Researchers struggle to amass good data and present them in as clear a fashion as possible. But what do we mean by 'clear' when it comes to images? In days gone by, whether we liked it or not, data acquired at the bench were not much different from what was published. In a biomedical lab, for example, samples that had been radio-labelled and separated on a gel were recorded on X-ray film. Composite figures were assembled, with lettering carefully placed around the mounted film. If a control was forgotten or a gel was uneven, the graduate student or postdoc was sent back into the lab to get it right 'for publication'. If a speck of dust on the film obscured data in the original photograph, another picture was taken. Slicing films to rearrange the order of samples, or to splice in a control group that was actually part of another gel, was not common because it took almost as much skill to do that as to rerun the experiment.
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