An investigation by the University College London has cleared prominent geneticist David Latchman of misconduct, but concluded he has “procedural matters in his lab that required attention.”
Latchman has two retracted papers; on PubPeer, there are questions about nearly four dozen more.
The results of the investigation were first reported by the Times Higher Education. We also received a short statement from a UCL spokesperson:
Biotechnology Letters has retracted a paper on a new gene delivery technique due to “the deliberate and fraudulent use of data in the paper that had previously appeared in other papers of these two authors.”
The journal’s Editor in Chief Colin Ratledge told us that someone tipped him off that one of the authors, University of Kalyani microbiologist Keka Sarkar, had been self-plagiarizing:
I can say that a person who was familiar with the work of Dr Sarkar got in touch with about their concerns about her publications and, in particular, her paper published in Biotechnology Letters. They supplied a dossier of her publications showing the obvious duplications of figures and that she had been using the same figures in different papers to illustrate the results from supposedly different experiments.
He found that, indeed, multiple figures in the Biotechnology Letters had appeared in other publications of Sarkar’s, some prior to the paper’s October 2013 publication, and one after. The details are in the whole retraction note:
Continue reading Gold nanoparticle paper crushed by “deliberate and fraudulent use of data”
The Journal of Insect Science is retracting a paper on the genetics of a fruit fly after discovering one of the genes the authors sequenced doesn’t appear to code for a protein.
The paper, “Molecular phylogeny and identification of the peach fruit fly, Bactrocera zonata, established in Egypt” was published in 2011, and compared sequences of the Egyptian species to those from species in other regions. It has not yet been cited, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
Phyllis Weintraub, the editor-in-chief of the journal, told us she thinks that the paper’s fatal mistake stemmed from “bad science instead of deliberate falsification.”
The retraction notice should go live on the site today, according to Lisa Junker, director of publications and communications for the Entomological Society of America, which publishes the journal. Here’s the text:
Continue reading Fruit fly paper retracted when gene turns out not to code for a protein as claimed
A 2011 paper about the crystal structure of a transcription regulator has been pulled by Molecules and Cells for “unethical behavior by the authors.”
Unfortunately, we can’t say much more than that, because the notice doesn’t, either: Continue reading “Unethical behavior” breaks crystallography paper
Authors of a widely covered study that documented traces of plague and anthrax on surfaces across New York City have revised the paper after public health officials challenged their interpretations of the data.
It’s hard to overestimate the attention these findings received when first published.
“Bubonic plague found in NYC subway,” wrote The Daily Beast.
“Your subway seat mate: Bubonic plague, anthrax, & mysterious DNA,” said Yahoo!
“NY subway has bubonic plague,” declared Newser.
Not so fast. In an erratum published July 29, the authors write: Continue reading Plague or anthrax on the subway? Think again, says now-corrected study
The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition is retracting a paper that showed genetically engineered rice serves as an effective vitamin A supplement after a Massachusetts judge denied the first author’s motion for an injunction against the publisher.
The journal announced plans to retract the paper last year following allegations that the paper contained ethical mis-steps, such as not getting informed consent from the parents of children eating the rice, and faking ethics approval documents.
Last July, first author Guangwen Tang at Tufts University filed a complaint and motion for preliminary injunction against the journal’s publisher, the American Society for Nutrition, to stop the retraction.
According to the ASN, on July 17, a Massachusetts Superior Court “cleared the way” for the publisher to retract the paper. So they have, as of July 29. Here’s more from the retraction notice:
Continue reading Golden rice paper pulled after judge rules for journal
A prominent endocrinologist pathologist has resigned from running the largest hospital diagnostic laboratory in Canada following an investigation that has uncovered evidence of falsified data in two papers, Retraction Watch has learned.
Sylvia Asa was the Program Medical Director of the Laboratory Medicine Program at the University Health Network, affiliated with the University of Toronto, until this past spring when she stepped down, according to UHN spokesperson Gillian Howard:
Continue reading Head of major diagnostic lab in Canada steps down amid investigation
The author of an article mapping the genome of an infectious bacterium is pulling the paper because — well, it wasn’t the bacterium she thought it was.
Study author Celia Abolnik is retracting her paper in Genome Announcements because it didn’t actually map out the DNA of Mycoplasma meleagridis, a bacterium that typically infects turkeys but has recently been found in chickens.
The trouble was, the sequence for Mycoplasma meleagridis in the National Institute of Health’s DNA database, Genbank, was actually a different variety of bacteria — Mycoplasma gallinaceum, another scourge of poultry.
Here’s the notice for “Complete Genome Sequence of Mycoplasma meleagridis, a Possible Emerging Pathogen in Chickens:”
There may be some deeply rooted issues in the work of high-profile plant biologist Olivier Voinnet, biology department research director at ETH in Zurich. Corrections have continued to pile up months after his work was hit with a barrage of criticism on PubPeer. We’ve tracked a total of seven corrections over the past five months (not including the April retraction of a 2004 paper in The Plant Cell). One of the corrected papers also received an Expression of Concern this week.
Collectively, the corrected papers have accumulated more than 1200 citations.
In January, Voinnet said he planned to correct multiple papers, after receiving “an anonymous email.”
One of the recent corrections we found is for a 2003 article in The Plant Journal, “An enhanced transient expression system in plants based on suppression of gene silencing by the p19 protein of tomato bushy stunt virus,” which details using proteins from a tomato virus to help alter gene expression. The study has been cited 862 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. Here’s the correction notice, posted June 8:
Genome Biology has partially retracted a high-profile paper about an epigenetic biomarker of aging – a year and a half after the author alerted the journal to a software coding error that invalidated one of its findings.
The paper, “DNA methylation age of human tissues and cell types,” garnered some media coverage and forms the basis of its author Steve Horvath‘s work on measuring human aging. It has been cited 73 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. The article is also recommended on the post-publication peer review site Faculty of 1000.
The lengthy, peer-reviewed erratum notice, written by Horvath, refers to several figures and files, as well as a conclusion: