ABOVE: ELIZABETH BIK
Elisabeth Bik describes herself as a “super-introvert,” the kind of person prone to weeping in closets after prolonged exposure to other people. That’s not a hypothetical, either.
But Bik, a microbiologist by training, has managed to carve out a niche for herself in science—one that doesn’t require her to interact much with other people and is perfectly suited to someone whose idea of a good time is spending 12 solid hours on a weekend scrutinizing images for signs of manipulation.
What started as a hobby has become a passion. Bik estimates that she has spent roughly 5,000 hours examining papers over the past five years. In the process, she estimates, she has identified in the neighborhood of 2,000 articles with problematic images. In 2016, she and two other researchers, Ferric Fang and Arturo Casadevall, published an article in mBio reporting on 784 papers—of more than 20,000 screened—with ...
