David Baltimore once famously issued a dictum (and this is a paraphrase because my memory fails me): "If not (at least) two-fold, then too bad!" As a systems biologist I believe that there is a lot of interesting biology between one-fold and two-fold, and that four-fold is not the same as two-fold.
One of the striking aspects of the whole media coverage of the persecution of President Claudine Gay has been the complete lack of nuance in the description of her "plagiarism". The one exception has been The Harvard Crimson. In an editorial piece, they state quite accurately (with wisdom beyond their years) that:
"But not all plagiarism is equal.
Plagiarism offenses lie on a spectrum. As defined by Harvard’s undergraduate “Guide to Using Sources,” it includes both misrepresentation of others’ ideas as one’s own and misattribution of borrowed material. Both matter, but the latter category, into which Gay’s allegations fall, is less serious by far."
In stark contrast, news outlets such as The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, etc. repeat almost verbatim the posts from Free Bacon about the "40 examples of plagiarism" as if critical thinking and nuance were not part of the job description.
I have examined roughly 10 of the examples, and in my opinion they range from not plagiarism (e.g. defining a variable), to insignificant plagiarism (e.g. sloppy paraphrasing with attribution), to minor plagiarism ("plagiarizing" an acknowledgments section).
There are one or two exception that I deem to be serious plagiarism on par with say plagiarizing a passage from Wikipedia without attribution.
Nuance matters both in biology and in the non-biological world. It gives me comfort that the younger generation recognizes what we in the older generation do not.
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