The term "vegetative electron microscopy" keeps showing up in scientific papers
Published on: 2025-07-30 20:06:23
Earlier this year, scientists discovered a peculiar term appearing in published papers: "vegetative electron microscopy".
This phrase, which sounds technical but is actually nonsense, has become a "digital fossil" – an error preserved and reinforced in artificial intelligence (AI) systems that is nearly impossible to remove from our knowledge repositories.
Like biological fossils trapped in rock, these digital artefacts may become permanent fixtures in our information ecosystem.
The case of vegetative electron microscopy offers a troubling glimpse into how AI systems can perpetuate and amplify errors throughout our collective knowledge.
A bad scan and an error in translation
Vegetative electron microscopy appears to have originated through a remarkable coincidence of unrelated errors.
First, two papers from the 1950s, published in the journal Bacteriological Reviews, were scanned and digitised.
However, the digitising process erroneously combined "vegetative" from one column of
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