In a stunning and tragic development, a co-author of the now-retracted Nature papers claiming to have found an easy way to create stem cells has committed suicide, according to news reports in Japan.
A 2011 paper in PLOS ONE has been retracted due to “inappropriately assembled” images. The issues, which were highlighted in a correction in TK, are attributed to the corresponding author, Paola Palozza, who has since passed away.
It’s not uncommon for scientists accused of wrongdoing — especially if they’re fired for it — to attempt to muddy the waters by claiming that they are being framed because they had threatened to blow the whistle on others. Some of those stories have more than a grain of truth to them.
Here’s one that doesn’t.
Paul Barach, an anesthesiologist who accused his former employer, the University of New South Wales, of a massive cover-up — and in turn accused by his employer of being an academic grifter — has admitted making up the affair.
The Australian, which broke the story, says Barach — a U.S.-born physician — has apologized for making the claims. According to an earlier article in the paper:
A panel reviewing The BMJ‘s handling of two controversial statin papers said the journal didn’t err when it corrected, rather than retracted, the articles.
The articles — a research paper and a commentary — suggested that use of statins in people at low risk for cardiovascular disease could be doing far more harm than good. Both articles inaccurately cited a study that provided data important to their conclusions — an error pointed out vigorously by a British researcher, Rory Collins, who demanded that the journal pull the pieces.
Another stem cell paper has been retracted from Nature, this one a highly cited 2008 study that had already been the subject of what the journal’s news section called a “furore” in 2010.
According to that 2010 news story:
The researchers behind the original work1, led by Thomas Skutella of the University of Tübingen, reported using cells from adult human testes to create pluripotent stem cells with similar properties to embryonic stem cells.
Raymond Sawaya, director of MD Anderson’s brain tumor program, presents Jun Fu with the 2014 Caroline Ross Endowment Fellowship.
A former postdoc at MD Anderson Cancer Center faked the results of a mouse study of a Novartis compound designed to fight brain tumors, according to the Office of Research Integrity (ORI).
A stumble in data preparation earned a retraction for a paper on delirium tremens, a life-threatening side effect of alcohol withdrawal that spans a wide range of symptoms, including hallucinations and seizures.
Though the initial retraction notice was extremely unhelpful, the author stepped in to give us a better picture of the errors that led to the paper’s demise.
Here’s the notice from Alcohol and Alcoholism about “Biochemical Predictors of Delirium Tremens in Patients in Alcohol Withdrawal”:
A group of researchers at Stanford and elsewhere is retracting a 2013 paper that another scientist told Nature was “one of the biggest things to happen in the narcolepsy field for some time.”
Fred Walumbwa, the leadership researcher at Florida International University who has retracted six papers for what appear to be problematic data, now has an impressive mega-correction in the form of an “addendum.”