The Lancet Infectious Diseases has removed a cover illustration of the Buddha contemplating a mosquito from its June, 2015 issue — a complement to a paper about malaria treatment in Cambodia — after receiving emails from readers who protested the depiction of the statue in a non-religious context.
After publishing the cover, the journal received “several emails” protesting the image, such as this one from Arjuna P R Aluwihare:
A researcher who confessed to spiking rabbit blood samples to make the results of an HIV vaccine experiment look better has been sentenced to 57 months of prison time, according to The Des Moines Register.
Dong-Pyou Han has also been ordered to repay more than $7 million to the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and will have three years of supervised release following his prison term.
In December, 2013, the U.S. Office of Research Integrity announced that Han, formerly at Iowa State University (ISU), had faked his results to make an HIV vaccine look more powerful. The faulty data made their way into seven national and international symposia between 2010 and 2012 (resulting in a retracted poster in 2014), along with three grant applications and multiple progress reports. Han agreed to a three-year research ban, and resigned from ISU in October the following year.
The NIH never sent the final $1.38 million grant payment of more than $10 million awarded to Han’s boss, Michael Cho, and ISU returned nearly $500,000 it had received for Han’s salary and other costs.
One of Paolo Macchiarini’s co-authors on a 2011 Lancet paper describing an allegedly groundbreaking procedure to transplant an artificial trachea seeded with stem cells is objecting to a recent investigation that concluded Macchiarini had committed misconduct.
Ola Hermanson, who studies neural stem cells at Karolinska Institutet, argued in a report dated June 29 that the investigation contained “serious flaws and formal errors.”
Here at Retraction Watch, we’ve covered somewhere shy of 2,000 retractions in our nearly five years of existence. With this post, we may be more than doubling that total count.
That’s because it looks like IEEE may have retracted thousands of meeting abstracts. Yes, thousands.
We don’t know the exact number, but a search for “retraction” in the abstracts of the 2011 International Conference on E-Business and E-Government (ICEE), held May 6-8 2011, brings up 1,281 results.
However, after the 2011 paper “Carcinogenicity of radiofrequency electromagnetic fields” appeared, a reader raised allegations of conflicts of interest among its participants, which sparked a reconsideration of their disclosures.
The correction concerns the conflicts of interest for Niels Kuster of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, also a board member of the non-profit IT’IS foundation.
Kuster told Retraction Watch he disclosed everything upfront:
The essay was included in an issue guest edited by faculty member Alice Dreger—who penned a post for us in March about the ways in which attacks on academic freedom have increased, during the time her own publication had been taken offline.
Last month, the community was shaken when a major study on gay marriage in Science was retracted following questions on its funding, data, and methodology. The senior author, Donald Green, made it clear he was not privy to many details of the paper — which raised some questions for C. K. Gunsalus, director of the National Center for Professional and Research Ethics, and Drummond Rennie, a former deputy editor at JAMA. We are pleased to present their guest post, about how co-authors can carry out their responsibilities to each other and the community.
C. K. Gunsalus
Just about everyone understands that even careful and meticulous people can be taken in by a smart, committed liar. What’s harder to understand is when a professional is fooled by lies that would have been prevented or caught by adhering to community norms and honoring one’s role and responsibilities in the scientific ecosystem.
Take the recent, sad controversy surrounding the now-retracted gay marriage study. We were struck by comments in the press by the co-author, Donald P. Green, on why he had not seen the primary data in his collaboration with first author Michael LaCour, nor known anything substantive about its funding. Green is the more senior scholar of the pair, the one with the established name whose participation helped provide credibility to the endeavor.
The New York Timesquoted Green on May 25 as saying: “It’s a very delicate situation when a senior scientist makes a move to look at a junior scientist’s data set.”
Here at Retraction Watch, we are reminded every day that everybody (including us) makes mistakes — what matters is, how you handle yourself when it happens. That’s why we created a “doing the right thing” category, to flag incidents where scientists have owned up to their errors and taken steps to correct them.
We’re not suggesting retractions have no effect on a scientist’s career — a working paper posted last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that principal investigators with retracted papers see an average drop of 10% in citations of their other papers, a phenomenon known as a citation penalty. But they face a bigger penalty if the retraction stemmed from misconduct, rather than an honest mistake.
The Lancet Infectious Diseases has removed a cover illustration of the Buddha contemplating a mosquito from its June, 2015 issue — a complement to a paper about malaria treatment in Cambodia — after receiving emails from readers who protested the depiction of the statue in a non-religious context.
