Category: cell biology

Despite refutation, Science arsenic life paper deserves retraction, scientist argues

David Sanders

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

A first? Papers retracted for citation manipulation

In what appears to be a first, two papers have been retracted for including citations designed to help another journal improve its impact factor rankings. The articles in The Scientific World Journal cited papers in Cell Transplantation, which in turn appears to have cited to a high degree other journals with shared board members.

Here’s publisher Hindawi’s statement on the matter, which involved their publication The Scientific World Journal: Continue reading A first? Papers retracted for citation manipulation

Controversial paper on life-extending buckyballs corrected after blog readers note problems

Back in April, a group of French and Tunisian researchers published a paper in Biomaterials which came to the astonishing conclusion that buckyballs (carbon tetrachloride) coated in olive oil could dramatically extend the lives of lab rodents. That news was picked up by Derek Lowe’s In the Pipeline blog, on which he expressed some bemusement about the work but ultimately praised it:

These are reasonable (but unproven) hypotheses, and I very much look forward to seeing this work followed up to see some more light shed on them. The whole life-extension result needs to be confirmed as well, and in other species. I congratulate the authors of this work, though, for giving me the most number of raised eyebrows I’ve had while reading a scientific paper in quite some time.

One of those eyebrows dropped a bit the following day, when Lowe reported that readers had pointed him to a clear case of image duplication in the article. At the time, Lowe concluded: Continue reading Controversial paper on life-extending buckyballs corrected after blog readers note problems

Wham, bam, no thank you, ram: Publisher error leads to retraction of already-withdrawn sheep sperm paper

Caution: Sexual innuendo ahead.

The withdrawal method is a notoriously unreliable form of birth control. It seems that what happens between the sheets applies to paper as well as cotton.

Here’s a retraction notice from BMC Research Notes that speaks — and nudges and winks — for itself. The 2011 article, “Effect of controlled and uncontrolled cooling rate on motility parameters of cryopreserved ram spermatozoa,” by a team of Irani veterinary scientists: Continue reading Wham, bam, no thank you, ram: Publisher error leads to retraction of already-withdrawn sheep sperm paper

Should Linus Pauling’s erroneous 1953 model of DNA be retracted?

Linus Pauling, via Wikimedia

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?

Korean stem cell investigation expands to another researcher, and more papers

Last month, we brought you the story of Soo-Kyung Kang, a Seoul National University stem cell researcher who has now retracted four papers amidst questions about image manipulation in a total of 14 studies. That story has drawn a great deal of attention in Korea, with comparisons to the Woo-Suk Hwang scandal, and has even led to a profile of Retraction Watch in the Seoul Daily, one of Korea’s largest newspapers.

We’ve now learned that the investigation has grown to 25 papers after an anonymous whistleblower warned about possible data fabrications in another paper by Kang, an associate professor of veterinary biotechnology, and Kyung-Sun Kang, director of the Adult Stem Cell Research Center in the same department (but no relation). And Soo-Kyung Kang was investigated in 2010, according to the Korea Herald.

The researchers’ labs are also under lockdown Continue reading Korean stem cell investigation expands to another researcher, and more papers

FASEB J retracts 15-year-old study after author comes forward, but universities decline to investigate

The FASEB Journal — FASEB stands for the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology — is retracting a 15-year-old paper without the consent of all of the authors, despite what seem like valiant attempts to figure out exactly what went wrong.

Here’s the notice for the University of Bern-University of Urbino paper:
Continue reading FASEB J retracts 15-year-old study after author comes forward, but universities decline to investigate

Retraction count for resveratrol researcher Dipak Das rises to 12

Das, via UConn

Dipak Das, the UConn researcher whom the university earlier ths year found to have fabricated or falsified data more than 100 times, has four more retractions to his name.

The notices appear in the June 1, 2012 issue of the American Journal of Physiology: Heart and Circulatory Physiology, and suggest that Das was not all that cooperative: Continue reading Retraction count for resveratrol researcher Dipak Das rises to 12

An Immunity retraction for Luk van Parijs, three years after the ORI found evidence of fabrication in the paper

Earlier this month, we reported on a correction by Luk van Parijs, the biologist the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) fired in 2005 after he admitted to making up data.

Immunity has now run a retraction involving van Parijs, dated May 25, 2012, for 2003’s “Autoimmunity as the Consequence of a Spontaneous Mutation in Rasgrp1”: Continue reading An Immunity retraction for Luk van Parijs, three years after the ORI found evidence of fabrication in the paper

Authors retract two Cell Metabolism papers after “data were inappropriately removed from the laboratory”

A group of researchers at the University of Utah has retracted two papers from Cell Metabolism after they realized that a dismissed employee had tossed out data that were the basis of some error-laden figures.

Here’s the notice for both papers: Continue reading Authors retract two Cell Metabolism papers after “data were inappropriately removed from the laboratory”