A well-known scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies longevity has retracted a paper for “numerous examples of unindicated splicing of gel lanes,” as well as other problems.
This is Leonard Guarente‘s second retraction. He shares both with Gizem Donmez, an alum of his lab who now has three retractions. Donmez left her post as a Tufts professor in 2014.
Guarente told us in March — when we reported that he’d published a mega-correction on another paper — that he had planned to address issues with the paper, “SIRT1 Protects against α-Synuclein Aggregation by Activating Molecular Chaperones,” published in the The Journal of Neuroscience. Now, a retraction note has appeared “at the request of the authors.” It explains:
It was brought to our attention that the Donmez et al., 2012 paper has numerous examples of unindicated splicing of gel lanes and of duplications and inversions of gel images. The prevalence of these occurrences is unacceptable and compels us to retract the paper. We offer our most sincere apologies to readers.
The paper has been cited 80 times, according to Thomson Reuters Web of Science.
Guarente told us he had nothing to add. We could not find current contact information for Donmez.
Hat tip: Kerry Grens
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Analysis on this… http://www.psblab.org/?p=514
In particular, contrast the retraction statement above with the assertion from the journal’s EiC in 2013 that there was nothing wrong.
I have no substantive comments on your analysis, but I salute you for using (inventing?) the term “post-docalypse”. Bravo!
Talking about inventing a term, what is “alum”?
“Alum” is a fairly standard American English abbreviation for “alumnus”/”alumna”.
Has there been any independent investigation in this case?
If so, it should have been published.
I am wondering why research institutes so often are hiding this kind of information?
For scientific progression and preventive reasons it is better to be open regarding these problems.
Gizem Dönmez is an Assoc. Prof at Adnan Menderes University, Department of Medical Biology (Turkey). She is using “Gizem Donmez Yalcin” in University web page (Yalcin is his husband`s surname) and using Gizem Yalcin in her published manuscripts. So you will see no paper from her with Donmez G. as the author (…not easy to track the papers of a well known scientist !).
Below is an example of her 2018 publication:
http://www.jneurology.com/articles/sirtuins-and-neurodegeneration.pdf
In the above paper you can also find her contact e-Mail…
http://www.jneurology.com/articles/sirtuins-and-neurodegeneration.pdf