How I know Elisabeth
I met Elisabeth after we had just moved to the Bay Area, through our husbands who both worked for the same company. Through Elisabeth I joined a Dutch drama group and acted with her for a few years until our director moved back to the Netherlands. We also did some singing classes and Bollywood dance classes together. For the past few years we haven’t been in touch very much so I was super excited when she said yes to be my second interviewee for The Fifties Project!
Elisabeth’s youth and college days: wannabe ornithologist becomes microbiologist
Elisabeth was born in Gouda, the Netherlands in 1966. Her dad was a doctor; he held his practice at home. Elisabeth and her two siblings were used to being around patients, and Elisabeth grew up being very interested in medicine and biology. However witnessing the growing demands of patients as well as her dad spending a lot of his “free” time still working, she knew she didn’t want to be a doctor. In fact, at 8 years old she decided she wanted to be an ornithologist (someone who studies birds): she pictured herself carrying around binoculars to watch birds everywhere. Over the years her interest changed to the wider subject of biology.
At 18 Elisabeth started college in Utrecht, the Netherlands. She lived at home during college: she rode her bike to Utrecht at the beginning of the school year and would leave it in the bicycle storage at the railway station so she could take the train from Gouda to Utrecht and then ride her bike to class.
She earned her Master’s degree in 6 years (normally 4 years) because she extended her internships as she was having such a great time, initially at a lab and then at the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment. At the latter she stayed even longer: she did her PhD work there.
Elisabeth’s jobs in the Netherlands
At 24 Elisabeth left her parents’ home to live in an apartment with some other people in Zeist. She met Gerard, her now husband for 22 years on a cultural trip to Istanbul, Turkey. They both really liked photography and spent a lot of time with a small subgroup of their travel companions trying to get the best shots of the sites. (This was way before smart phones, when you took maybe one or two pictures per site, otherwise it would get too expensive!). A relationship developed and after a year they bought a house together. Elisabeth started her PhD at the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, working on cholera for 4-5 years and earning her degree in 1996. For a while she stayed at the institute to keep working on cholera, before switching to a hospital in Nieuwegein where she worked for 4 years as molecular microbiologist. She trained people in new (DNA) techniques.
Elisabeth’s jobs in the United States
In 2001, Elisabeth’s husband was asked to relocate to San Jose for his company. They moved a month after 9/11. Through her lab in the Netherlands she got in touch with David Relman who ran a group at Stanford. She started working there in April 2002 and stayed for 15 years, focusing on sequencing microbes. She worked with huge spreadsheets, especially enjoying figuring out how to make data visible and understandable for the general public.
Just after her 50th birthday Elisabeth left the academic world for a startup, uBiome. There she focused on science writing and blog writing. The first year was fun but once the company started growing, Elisabeth found she was having so many meetings, she lost the passion for her job. She also didn’t agree with the direction the company was going, valuing money over science. So she left. 6 months later, the FBI raided the company for alleged insurance fraud. It no longer exists.
Elisabeth took a new job at Astarte Medical. Although she liked the company and the product they were developing, the job was not a good fit for her.
In retrospect, she doesn’t feel like her switch to work there was a great one. However, she found that as a 50 year old with so much experience and thus certain financial expectations, it wasn’t as easy to find a new job as she had expected with her then 20,000+ Twitter followers and her Microbiome blog as her safety nets. She did use her followers and blog to negotiate a good salary at uBiome. She also asked for a promotion when the time was right.
Elisabeth’s desire for recognition
So how exactly did Elisabeth get 73,400 Twitter followers? In 2014 Elisabeth realized her boss was famous and was asked to do presentations all around the world, but no one knew the people working in the lab. She wanted to get some recognition too. She already had a few years of writing a personal blog under her belt so she started her blog “Microbiome Digest”, every day publishing an overview of new papers on microbiome studies. Initially just a service for the colleagues in her own lab, she soon started sending emails to other labs offering this free service. On her Twitter account she tweeted about her blog; as the microbiome field grew, her number of followers grew as well. (Her blog still exists although she no longer runs it herself: through her tweets she found a group of volunteers who compile the lists. The number of visitors (300-500 per day) has been stable over the years).
Elisabeth’s scientific hobby started around the same time as her blog. Initially, she had been drawn to searching for plagiarized content (30 papers were retracted thanks to her work). At some point she realized she was good at finding image duplication. In the first year she started focusing on that, she screened 20,000 papers and found image duplication or manipulation in 4%, or 800 of them. Elisabeth felt she was doing something good for science, she just needed to convince the rest of the world. She wrote a paper about her findings with 2 co-authors in 2016 (when she was exactly 50 years old!). This shocked the science world! The publication had a profound effect on her Twitter account.
Elisabeth’s switch to full-time “spotting”
Early 2019 Elisabeth realized that she was way more enthusiastic about her “misconduct hobby” than about her day job. On March 1, 2019 she quit her job and started working on image manipulation/duplication full-time from her living room. She looks at microscope photos of cells and organs in scientific papers and searches for duplicates. For example, if the same photo is used for experiment A on one page and for experiment B on another page, something is wrong. Or, a photo shows two exactly identical cells which may mean it has been manipulated. She usually reports her findings to the journal that published the paper. Initially she was very careful, trying to stay anonymous, but now she isn’t afraid to be named as the source any more. In fact, in August 2019 she tweeted about her findings of image duplication in a paper of a Harvard group in Nature. She was very nervous about it but it was very well received: her tweet got 3,500 likes. She really wanted to make an impact. Nature replied directly to her tweet so it did make a huge impact! Finally a few weeks ago (about 10 months later) Nature retracted the paper.
Elisabeth calls herself a ‘super spotter’ which she thinks is a combination of talent and training herself. (She shows me how she almost crawls into the screen to recognize image duplications). She doesn’t consider herself super special.
Elisabeth sometimes consults for universities who have been accused of misconduct, for whom she serves as an expert.
Her work has been noticed and she’s been interviewed by big publications like Nature and Science, New York Times, Forbes, Wall Street Journal and this past week she appeared on the front page of the Mercury News!
She loves that she is doing something that is very unique, which she can do all by herself. (In 50 years, she learned that interactions with other people in the workplace were hard for her.) There are maybe 25 people in the world who do what she does, who like to stay anonymous. Sometimes she collaborates with people to analyze so-called paper mills: groups of scientific papers that look very much alike. Elisabeth is the only one who operates under her own name and not a pseudonym.
Elisabeth on her life so far
Elisabeth doesn’t regret anything she has done. She has had various jobs and learned a lot in every one of them. She practiced science from lots of different angles – academics (Netherlands and United States), health care, start-up. She wouldn’t have wanted it any different. She fondly looks back on everything she did. She feels like she jumped on opportunities that presented themselves, and now it’s time to give back to science with her image duplication work. Considering her path so far, she may be jumping on new opportunities in the future too. Right now she enjoys being in the spotlight for her work. She’d never have thought she’d get full feature interviews by all scientific publications named above as well as the BBC.
Elisabeth’s advice for others in this stage of life
We’re all intrinsically insecure and scared. You need to push yourself a little bit more every time to do something scary. Try to see yourself as inspiration for others. Lots of people feel like they don’t really have anything noteworthy to share. But once you start sharing stories online, people will start listening. Take note of what people like and use feedback to grow (even though it’s hard to take!). Never change yourself. Elisabeth was told many times she should be less critical, to which she answered: I can’t, I am a critic – that’s the package. Find a job or activity that fits you, don’t try to fit someone else’s mold!