Author: Ivan Oransky

Puzzling: Maybe weight loss surgery paper by author who acknowledged fraud is being retracted after all

We’ve been following the case of Edward Shang, a weight loss surgeon who has acknowledged making up most — if not all — of the patients in a now-retracted study in Surgery for Obesity and Related Diseases. Last week, we reported that Obesity Surgery, where Shang had published four papers, would not be retracting any of them. That’s what Surgery for Obesity and Related Diseases Obesity Surgery editor Scott Shikora told us in an email exchange (more on that below).

It turns out, however, that one of Shang’s Obesity Surgery papers had already been retracted, unbeknownst to us because the original abstract was not — and is still not — linked to the retraction notice, which reads: Continue reading Puzzling: Maybe weight loss surgery paper by author who acknowledged fraud is being retracted after all

Hair today, gone tomorrow: Hair loss company retracts public statements

Sorry, but we have some shocking news to report: That hair loss stock you bought may not be quite as promising as you were led to believe.

A release from Vancouver-based Replicel, which takes “dermal sheath cup cells…from a subject’s own healthy hair follicles,” replicates them “into the millions over a three month period,” and reintroduces them ” into areas of hair loss” with “the anticipated result the development of new hair follicles”: Continue reading Hair today, gone tomorrow: Hair loss company retracts public statements

Obesity Surgery won’t retract papers by weight loss surgeon who published fake data elsewhere

Earlier this week, we reported on the case of Edward Shang, a weight loss surgeon who was forced to retract a study after it became clear that he had enrolled only about a third as many patients as he claimed — if he enrolled any at all. In that post, the editor in chief of Surgery for Obesity and Related Diseases, who retracted the paper, told us he had flagged the issue for Obesity Surgery editors, who had also published Shang’s work.

Yesterday, we heard back from the editor of Obesity Surgery, Scott Shikora, who tells us that he’s reviewed Shang’s four publications in his journal: Continue reading Obesity Surgery won’t retract papers by weight loss surgeon who published fake data elsewhere

Author retracts weight loss surgery paper after admitting most, if not all, of the subjects were made up

If you had read “Aerobic endurance training improves weight loss, body composition, and co-morbidities in patients after laparoscopic Roux-en-Y gastric bypass,” a 2010 paper in Surgery for Obesity and Related Diseases, you might have been convinced by the title and findings that exercise was a good idea for people who’d had stomach stapling.

After all, the authors had operated on “60 consecutive morbidly obese patients” and then randomized them into “a low-exercise group (aerobic physical exercise 1 time for 1 hr/wk) or a multiple-exercise group (APE 2 times for 1 hr/wk)” so they could collect data on “age, gender, length of hospital stay, operative details, co-morbidities, postoperative complications, initial body weight and height, postoperative weight, and body composition.” When they did that, they found that “The multiple exercise group had a significantly more rapid reduction of body mass index, excess weight loss, and fat mass compared with the low-exercise group.”

Except that at best they had only operated on about a third the number of patients they said they had. Continue reading Author retracts weight loss surgery paper after admitting most, if not all, of the subjects were made up

A correction for Luk van Parijs and colleagues for a “clerical error”

Luk van Parijs, a former associate professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who was fired in 2005 after confessing to data fabrication and sentenced last year to six months of house arrest, can add another correction to his list of several retractions and errata.

Here’s the notice for “Interferon γ is required for activation-induced death of T lymphocytes,” from the Journal of Experimental Medicine (JEM): Continue reading A correction for Luk van Parijs and colleagues for a “clerical error”

Pair of graphene papers retracted

Graphene has been hot for several years. Here’s what the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences had to say about it in 2010 when awarding two researchers the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work:

Graphene is a form of carbon. As a material it is completely new – not only the thinnest ever but also the strongest. As a conductor of electricity it performs as well as copper. As a conductor of heat it outperforms all other known materials. It is almost completely transparent, yet so dense that not even helium, the smallest gas atom, can pass through it. Carbon, the basis of all known life on earth, has surprised us once again.

But one researcher may have allowed his enthusiasm for graphene to get ahead of him. He and his unwitting co-authors have now lost two papers thanks to that enthusiasm. Continue reading Pair of graphene papers retracted

JACS temporarily pulls “space dinosaurs” paper for alleged duplication

Duplication has, as we noted on Twitter the other day, been tripping up more and more scientists. And now self-plagiarism has snared a prominent Columbia University chemist in a paper that left many people scratching their heads to begin with.

As reported by the Chembark blog and Nature, the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) has pulled a paper by Ronald Breslow for alleged duplication. The page for “On Evidence for the Likely Origin of Homochirality in Amino Acids, Sugars, and Nucleosides on Prebiotic Earth,” originally published on March 25, now includes this: Continue reading JACS temporarily pulls “space dinosaurs” paper for alleged duplication

Patient database errors lead to three rheumatology retractions

The authors of three papers in Rheumatology International about systemic sclerosis, also known as scleroderma, are retracting them after patients were misidentified in databases. According to the three notices:

This article has been retracted at the request of the authors. The authors made a serious statistical error which unfortunately invalidates their results.

Corresponding author Metin Isik tells Retraction Watch that the error was adding a patient with systemic sclerosis database twice, and adding another patient with polymyositis, not systemic sclerosis, to the sclerosis database. (Why the journal didn’t spell that out in the notice is anyone’s guess, but we’ve asked the editor for comment and will update with anything we hear back.)

It’s easy to see how three patients would affect the results of “Systemic sclerosis and malignancies after cyclophosphamide therapy: a single center experience,” Continue reading Patient database errors lead to three rheumatology retractions

The HeLa problem: What a retraction says about whether cancer researchers can trust their cell lines

Retraction Watch readers who’ve read Rebecca Skloot’s bestseller The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks may remember that decades ago, scientists began realizing that Lacks’s cells, now known as the HeLa cell line and used in labs around the world, were so good at proliferating that they had taken over many other cell lines researchers use to study human disease.

Such readers would have been nodding their heads at a front-page Wall Street Journal on Saturday. As Amy Dockser Marcus (no relation to Adam) reports: Continue reading The HeLa problem: What a retraction says about whether cancer researchers can trust their cell lines

A retracted periodontitis-heart disease paper that didn’t make it into the new AHA review

On Wednesday, the American Heart Association announced something that those of us who’d been reading the medical literature carefully had known for a while: Bad gums do not cause heart disease.

Periodontitis is linked to bad heart disease, you see, as studies have shown, and periodontists have sure been using this as an excuse to tell us to floss. But there’s never been a convincing study showing that one causes the other.

In fact, it’s not even clear how you’d do that study. “Let’s see, for a control group, we should have 100 people convince themselves they’re flossing for a year, but not actually floss….oh, what else can we get funding for?”

That “news” prompted an email from Retraction Watch friend Marc Abrahams, Continue reading A retracted periodontitis-heart disease paper that didn’t make it into the new AHA review