A contested retraction has punctuated the complicated saga of a 2003 paper in the FASEB Journal. (FASEB stands for the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.)
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Research Integrity (ORI) has found that a Boston University cancer researcher made up experiments reported in two papers funded by National Cancer Institute and National Institutes of Health grants. According to the ORI notice:
Sheng Wang, PhD, Boston University School of Medicine Cancer Research Center: Based on the Respondent’s acceptance of ORI’s research misconduct findings, ORI found that Dr. Sheng Wang, who has been an Assistant Professor, Department of Medicine, Boston University School of Medicine Cancer Research Center (BUSM), engaged in research misconduct in research supported by National Cancer Institute (NCI), National Institutes of Health (NIH), grants R01 CA102940 and R01 CA101992.
The authors of two Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) studies of the molecular underpinnings of hearts whose rhythms have gone awry have retracted the papers, for reasons that are not completely clear.
There’s another retraction in the the complicated case of Milena Penkowa, the former University of Copenhagen researcher being investigated for scientific misconduct and misuse of grant funds. The paper, in Experimental Physiology, was titled “Exercise-induced metallothionein expression in human skeletal muscle fibres” and was published online in January 2005.
The laboratory of Michael Hertl, a German dermatology researcher with an international reputation, is under investigation for possible misconduct, according to a legal official at Hertl’s institution, Philipps-Universitat Marburg.
When a group of researchers last year claimed to have found a “genetic signature” to identify people likely to live to 100, they were questioned immediately. Now they’ve retracted the controversial paper — but continue to stand behind their assertion.
Readers of this blog by now know that if there’s one thing that really gets us going, it’s obfuscation. So it shouldn’t be surprising that the following retraction notice from the journal Psychopharmacology, made us particularly batty:
This paper has been retracted by the author because of legal issues.
On Tuesday, we reported that Emory University in Atlanta was looking into why a team of former researchers — now at the University of Louisville — had retracted three papers in the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC).