to write. It should be fun to write your own memoir! If not, why do it in the first place? It’s not like it’s gonna bring in loads of cash.

          What’s next, a mathematician hiring someone to ghost-prove a theorem?

          P.S. I read Stein’s article more carefully, and I realized that I missed the point above. Follow the link and you’ll see that Stein hired someone to write his life story as a clever gimmick for a magazine article he wrote about a ghostwriter. The ghostwriter purposely wrote it in a hack airport-bio style. That makes sense. It’s not that Stein hired a ghostwriter to write his memoir, it’s that he used his funny life experiences to unpack how ghostwriting can work.

        • Carlos, that’s an incredible (not in a good way) article! Here’s a quote: “Nearly all experts and celebrities use ghostwriters…” So is it “Regression and Other Stories” by Gelman, Hill, Vehtari (with ghostwriting by Loberg)? Or maybe GHV are neither experts nor celebrities? Or they’re exceptional in not using a ghostwriter.

        • The linked article provides a link supposedly to a piece written by Loberg about the secret to creative writing (and avoiding plagiarism). The link did not work for me. But if she really wrote such a piece, this is becoming a pattern. Books and articles about honesty are written by authors who use fraudulent data. Articles about plagiarism are written by authors who plagiarize. I guess it shouldn’t be totally surprising, but it is disturbing. Does it mean books about racism are written by racists, books about murder are written by murderers, and books about illegal trading are written by illegal traders? Maybe this is a key to solving many criminal cases.

        • Dale:

          I’m still stuck on the idea that the author of that magazine article is a professional writer who . . . hired a ghostwriter to write his own memoir! Where does it all stop? Does the professional writer’s ghostwriter hire a ghostwriter? This is entering Russell’s Paradox territory.

        • > Where does it all stop? Does the professional writer’s ghostwriter hire a ghostwriter?

          “[…] real estate developer Tan Youhui contacted an alleged hitman in October 2013, with a request to kill a business competitor, surnamed Wei.

          The hired man, Xi Guangan, received two million Chinese yuan ($282,600) to kill Wei, […]

          Xi took the money and outsourced the job to another would-be hitman, Mo Tianxiang, while keeping half of the initial amount.

          Mo, who was offered one million Chinese yuan ($141,300), also decided against carrying out the hit. Instead, he pocketed some of the proposed fee and found another man, Yang Kangsheng.

          Yang was paid 270,000 Chinese yuan ($38,100) up front and promised another 500,000 Chinese yuan ($70,600) when the job was completed.

          Yang then pocketed part of the money and outsourced the job to a fourth man, Yang Guangsheng, with an initial offer of 200,000 Chinese yuan ($28,200), and a further bonus of 500,000 Chinese yuan ($70,600) on completion of the deed. […]

          The chain of outsourcing continued for over six months until the job reached a fifth person, Ling Xiansi. By that point, Ling was offered just 100,000 yuan ($14,100) to murder Wei, the court said.

          Ling also got cold feet. But rather than killing Wei or finding another supposed hitman, he met with the intended target directly – and offered to help fake his death.”

          https://edition.cnn.com/2019/10/22/asia/china-jails-men-outsource-murder-plot-intl-hnk/index.html

        • The hitmen should have hired someone with a whip to ensure they completed the job. This is what happens when you rely on trust but monitoring is difficult and costly.

        • @Carlos: a fictionalized version of that hitman scenario made it into the series “Too Old To Die Young”…had no idea it had basis in fact

    • Well, the Amazon blurb contains the text:
      About the Author
      David B. Agus, MD, is the author of the international sensations The End of Illness, A Short Guide to a Long Life, and The Lucky Years. A professor of medicine and engineering at the University of Southern California, he is the founding Director and CEO of the Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine and a contributor to CBS News. He lives in Santa Monica, California.

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  7. As someone who graduated from USC, this is about the tamest scandal I could imagine for them. Not even close to having the Dean of medicine using his office to party on methamphetamines and opioids with prostitutes or be involved in other illegal activity at a hotel where a prostitute overdosed and then USC certainly gave the appearance of suppressing the investigation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Puliafito Fuck that guy and his strong attempt to get my wife fired.

    There were also the sex abusers in the student medical center. https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-usc-settlement-lawsuits-former-patient-gynecologist-20190213-story.html I think there were two separate incidents?

    And a second med school dean who resigned after strong allegations of sexual harassment both at a previous institution and after being hired.

    USC is full of scandals. There are some good people at USC but it’s mainly by happy accident.

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  8. Next time the publisher will run the text through a ChatGPT-based tool to rephrase the whole book, and then no one will notice the plagiarism.

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