Last year, we reported on two retractions and two corrections by a team at the University of Utah. The retractions were because “some of the original data were inappropriately removed from the laboratory.”
At the time, corresponding author Jerry Kaplan told us that:
The data were lost when an employee, who was dismissed, discarded lab notebooks without permission. This occurred prior to the identification of errors in the manuscripts and was reported at that time to the University authorities.
Stapel will do 120 hours of community service, and decline disability and illness benefits that would have added up to 18 months’ worth of salary, according to reports in the Dutch press. Apparently, it helped his case that he had voluntarily given up his PhD.
A new retraction notice in the Journal of Applied Physiology gives only a hint at the problems in the paper, but what it does say has led us to a story about one of its co-authors.
We’ve written before about retractions for cell lines that turn out not to be what researchers thought they were. In a few cases, that has involved contamination by HeLa cells, named for Henrietta Lacks. Today, we note the retraction of a paper whose authors, from Taiwan, thought they were using human muscle cells that line blood vessels when they were actually studying such cells from rat embryos.
Last month, Ivan met David Vaux at the 3rd World Conference on Research Integrity in Montreal. David mentioned a retraction he published in Nature, and we thought it would be a great guest post on what it’s like to retract one of your own papers in an attempt to clean up the literature.
David Vaux
In September 1995 Nature asked me to review a manuscript by Bellgrau and co-workers, which subsequently appeared. I was very excited by this paper, as it showed that expression of CD95L on Sertoli cells in allogeneic mismatched testes tissue transplanted under the kidney capsule was able to induce apoptosis of invading cytotoxic T cells, thereby preventing rejection. As I wrote in a News and Views piece, the implications of these findings were enormous – grafts engineered to express CD95L would be able to prevent rejection without generalized immunosuppression.
In fact, I was so taken by these findings that we started generation of transgenic mice that expressed CD95L on their islet beta cells to see if it would allow islet cell grafts to avoid rejection and provide a cure for diabetes in mismatched recipients.
Germans and Italians are big masterbatchers. Click to enlarge. via http://bit.ly/100YBKB
Our mothers told us that if we used the masterbatch process, we’d go blind. And what better way to gather some updates to recent posts than to include one that involves said masterbatch process?
Last year, we reported on two retractions and two corrections by a team at the University of Utah. The retractions were because “some of the original data were inappropriately removed from the laboratory.”
