I have no idea about this catalogue, however, looking at the article and how the image manipulation has happened - it looks very much like "repro" work back in the day.

Anything that large companies published in/as magazines, etc, back in the 80/90s first went to a design company. Then to a repro company for the "finishing touches" to make it look nice. Faces were touched up, photo artifacts was removed, everything was to look neat and tidy.

This looks so much like that. I wouldn't be surprised if Thermo Fisher still ran everything that is to be published through a marketing/repro cycle, who has tampered with this without realizing what it looks like.

It'll be interesting to see if any actual data has been changed, or just the presentation of the data.

In some of the experiments, the same random noise background exists with different black blobs superimposed at where you expect the correct value to be. Ie they took a fixed realistic-ish looking background, and drew in the 'correct' values

Its hard to argue that that isn't fraud as a result. It isn't touching up existing data, its fully fabricating data

No marketing or design company would duplicate a band from another experiment (taking care to rotate it to make it look different nonetheless). Even in that unlikely scenario, Thermo Fisher is still responsible for the scientific data they publish.

The background painting could maybe be explained like this (depending on what was hidden), but I don't think the duplicated blobs have a good explanation, especially because some were rotated to try to hide the manipulation.

I disagree. If you look at the photos the painting used to make black blobs shorter. As I understand, black blob vertical position is the weight of a molecule, and they want to hide the fact that there are heavier or lighter molecules. So originally there was a long blob, and they made it look shorter.