Camera maker Nikon has disqualified Ning Xu, an optical engineering researcher at Tsinghua University in China, from this year's Small World in Motion competition. The company said the video did not comply with the competition rules regarding generative AI.
The video showed hair-like structures lining the airways of a child with primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD), a rare genetic disease, and claimed to use a sequence of light waves to illuminate the sample in colour. It was magnified to 100 times in size. Days after the winners were announced in September, microscopy experts began questioning its accuracy on social media.
Edward Phelps, an associate professor at Florida University, wrote in a comment section on a LinkedIn post by Nikon that the images of nuclei 'do not behave as nuclei' and that the cilia 'appear from nowhere and do not match the known size'. The post has since been deleted by Nikon.
The microscopy community also wrote an open letter to the competition calling for the winning work to be externally examined. 'A potentially misleading portrayal of PCD is shaping public understanding of an already poorly understood rare disease,' the letter said.
Nikon said the decision was based on the video's eligibility and was not a judgement of the entrant's professional reputation or scientific contributions.
Following the controversy, Vietnamese researcher Nguyen Nam Nhat was awarded first place for a video of a microscopic roundworm encountering a single-celled organism called a Dileptus. The video had initially placed second.