Eric Smart, who as we reported in November was sanctioned by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) for faking dozens of images in ten papers and seven grants over the past decade, has had his first retraction.
Here’s the December 24 notice, from PNAS: Continue reading First retraction for Eric Smart, who faked dozens of images, appears in PNAS
The U.S. Office of Research Integrity is investigating work done at a Caltech lab after researchers there couldn’t replicate it, and retracted a paper based on the findings.
Here’s the notice, which ran this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS): Continue reading ORI investigating work from Caltech lab as PNAS paper is retracted
A group of cardiology researchers formerly of the University of Cologne has retracted two papers, after investigations into allegations of misconduct led to an admission of guilt by one of the lab’s junior members.
Here’s the first retraction, for “Connexin 43 acts as a cytoprotective mediator of signal transduction by stimulating mitochondrial KATP channels in mouse cardiomyocytes,” published last week in the Journal of Clinical Investigation: Continue reading Two patch-clamping retractions in PNAS and the JCI after first author admits image manipulation
The U.S. Office of Research Integrity has come down hard on a Eric J. Smart, an NIH-funded former University of Kentucky nutrition researcher who faked data in ten published papers and seven grant applications over the past decade.
Smart studies cholesterol, heart disease, diabetes, and high blood pressure. According to the notice in the Federal Register: Continue reading ORI sanctions former University of Kentucky nutrition researcher for faking dozens of images in 10 papers
Well, it only took 17 years.
As two retraction notices in the September 15 issue of the Journal of Immunology note:
On October 19, 1995, the Office of Research Integrity at the National Institutes of Health found that Weishu Y. Weiser, Ph.D., formerly of the Harvard Medical School at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, committed scientific misconduct by falsifying data in biomedical research supported by two Public Health Service grants. As a result, she agreed to submit a letter to The Journal of Immunology to retract this article. The offices of The Journal of Immunology have no record of receiving such a letter and hence the article is now being retracted.
The retractions, for “Recombinant Migration Inhibitory Factor Induces Nitric Oxide Synthase in Murine Macrophages” and “Human Recombinant Migration Inhibitory Factor Activates Human Macrophages to Kill Leishmania donovani,” both say the same thing.
“Recombinant Migration Inhibitory Factor Induces Nitric Oxide Synthase in Murine Macrophages” has been cited 66 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge — 40 of those times since the ORI’s report was released. The numbers for the Leishmania paper are almost identical: Continue reading ORI findings lead to two retractions — nearly 17 years later
A paper about an alleged cheetah fossil from the Pliocene epoch, dogged by questions since its publication in 2008, has been retracted after one of the authors acknowledged it wasn’t what they thought it was.
Here’s the notice for the paper, “A primitive Late Pliocene cheetah, and evolution of the cheetah lineage:” Continue reading Author retracts PNAS paper about alleged Pliocene cheetah fossil that critics said was a fake
Alirio Melendez, who has had three of his papers retracted amidst suspicions about 70, has had another one retracted, this one in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). And he has also resigned from his post at the University of Liverpool, we have just learned.
Here’s the notice: Continue reading Retraction number four appears in PNAS for work of Alirio Melendez, who has resigned post at U Liverpool
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?
On Tuesday, we covered a retraction in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) involving zalutumumab, a compound once being developed for treatments of head and neck cancer. As we noted at the time, the authors decided to retract the paper because they no longer trusted the method they used. One of the authors didn’t sign the notice, and we’ve now heard from her about why.
First, a comment from lead author Paul W.H.I Parren, who tells Retraction Watch: Continue reading PNAS author explains why she didn’t sign retraction notice for potential anti-cancer drug study
There’s another non-unanimous retraction in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) this week, and this one involves an anti-tumor antibody that may not be what the authors originally thought it was.
According to the notice for “The antibody zalutumumab inhibits epidermal growth factor receptor signaling by limiting intra- and intermolecular flexibility:” Continue reading Another non-unanimous PNAS retraction, for potential anti-cancer drug, after company’s method proves unreliable