A Microplastics Preprint Grift

This will be a short post outlining the journey from wanton and willful microplastics alarmism (the “plastic spoon in your brain” fear-mongering paper) based on a study some serious scientists have come to view as a “joke” yet which was amplified dozens of times by the automated box of confusion scientific publishers have cobbled together, to a more recent preprint on bioRxiv that is being leveraged to sell unproved and very probably unnecessary “therapies” its authors want to profit from.

Just as a reminder, here is a brief history of the “plastic spoon in your brain” paper, demonstrating that a preprint can get a lot done on its own:

. . . the February 2025 paper wasn’t the first version available, or the first version the media covered. The first publicly available version was an unreviewed preprint posted nine months earlier (May 5, 2024). It was posted to the preprint server Research Square, which is associated with the ultimate publisher of the paper (Springer Nature). It was posted one week after the paper was submitted to Nature Medicine as part of the publisher's “In Review” system, a node on the box of confusion.

But this was not really the first appearance of the preprint. An author proof of the Research Square-branded preprint was posted on ResearchGate, the article-sharing site, on April 30, 2024, nearly a week earlier. It was indexed by Google that day.

The May 5, 2024, preprint on Research Square was indexed the next day in PubMed, with the full text of the preprint published on PubMed Central (PMC) and Europe PMC at the same time. This automatically created a linked publication event at NIH.gov for the work and availability in a half-dozen automated feeds using varying protocols (FTP, AWS, etc.).

To recap — within one week, a draft paper just submitted to a journal and probably only beginning its review process had been posted on:

ResearchGate

Research Square

PMC

Europe PMC

NIH.gov

The PMC Article Datasets feeds, available via FTP, AWS, HTTP, and other formats for unlimited download and reuse

These versions received 460 media mentions, and the unreviewed preprint was cited 27 times. The preprint was also indexed for discovery via search in ResearchGate, Research Square, PubMed, Europe PMC, Semantic Scholar, and Google Scholar, along with public search engines like Google.

Remember, this is one unreviewed paper, one unvetted scientific claim. There are thousands of scientific papers published every day on average. The “automated box of confusion” had done all of this for thousands of papers without anyone lifting a finger.

When the paper was officially published in February 2025, it received 790 media mentions and 34 citations by mid-May. Of the 1,250 total media mentions of the claims, more than one-third were to an unreviewed manuscript posted by the authors without any substantive external vetting or evaluation. Coverage of the peer-reviewed version occurred nearly a year later. 

In March 2025, a month after the peer-reviewed paper was published in Nature Medicine, a correction was issued. This correction was substantial, including revised figures, corrected math, and new figures. However, by this time, the media had moved on. The correction received no media coverage. The multiple preprint versions carried no notice of the correction, and were not updated.  

The allergist and plastic surgeon who are behind the latest bioRxiv preprint have a nice “institute” in Sarasota, FL, which boasts it is “completely void of any odors”:

Yes, the bioRxiv preprint’s authors are from the company trying to sell microplastic detoxes at their full-service (stem cells, beauty supplies!) Econolodge-inspired center for rehab and healing.

The preprint is just another load of garbage going into LLMs, because of course bioRxiv is easy pickings because preprints are free all around.

Will their preprint end up in a Gold OA journal somewhere? It doesn’t really matter. Their bogus science is cited on their website and at NewsNation as if it’s very cutting edge . . . because it’s a preprint.

Why is this happening? How is this happening? How have we failed to adapt to the Internet as a distribution economy? Why is all this being pumped into the public sphere despite probably being scientifically invalid?

Well, we wrote a book explaining it.

That doesn’t make it any less exasperating to see science being made a mockery.