The science world has been abuzz with news that a 2010 Science paper on an arsenic-based strain of bacteria had been refuted by two new studies published Sunday night. Yesterday on Retraction Watch, David Sanders argued the paper should still be retracted. So we were curious whether the editors of the journal had ever asked Felisa Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues to retract the paper. Science tells Retraction Watch: Continue reading Science has “not asked for a correction or retraction” of arsenic life paper, and why situation is unlike XMRV-CFS
Category: not reproducible
Noteworthy: Journal posts all the corrections it wanted in a climate change paper after authors refuse most
In a case of refreshing transparency, a journal has published a detailed list of corrections it requested from authors of a paper on the costs of climate change, even though the authors declined to make most of them.
Earlier this year, the journal Ecological Economics published a paper that cast some doubt on the FUND model, which, as the article explains:
The FUND model of climate economics, developed by Richard Tol and David Anthoff, is widely used, both in research and in the development of policy proposals. It was one of three models used by the U.S. government’s Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Carbon in 2009 (Interagency Working Group on Social Cost of Carbon, 2010). The Working Group’s “central estimate” 1 of the social cost of carbon (SCC), i.e. the monetary value of the incremental damages from greenhouse gas emissions, was $21 per ton of CO2.
The paper concluded: Continue reading Noteworthy: Journal posts all the corrections it wanted in a climate change paper after authors refuse most
Despite refutation, Science arsenic life paper deserves retraction, scientist argues
Yesterday, Science published two papers which undercut an earlier paper in the journal claiming to show evidence for an arsenic-based strain of bacteria. Guest poster David Sanders, a structural biologist at Purdue University who was involved in a Retraction Watch story in May, argues that the journal could have avoided publishing the rebuttals—a swift retraction of the original was (and still is) the better move.
Allow me to apologize from the start. This narrative is not a typical Retraction Watch post, because it contains a number of personal elements. However, it would be hard to separate my perspective from my experience.
I will begin by asserting that, despite Rosie Redfield’s many valuable contributions to refuting the Wolfe-Simon paper that have culminated with the publication of data she and other investigators have obtained, there was no need for Science to publish additional articles. The Wolfe-Simon paper never should have been published. The only responsible action on the part of Science would be to retract the original article. Continue reading Despite refutation, Science arsenic life paper deserves retraction, scientist argues
Journal retracts antipsychotic study when all subjects’ PET scans turn out to be unreliable or invalid
The Journal of Psychiatric Research is retracting a 2010 paper claiming to show a relationship between quetiapine (Seroquel) and certain lab tests and brain scans, after it turns out the brain images were either unreliable or invalid.
Here’s the notice for “Relationship between dopamine D2 receptor occupancy, clinical response, and drug and monoamine metabolites levels in plasma and cerebrospinal fluid. A pilot study in patients suffering from first-episode schizophrenia treated with quetiapine”: Continue reading Journal retracts antipsychotic study when all subjects’ PET scans turn out to be unreliable or invalid
Should Linus Pauling’s erroneous 1953 model of DNA be retracted?
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?
JPET peeves: Paper withdrawn after drug company won’t disclose chemical structure
A group of researchers at the drug company ChemoCentryx is withdrawing a 2012 paper in the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics over failure to appropriately identify the molecule they describe in the article.
The withdrawal notice tells the story: Continue reading JPET peeves: Paper withdrawn after drug company won’t disclose chemical structure
Biologists delete paper from literature after realizing they’d deleted too many genes
Researchers deleted more genes than they bargained for in a Drosophila strain, a mistake that resulted in a retraction of a paper from 2007.
Ron Wides, a biologist specializing in pattern development at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and colleagues have retracted a paper published in Mechanisms of Development after his lab found that their technique to delete the Ten-a gene ended up deleting other nearby genes, too.
It was deletions of other genes, and not Ten-a, that killed the fruit flies, Wides concluded. His group had also concluded, erroneously, that Ten-a is what’s known as a “pair-rule” gene. Fruit fly embryos develop in stacked segments, like tubes of Pringles; pair-rule genes guide the development of alternating segments. Those other loci, and not Ten-a, caused lethality and caused the flies to develop improperly early, Wides concluded.
The retraction reads in full: Continue reading Biologists delete paper from literature after realizing they’d deleted too many genes
Millennium Villages Project forced to correct Lancet paper on foreign aid as leader leaves team
A senior member of a high-profile foreign aid research team has left the project on the heels of a Lancet correction of a heavily criticized paper the team published earlier this month.
Paul Pronyk, who until last week was director of monitoring and evaluation at Columbia University’s Center for Global Health and Economic Development, which runs the Millennium Villages Project, wrote a letter to the Lancet acknowledging errors in the paper, “The effect of an integrated multisector model for achieving the Millennium Development Goals and improving child survival in rural sub-Saharan Africa: a non-randomised controlled assessment,” originally published May 8. That admission came after Jesse Bump, Michael Clemens, Gabriel Demombynes, and Lawrence Haddad wrote a letter criticizing the work, which was published this week accompanied by corrections to the paper: Continue reading Millennium Villages Project forced to correct Lancet paper on foreign aid as leader leaves team
Assay come, assay go: Corporate takeover leads to retraction of device analysis
A group of hematology researchers in Canada lost a publication to the merger of two medical device makers, after the acquiring company apparently decided not to pursue marketing the product in question.
An April 23 retraction notice in the International Journal of Laboratory Hematology about the article, “Enhanced flagging and improved clinical sensitivity on the new DxH 300TM Coulter® cellular analysis system,” originally published in February, tells the tale: Continue reading Assay come, assay go: Corporate takeover leads to retraction of device analysis
The HeLa problem: What a retraction says about whether cancer researchers can trust their cell lines
Retraction Watch readers who’ve read Rebecca Skloot’s bestseller The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks may remember that decades ago, scientists began realizing that Lacks’s cells, now known as the HeLa cell line and used in labs around the world, were so good at proliferating that they had taken over many other cell lines researchers use to study human disease.
Such readers would have been nodding their heads at a front-page Wall Street Journal on Saturday. As Amy Dockser Marcus (no relation to Adam) reports: Continue reading The HeLa problem: What a retraction says about whether cancer researchers can trust their cell lines