Nature is retracting a 2010 paper by a team from Princeton and Drexel on the workings of Plasmodium falciparum, which causes malaria in people. How that came about seems to have been a winding road.
The article — a research letter — titled “Branched tricarboxylic acid metabolism in Plasmodium falciparum,” came from the Princeton lab of Manuel Llinás. It purported to find that:
Continue reading Authors retract already-corrected Nature malaria paper
An associate professor at Montreal’s McGill University is correcting two papers, one of them in Nature, after a university committee found evidence of falsification, Retraction Watch has learned.
Concerns had been raised about four papers by Maya Saleh and colleagues: Continue reading McGill committee says Nature figures were “intentionally contrived and falsified”
The work of Sam W. Lee, a cancer biologist at Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital, has come under fire at Science Fraud lately over concerns about the possible reuse of images in his group’s published studies.
Turns out there’s some there, there after all. The journal Current Biology has issued a pretty thorny correction for one of Lee’s 2006 articles, “RhoE Is a Pro-Survival p53 Target Gene that Inhibits ROCK I-Mediated Apoptosis in Response to Genotoxic Stress,” citing multiple issues with its figures: Continue reading Image correction in Current Biology for Harvard’s Sam Lee
In baseball, it’s three strikes and you’re out. In Nature, apparently, you can stay at the plate after three swings-and-misses.
That’s what we concluded from a Corrigendum in last week’s issue, for “CD95 promotes tumour growth,” originally published in May 2010 and now corrected not once, not twice, but three times.
Here was the first Corrigendum, from March 2011: Continue reading The Nature paper that required three corrections
Shane Mayack, a former post-doc in Harvard lab of Amy Wagers, a rising star in the stem cell field, has been sanctioned by the Office of Research Integrity for misconduct.
Mayack, who has defended her actions on this blog as honest error — albeit sloppiness — and has not admitted to wrongdoing, must undergo supervision if she receives any federal grant funding over the next three years, under the voluntary agreement.
Here’s the notice, which appeared in the Federal Register this week (and which the Boston Globe was first to report): Continue reading ORI finds Harvard stem cell lab post-doc Mayack manipulated images
We love history at Retraction Watch, but with few exceptions, such as covering what seems to have been the first-ever English language retraction in 1756, the daily march of retractions doesn’t leave us much time to take steps back. So we’re very glad to be able to present a guest post by our friend Jeff Perkel about a classic paper that scientists have known to be wrong for most of its nearly 60-year-life — and yet remains in the literature.
The date is December 31, 1952. Linus Pauling, the CalTech wunder-chemist who had recently solved the secondary structure of proteins by describing the alpha-helix and the beta-sheet, has just submitted a “Proposed Structure for the Nucleic Acids” to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The PNAS description appears in February 1953 and runs for 14 pages, with seven figures and two tables (compare that with Watson and Crick’s one-pager two months later in Nature).
Pauling also submitted a short note to Nature to alert that journal’s readers to the basics of the PNAS paper. The Nature note appeared in the journal’s February 21 issue: Continue reading Should Linus Pauling’s erroneous 1953 model of DNA be retracted?
Shikeagi Kato, an endocrinologist formerly of the University of Tokyo who resigned on March 31 amidst an investigation into his work, has retracted another paper, this one in Nature.
Here’s the notice for “DNA demethylation for hormone-induced transcriptional derepression,” which was the subject of a correction last October: Continue reading Shikeagi Kato, who resigned post in March, retracts Nature paper
Last week, we wrote about a correction of a heavily criticized paper in The Lancet by the Millennium Villages Project, a large aid program. Paul Pronyk, director of monitoring and evaluation at Columbia University’s Center for Global Health and Economic Development, which runs the Project, left his job shortly after writing an explanatory letter that accompanied the correction.
That correction had come after a letter to The Lancet, but also after Nature had raised issues in an editorial. Nature’s editorial concluded: Continue reading Former Millennium Villages Project staffer responds to critical Nature editorial
This past April, Amparo Acker-Palmer and colleagues published a study in Nature, “Ephrin Bs are essential components of the Reelin pathway to regulate neuronal migration.” Within a day of its publication, Nature readers were raising questions about many of its figures. They started like this:
Andy Gu said:
Looks like Fig 1a, the two middle figures are actually the same with little move from desired regions. I don’t trust their data now…..
After several such comments, Nature senior editor Noah Gray weighed in: Continue reading You can do that? A massive correction in Nature, but no retraction
Margaret Munro, a Postmedia News reporter whose work we’ve had the chance to admire before, has a few great stories running in Canadian papers today about what happened in some recent scientific fraud investigations.
She bases the stories on Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) documents obtained under a freedom of information request. NSERC — which provides $1 billion per year for research — seems to have gone far out of its way to keep the names of the researchers a secret.
In one set of heavily redacted documents, however, they did mention a December 2008 retraction. As Retraction Watch readers know, we investigate retractions…well, not exactly for a living, but we sure spend a lot of time doing it. So we threw ourselves at our favorite database and made some connections.
Long story short: We’re quite sure we’ve found the unnamed researcher. Continue reading Unveiled: Anonymous researcher found guilty of fraud in Canadian funding agency documents