Last week, we reported that Craig Hill, a prominent chemist at Emory University, and his colleagues at six other institutions are retracting three papers they published in the mid-2000s, two in the Journal of the American Chemical Society and one in Science.
We have now spoken with Hill, who walked us through the history of the research. According to Hill, the international team of researchers, after “unusually extensive experiments” felt they had enough evidence to publish their original articles
but all authors (and others) remained skeptical given the unprecedented nature of these compounds.
Hill’s lab continued to conduct experiments and probe the original data after the publications, he said. (Hill wrote a piece for Nature in 2008 explaining the significance of the research, which, among other things, might lead to better ways of harnessing solar energy.) Continue reading Chemist Craig Hill, author of JACS and Science papers, explains the retractions