#mirkin

Three years ago, I asked in a blog post here What do scientific prizes celebrates? It was a reaction to false claims in press releases by the King Faisal Price and Northwestern University announcing the award of the 2023 King Faisal Prize in Medicine and Science to Chad Mirkin. One of the false claims was that spherical nucleic acids were the basis for more than 1,800 commercial products.Well,…

PNAS did not publish the letter to the Editor I had submitted (and which led to a legal threat against me), but they did request that the authors publish a correction adding some of the references that I had cited in my letter. Eventually a correction was published on the 2nd of August, but as I told Retraction Watch for their follow up piece, “this correction does nothing to correct the main…

Regular readers of this blog might remember that in November 2015, I published a post entitled PNAS: “your letter does not contribute significantly to the discussion of this paper”. That short post related how the then Editor-in-Chief of PNAS, Inder Verma, had dismissed our critique (available thanks to BiorXiv) of a PNAS paper. The justification of the EiC was patently absurd: it could have been…

What do scientific prizes celebrate?

Another scientific prize has been awarded to Chad Mirkin for his work on oligonucleotide-modified gold nanoparticles (or Spherical Nucleic Acids, aka SNAs, as Mirkin calls them since 2012)… whilst SNA company Exicure continues on its “death spiral“. The prize is the 2023 King Faisal Prize (KFP) in Medicine and Science. The KFP and Northwestern press releases show a certain disconnect from…

Conflict of interest/publishing ethics; a short case study

The company Aurasense (now Exicure) was established in 2009. Founders are Shad Thaxton and Chad Mirkin. Its first employee was David Giljohann: Principal Scientist (2009-11), then COO 2012-13, now CEO.

According to this 2009 New York Times article, Thaxton and Mirkin founded Aurasense to commercialise a technology based on “tiny particles that mimic those good carriers of cholesterol before it…