Twelve years after sleuths flagged problematic images in a 2009 paper, the authors — including the head of a UK research institute — have retracted the article.
The paper, published in Genes & Development, has been cited 126 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
According to the June 1 retraction notice, the authors retracted the paper because of “anomalies in the data presented” in multiple figures. “The issues relate to potential instances of image manipulation, including undisclosed splicing, lane flipping, and lane and panel duplications in the preparation of these figures.”
Corresponding author Anne Willis is the director of the Medical Research Council Toxicology Unit at the University of Cambridge, a position she has held since 2010. Prior to that, she was at the University of Nottingham, which was her affiliation on the now-retracted paper. In 2017, she was awarded an OBE for “services to biomedical sciences and supporting the careers of women scientists.” Neither Willis nor the MRC Toxicology Unit communications team responded to our requests for comment.
All the authors except one, who did not respond to the journal’s attempts to contact him, agreed to the retraction.
Starting in 2013, multiple comments on PubPeer pointed out problems with figures in the paper. In 2023, Elisabeth Bik, an expert in detecting image manipulation, compiled the prior comments along with a few additional problems she found. (A note that Retraction Watch administers the Elisabeth Bik Science Integrity Fund.)
“The amount of image duplication, with — what appears to be — digital copy/pasting of parts of blot panels and lanes is a strong indicator of an intention-to-mislead,” Bik told Retraction Watch. She “was planning to alert the journals/institutions, but [had] not done that in this case,” she said.
Sixteen of Willis’ papers have comments on PubPeer, all of which flag image issues. Willis has one other retraction, the withdrawal of a conference abstract “inadvertently published” in Toxicology in 2012. Two of her papers have corrections for image assembly issues.
John Inglis, executive director and publisher at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, which publishes Genes & Development, told us the retraction “was agreed between the authors and the journal’s editorial staff.” We asked if he could comment on the timeline of the retraction, the PubPeer comments, and if anyone besides the authors contacted the journal about the issues with the figures. He responded, “at CSHL Press, correspondence of this kind is private and we have no details to share or any further comment to make.”
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