It’s Nobel Prize week, and the work behind mRNA COVID-19 vaccines has just earned the physiology or medicine prize. But this is Retraction Watch, so that’s not what this post is about.
A Nobel prize-winning researcher whose publications have come under scrutiny has retracted his 10th paper for issues with the data and images.
Gregg Semenza, a professor of genetic medicine and director of the vascular program at Johns Hopkins’ Institute for Cell Engineering in Baltimore, shared the 2019 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for “discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability.”
The pseudonymous sleuth Claire Francis had flagged possibly duplicated or manipulated images in Semenza’s publications on PubPeer before 2019, and other sleuths posted more beginning in October 2020.
Last September, Semenza and his co-authors pulled four papers from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Another PNAS paper, one in Oncogene, and two from the Journal of Biological Chemistry were retracted over the past year, with each notice stating that Semenza requested or agreed to the retractions.
Today, Molecular Cancer Research has retracted another of the Nobelist’s articles, “Procollagen Lysyl Hydroxylase 2 Is Essential for Hypoxia-Induced Breast Cancer Metastasis,” which appeared in 2013. The article has been cited 181 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
With a 2011 retraction for a paper co-authored with Naoki Mori – who with 31 retractions sits at No. 24 on our leaderboard – today’s retraction makes 10 for Semenza. More may be on the way.
The notice states:
This article (1) has been retracted at the request of the authors. The authors found that lanes 4, 5, and 6 of the HIF-1α immunoblot in Fig. 3A are identical images. An internal review corroborated the authors’ claim, and the editors agreed with the authors’ retraction request. The authors apologize to the scientific community and deeply regret any inconveniences or challenges resulting from the publication and subsequent retraction of this article.
A copy of this Retraction Notice was sent to the last known email addresses for all authors. Four authors (Denis Wirtz, Carmen C. Wong, Daniele M. Gilkes, and Gregg L. Semenza) agreed to the retraction; the 3 remaining authors could not be located.
Semenza did not immediately respond to our request for comment. Johns Hopkins would not comment on whether they were investigating the matter when a reporter from The Baltimore Sun asked this summer.
In October 2020, a PubPeer user commented that the lanes of the figure identified in the retraction notice were “much more similar than expected.” The first author, Daniele M. Gilkes, responded by posting an image of the “original uncropped version.” Another commenter raised more concerns about the image, but Gilkes did not respond again.
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Nobel prize on retractions winner: Gregg Semenza
Research ethics do not seem to be important for success in academia. No matter whether you manipulate data or do something else, you can succeed in academia as long as you publish in high-impact journals. Very easy.
That’s a fascinating perspective. Do you have evidence for this? There’s also of history of Nobel-awarded work that was rejected from high impact journals and published in lower-impact journals.
Nobel-awarded work being rejected by journals. That’s not fraud, is it?
In the current publish or perish culture, data manipulations in high-impact journals are not so surprising.
What is this saying about the peer review process? Is it just a rubber stamp? The journals should have caught this. This is hurting some previously reputable journals.
Surely, these retracted studies exaggerated the significance of HIF pathways.
Perhaps one day a fantastic drug based on HIF will be developed to vindicate the value of this pathway. Still waiting…
By now it should be evident to even the most casual observer: the mansion of American academia has rotting timbers. Publish-or-perish has brought the system to the brink. Of what use is knowledge (even non-fake knowledge) without character?
Are these the people we depend on to teach our young?
Retraction shouldn’t automatically damage an author’s reputation, especially when the author requests or supports the retraction. But when they have a lot of them, I think it’s fair to be more cautious when looking at their work. And the fact that it happens with illustrious authors and journals underscores the fact that peer review isn’t all it’s made out to be.
Sir, these so-called “superstar” professors usually don’t teach at all. Teaching is never these guys’ concern at all. My Alma mater is a famous public university in Texas, some professors cannot even speak English properly, but this never stops them from getting tenure positions, only because they can publish papers and put my alma mater’s name on the paper. This is how university works
Why should a good researcher teach to be a good researcher. However one only teaches the past from textbooks if one is not an innovative researcher. Textbooks are by definition outdated. For teaching from text books just to learn a job one doesn’t need current universities and their „teachers“. Online courses and AI will replace them.
Principal investigators teach in the lab with their grad students & post-docs as pupils. PIs are teaching ethics & attitudes, as well as, techniques & ideas.
Let’s imagine Gregg Semenza gets to 20, then 30 retractions. Will people argue it’s just a percentage game, and that only 4%, or 6% of his publications had then been retracted? Will there come a point that Nobel Committee says that is time to reconsider his prize?
The retractions are not about the discovery of what made Gregg Semenza famous, but they are about what his discovery (along with at least two other groups, 3 people were awarded that Nobel Prize) might lead to/does.
Imagine again that his Nobel Prize is withdrawn. Would that make any difference to poor scientific practice in the world?
Dear Fernando,
10 retractions?? That is a substantial number revealing a disturbing pattern.. I wonder what an in depth look at the money trail might show… where is his research funding coming from..? Once that is complete the next step will be obvious.. The Nobel Prize Committee must keep their standards above reproach.. 10 retractions?? Wow..
2/14/24 New expression of concern.
https://pubpeer.com/publications/73F405A1F9F6E7F34D45BBA64166E2
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0119762
Eleventh retraction for Gregg Semenza.
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2402727121
RETRACTION
Retraction for Wei et al., Endothelial expression of hypoxia-inducible factor 1 protects the murine heart and aorta from pressure overload by suppression of TGF-β signaling
February 26, 2024
121 (10) e2402727121
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2402727121
Vol. 121 | No. 10
Medical Sciences
Retraction of “Endothelial expression of hypoxia-inducible factor 1 protects the murine heart and aorta from pressure overload by suppression of TGF-β signaling,” by Hong Wei, Djahida Bedja, Norimichi Koitabashi, Dongmei Xing, Jasper Chen, Karen Fox-Talbot, Rosanne Rouf, Shaoping Chen, Charles Steenbergen, John W. Harmon, Harry C. Dietz, Kathleen L. Gabrielson, David A. Kass, and Gregg L. Semenza,
which was first published March 8, 2012; 10.1073/pnas.1202081109 (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 109, E841–E850).
The undersigned authors note, “We are retracting this paper due to the following concerns with presentation of data in immunoblot assays of total and phosphorylated ERK1/2 in Fig. 4F and Fig. 4G. The first issue is that two different blots were used to analyze total and phosphorylated ERK1/2 in Fig. 4F, whereas it appears that the same blot was stripped and reused to analyze total and phosphorylated ERK1/2 in Fig. 4G. The second issue is that there appears to be splicing of lanes in the assay of phosphorylated ERK1/2 in Fig. 4F that was not indicated in the figure. Since the integrity of the data has been questioned and we have not been able to locate the raw data files from over 10 years ago, we request that the paper be retracted. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.”
Charles Steenbergen, Harry C. Dietz, and Gregg L. Semenza
I wonder if they did not like the image of the orignal immuno blot & tried to reproduce it, but couldn’t.
Would be interesting to see whether the remains of his work still justify there Nobel.