A former researcher at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis has won back the right to apply for Federal research funding despite a 2011 finding against him by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI).
BMC Genomics has issued an expression of concern for a 2011 paper by a prominent Argentine chemist, Ariel Fernandez, whose work covers several disciplines — “His research spans representation theory in algebra, physical chemistry, molecular biophysics, and more recently, molecular evolution and drug discovery” — and institutions. And therein lies the tale.
Fernandez appeared as the first author of the article, titled “Subfunctionalization reduces the fitness cost of gene duplication in humans by buffering dosage imbalances,” along with a pair of researchers from Taiwan. Fernandez’s affiliations were listed as being with the Instituto Argentino de Matemática “Alberto P. Calderón”, CONICET (National Research Council of Argentina), in Buenos Aires, the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago, and the Morgridge Institute for Research, in Madison, Wisc.
Scientific experiments are like recipes: With the right components and the proper steps, the end result can be a thing of beauty. But if you start with a cup of salt instead of a cup of flour, well, even the neighbor’s schnauzer won’t touch that batch of sugar cookies.
That’s a little like the situation we have in “Controls on topographic dependence and temporal instability in catchment-scale soil moisture patterns,” a paper published in February in Water Resources Research by Michael Coleman and Jeffrey Niemann of Colorado State University.
A public health journal has retracted a 2010 paper by a CDC AIDS researcher in Uganda who appears to have lifted much of the work from a Canadian scientist.
The article, “Determinants of project success among HIV/AIDS NGOs in Rakai, Uganda,” appeared in the International Journal of Health Planning and Management, a Wiley title. The author was Stevens Bechange, who was listed as being with the Uganda Virus Research Institute, in Entebbe. Bechange’s Linkedin page says he is a doctoral student at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, UK, studying “Health, Wellness and Fitness.” His contact information on the article was an email with a CDC address (we’ve put in a call to the agency to find out more about his status but haven’t heard back yet).
Coding errors in a database maintained by Pfizer have led authors to retract two heart biomarker papers in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
Eric Smart, the former University of Kentucky researcher found by the Office of Research Integrity to have faked images in ten papers, has two more retractions, both in the American Journal of Physiology — Cell Physiology.
A labeled chemical bottle may contain a genie and not the expected reagent, according to a cautionary retraction that could be a warning for all bench researchers.
Sreenivasan Sasidharan, a researcher at the Institute for Research in Molecular Medicine (INFORMM), part of the Universiti Sains Malaysia, used a bottle labeled lantadene A, a liver-destroying chemical from the leaves of the Lantana camara plant that some livestock eat.
Sasidharan found that contrary to expectations, “lantadene A” protected livers against damage from acetaminophen — aka Tylenol.