Via Bluesky and Chemistry World, this Retraction Watch piece from last month*:
One of the winners of the 2024 Kavli Prize in nanoscience has threatened to sue a longtime critic, Retraction Watch has learned.
In a cease and desist letter, a lawyer representing Chad Mirkin, a chemist and director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology at Northwestern University in Chicago, accused Raphaël Lévy, a professor of physics at the Université Paris Sorbonne Nord, of making “patently false and defamatory” statements about Mirkin’s research.
The demand primarily concerns a letter to the editor Lévy submitted in April to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences regarding an article Mirkin co-authored, “Multimodal neuro-nanotechnology: Challenging the existing paradigm in glioblastoma therapy,” which appeared in the journal in February.
Lévy and Mirkin, who was awarded one quarter of this year’s Kavli Prize in nanoscience for his work on spherical nucleic acids (SNAs), have a long history. In 2018, they clashed at a meeting of the American Chemical Society, where Mirkin called Lévy a “scientific terrorist.” Lévy has begun an effort to replicate one of Mirkin’s significant papers as part of the NanoBubbles project, which “focuses on how, when and why science fails to correct itself,” according to its website.
I have to say, there is basically zero likelihood that a suit is going to result from this, which makes me wonder what the point of this is, other than an attempt to intimidate Professor Lévy into silence. What a goofy idea - I have a difficult time thinking it's likely that Professor Mirkin will sue Professor Lévy, but you never know.
*I think I missed this because it was released on the same day as the Biden/Harris swap.\
Mirkin gave a seminar at my graduate department shortly before I started. I wasn't there, but the other grad students were still talking about how obnoxious he was a few years later!
ReplyDeleteChad Mirkin's behavior is shameful and should be condemned by the entire chemical community. That said, what is the point of the Chemistry World piece that literally just copies reporting from Retraction Watch? It adds nothing new. Couldn't Dalmeet Singh Chawla have done even a little bit of journalism to expand the story? For example, how is it that Mirkin was responding to a letter Levy had submitted to PNAS but which was not published? Did Levy make it public? If not, then was there a serious breach of ethics at PNAS that allowed Mirkin to gain access to this submitted letter? If so, then it seems to me like someone should face repercussions for that.
ReplyDeleteIf you check PNAS editors, you will find the answer (Mirkin is one).
DeleteI (Raphaël Lévy) can attempt to respond to those questions, but first, one thing is sure: the "shameful behavior" has not been condemned by the entire chemical community, or, if it has, it has been silently. In fact, a month after the Retraction Watch piece, ACS Nano has published an editorial celebrating the Kavli prize winners where not only the controversy and legal threat are not mentioned, but the kind of skewed extremely optimistic misrepresentations of his work which I was questioning in my letter to PNAS, are repeated and amplified.
DeleteHow is it that Mirkin was replying to a letter which was not public at the time? I don't know exactly and PNAS has not been very transparent even to me (and has refused to say anything to journalists). I did publish the letter once it had been rejected by PNAS : feel free to read, share, cite - obviously the best response to the attempt to censor is that everyone should read it; DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.12746733.
I was told by another undergrad visiting grad schools in the early 2000s that Mirkin had a portrait of himelf in his office. Having not applied to Northwestern, I always wondered if this was true.
ReplyDeleteActually, it is true, he is smart but a narcissist.
DeleteSounds like like an almost necessary character trait for profs these days
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