Adam Marcus

Drip, drip: Former Harvard stem cell researcher up to 18 retractions

Piero Anversa, a former star researcher at Harvard Medical School who left the institution under a cloud, is up to 18 retractions. But that’s barely half of the 31 papers by Anversa’s group that Harvard has requested journals pull over concerns about the integrity of the findings.

The two articles, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, appeared in 2008 and 2009. Anversa and a frequent co-author, Annarosa Leri, are among the authors on each.

Anversa ran a richly-funded lab at Brigham and Women’s Hospital studying cardiac stem cells. But in 2014, critics began publicly questioning the output from the lab — questions that led to the departure of Anversa and Leri and a $10 million payout from the Brigham and Partners Healthcare to settle allegations of fraud involving the work. Anversa and Leri also sued Harvard — unsuccessfully — for alerting journals to the investigation and allegedly costing them job offers.

The retraction notice for the 2008 paper, “Notch1 regulates the fate of cardiac progenitor cells,” reads:

Health care group withdraws rheumatoid arthritis drug report

An influential group that studies the economic burden of medical care has temporarily removed from its website a draft report about the cost-effectiveness of drugs to treat rheumatoid arthritis amid questions about the modeling researchers used in their analysis.

The group initially did little to explain the move, despite having issued a press release for the document last week, replacing the report’s page with a brief statement:

‘Miracle’ on ice as chemists pull nanocatalyst paper that fizzled

God giveth miracles … and it seems she taketh them away as well.

A group of chemists in China has lost a 2018 paper which described a “miraculous” discovery that wasn’t.

The paper was titled “A miraculous chiral Ir–Rh bimetallic nanocatalyst for asymmetric hydrogenation of activated ketones,” and it appeared in Organic Chemistry Frontiers, a publication of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

The authors, from the State Key Laboratory of Fine Chemicals at Dalian University of Technology, purported to show that:

Doing the right thing: Authors retract paper on autism and social clues after realizing an error

A team of researchers in Europe has retracted a 2016 paper on how people with autism process social cues after finding an error in their analysis.

The article, “Social Bayes: using Bayesian modeling to study autistic trait–related differences in social cognition,” appeared in Biological Psychiatry, an Elsevier journal.

The senior author of the paper is Leonhard Schilbach, of the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich and University Hospital Cologne. According to the abstract of the article:

Geology paper has a rocky road, is now retracted

The authors of a 2019 paper in PLOS One on rocks in China have retracted the article for “misrepresentation of the results and data.”

The article, “Impacts of rock properties on Danxia landform formation based on lithological experiments at Kongtongshan National Geopark, northwest China,” was written by a group from Sun Yat-sen University and Hainan University. The researchers declared that:

Did the IPCC’s new oceans report mean to cite a now-retracted paper?

A major new report about the dramatic warming of the oceans cites a 2018 Nature paper on the topic that was retracted earlier this week — the same day, in fact, that the report dropped.

But one of the authors of that paper tells Retraction Watch that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report, released September 25, must have meant to cite a different paper by the same authors.

The report concluded that:

It is virtually certain that the global ocean has warmed unabated since 1970 and has taken up more than 90% of the excess heat in the climate system (high confidence). Since 1993, the rate of ocean warming has more than doubled (likely).

In a section on global carbon burden, the document states that:

PLOS ONE retracts perfume study when data don’t pass the sniff test

A pair of perfume researchers in England have lost a 2019 paper on what makes a scent appealing because, ahem, something about the data didn’t smell quite right.

The article was titled “Social success of perfumes,” and it appeared in July in PLOS ONE. There was a press release and a university writeup about the paper — but not, we should note, about the retraction.

The authors were Vaiva Vasiliauskaite and Tim S. Evans, of the Theoretical Physics Group and Centre for Complexity Science at Imperial College London.

The abstract of the study stated that:

Nature paper on ocean warming retracted

Nature is retracting a 2018 paper which found that the oceans are warming much faster than predicted by previous models of climate change.

The article, “Quantification of ocean heat uptake from changes in atmospheric O2 and CO2 composition,” appeared at last October but quickly drew the attention of an influential critic who said the analysis was flawed.

The authors agreed, and within three weeks the paper received the following update:

Nature walks back mentorship prize for Spanish scientist with nine retractions

Nature is rescinding an award to a Spanish researcher whose group has at least nine retractions for problems with their published images.

The journal in 2017 gave Carlos López-Otín, of the University of Oviedo, its mid-career achievement mentoring prize for Spanish scientists — along with a physicist from Barcelona — citing:

the ability of these scientists to instil confidence in self-doubting trainees, and of their motivational skills.

But two years – and a slew of retractions — later, it seems Nature’s own doubts about López-Otín’s skills as a mentor were too great to ignore.

Wanted: Lawyer to take case of Ohio cancer researcher with retraction-rich CV

Carlo Croce, the embattled and litigious cancer researcher at The Ohio State University, may be on the market for a new attorney.

Croce, who unsuccessfully sued the New York Times for libel after the newspaper reported on misconduct allegations against him, has been waging a second legal front against his institution. The grounds: Croce wants Ohio State to restore him to his position as chair of the Department of Cancer Biology and Genetics — a demand OSU has so far rejected.

Court documents suggest that the case has proceeded to depositions. But we’ve learned that Croce’s attorneys in the academic matter have dropped him as a client. In a motion approved earlier this month, the lawyers, from the Columbus firm James E. Arnold & Associates, petitioned to be removed from the case.

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