Year: 2010

Best of Retractions Part III: Whatever can go wrong …

Paging Dr. Murphy.

In July, the editors of Cancer Biology & Therapy published a retraction remarkable for its scope. Apparently, nearly everything dishonest authors can do to doctor a manuscript, these authors did.

The paper, “Overexpression of transketolase protein TKTL1 is associated with occurrence and progression in nasopharyngeal carcinoma,” initially appeared on the journal’s website in January 2008. It came out in print three months later, in the April issue, and has been cited 8 times since, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.

The authors were Song Zhang, Jian Xin Yue,  Ju Hong Yang, Peng Cheng Cai and Wei Jia Kong, of Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Hubei, China. It will be quite clear why we listed all those authors in a moment. Continue reading Best of Retractions Part III: Whatever can go wrong …

Another update on Anil Potti: Co-author asks Nature Medicine to retract paper

courtesy Nature

Anil Potti, who resigned from his post at Duke today during an investigation into faked results, will likely have another retraction to his credit shortly. According to a Duke statement:

Dr. Potti’s collaborator, Joseph Nevins, Ph.D., has initiated a process intended to lead to a retraction request regarding a paper previously published in Nature Medicine.  This process has been initiated due to concerns about the reproducibility of reported predictors, and their possible effect on the overall conclusions in this paper.  Other papers published based on this science are currently being reviewed for any concerns. Continue reading Another update on Anil Potti: Co-author asks Nature Medicine to retract paper

Duke’s Anil Potti resigns

Duke University photo

Duke’s Anil Potti, the Duke cancer researcher who falsely claimed to be a Rhodes Scholar and may have faked several analyses of chemotherapy and cancer, has resigned from the university.

The Duke Chronicle reports that Potti

…stepped down from his position at Duke’s Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy Friday and took responsibility for the problems in his research, IGSP Director Huntington Willard wrote in an e-mail to IGSP staff.

Willard wrote that Potti “accepted full responsibility for a series of anomalies in data handling, analysis and management that have come under scrutiny in the past months.”

He said that investigations into Potti’s research will continue, as will IGSP’s examinations of Potti’s science.

The resignation follows the retraction earlier this week of one paper Potti co-authored in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

We’ll update as we learn more.

Please see an update about a second paper now being retracted by one of Potti’s co-authors.

“What were you thinking? Do not manipulate those data”

The title of this post is stolen, with adoring attribution, from a piece in the November 16, 2010 issue of Autophagy, because we couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

In the piece, the journal’s editor, Dan Klionsky, focuses on images. It reads, in part: Continue reading “What were you thinking? Do not manipulate those data”

JCO makes it official, retracting paper co-authored by Anil Potti

We have a follow-up to our post two weeks ago about a possible retraction in the case of Anil Potti, the Duke cancer researcher who falsely claimed to be a Rhodes Scholar and may have also faked an analysis of how breast cancer responds to chemotherapy.

In that post, we noted that the Raleigh News & Observer had reported that one of Potti’s collaborators, Duke’s Joseph Nevins, had requested that a 2007 paper they co-authored be retracted. The journal told us this morning that the retraction went live yesterday. In it, the authors write: Continue reading JCO makes it official, retracting paper co-authored by Anil Potti

So how many retractions are there every year, anyway?

The title of this post is a question that we’ve been asking ourselves since we started Retraction Watch in August, and that others have asked us since. And we’ve gotten different answers depending where we look:

So the real number is a) probably somewhere between 30 and 95 and b) increasing — which isn’t as precise as we’d like, but is hardly the fault of the various people who’ve tried valiantly to count.

Well, we may be a step closer to precision, sort of. Continue reading So how many retractions are there every year, anyway?

More on the latest Cell retraction: PI says a graduate student was at fault

Carsten Carlberg

This morning we reported on a new retraction in Cell involving fraud from a lab in Finland, which led us to a second retraction of a paper by the same group in the Journal of Molecular Biology. The first author on both papers was Tatjana Degenhardt, who at the time was a graduate student in the lab of Carsten Carlberg, professor of biochemistry at the University of Kuopio.

A few minutes ago Retraction Watch spoke with Carlberg, who had this to say about Degenhardt: Continue reading More on the latest Cell retraction: PI says a graduate student was at fault

Cell retraction for bogus images in genetics paper reveals another, in Journal of Molecular Biology

Call it bad luck, but the journal Cell has been victimized again by image manipulation. For the second time this month, the publication has retracted a paper whose authors acknowledged that one of them had played around with the figures.

Published in August 2009, the paper, “Population-Level Transcription Cycles Derive from Stochastic Timing of Single-Cell Transcription,” has been cited 16 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. It purported to show using computer modeling that

transcriptional cycling, i.e., periodic assembly of transcription factors and their cofactors and the resulting cyclical accumulation of mRNA, may stem from stochastic timing and sequential activation of transcription in individual cells.

The authors, from several European institutions, presented experimental data to back up their computer model, including multiple figures. Some of those, they now admit, were fabricated — to the point where the whole paper collapsed: Continue reading Cell retraction for bogus images in genetics paper reveals another, in Journal of Molecular Biology

Science plays two — a retraction, and concern issued about genetics papers

It’s a busy week at Science. The journal is retracting a controversial paper about which it had previously expressed doubts, and has published an “Expression of Concern” about another article that looks like it might be headed for the same fate.

First, the retraction.

The move involves an October 2009 paper, on which we’ve previously posted, by European researchers who claimed to have made a major advance in the ability to watch how enzymes behave in cells — thereby giving scientists a new tool for monitoring the function of genes.

But back in December, Science editor Bruce Alberts issued this “Expression of Concern” about the research: Continue reading Science plays two — a retraction, and concern issued about genetics papers

It’s poll time: Should a retraction during graduate school mean losing your PhD?

photo by secretlondon123 via flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/secretlondon/

A few weeks ago, we reported on the case of Emily Horvath, a promising scientist at Indiana University who admitted to falsifying data to make her results look better. Some of that data went into her PhD thesis. That prompted a Retraction Watch reader to ask whether scientists who commit such fraud should be stripped of their PhDs. We figured that was a good poll question, so let us know what you think.