Category: basic life sciences retractions

Journal retracts paper on gender dysphoria after 900 critics petition

Stephen Gliske

A journal has retracted a controversial paper that questioned what it called the “existing dogma” about gender.

The article, “A new theory of gender dysphoria incorporating the distress, social behavioral, and body-ownership networks,” was written by Stephen Gliske, a physicist-turned-neuroscientist at the University of Michigan.

Gliske’s paper, which received a modest amount of media attention, argued for what he calls a “multisense theory” of gender identity. As he told Newsweek last December: 

Continue reading Journal retracts paper on gender dysphoria after 900 critics petition

Former star cancer researcher who sued his university for discrimination notches eighth retraction

Jasti Rao, who once earned $700,000 a year at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria and was named the first “Peorian of the Year” before a misconduct investigation put an end to his time there, has now lost eight papers. 

Rao’s case is among the more colorful that we’ve covered. A highly-regarded cancer specialist, Rao was caught up in a morass of misdeeds, including not only plagiarism and manipulation of data but gambling and behavior tantamount to extortion of his employees. As we reported in 2018: 

Continue reading Former star cancer researcher who sued his university for discrimination notches eighth retraction

Neuroscience group retracts Science paper

A group of neuroscientists in Switzerland have retracted a 2019 paper in Science whose first author they say falsified data in the study.

The article, “Insular cortex processes aversive somatosensory information and is crucial for threat learning,” came from the lab of Ralf Schneggenburger, of the Ecole Polytechniqe Federale De Lausanne (EPFL). The first author was Emmanuelle Berret, then a post-doc in the lab. 

EPFL issued a press release about the study when it appeared. According to the release, the research showed that the insular cortex — a region “deep within the lateral sulcus” — is in charge of processing how mice and humans (pace, James Heathers) apparently learn from painful stimuli:

Continue reading Neuroscience group retracts Science paper

Thirty years after publication, a paper cited by creationists is retracted

Dan Larhammar

A paper by a Russian researcher who has been dogged by allegations of fraud has been retracted, 30 years to the month after its publication, and 25 years after the journal published a strongly critical letter to the editor.

The 1989 paper on the genetics of wild timber voles by Dmitrii A. Kuznetsov in the International Journal of Neuroscience was, according to Dan Larhammar, a professor of molecular cell biology at Uppsala University in Sweden and now president of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, being used by creationists as evidence for their beliefs. Larhammar published a letter to the editor about the paper in 1994 that concluded:

Continue reading Thirty years after publication, a paper cited by creationists is retracted

“I sincerely apologise:” UK cancer researcher calls for retraction of his work years after it’s flagged on PubPeer

Richard Hill

A cancer researcher in England says he will be retracting a 2011 paper after acknowledging “unacceptable” manipulation of some of the figures in the article.

Richard Hill, of the University of Portsmouth, this week agreed to retract the article, “DNA-PKcs binding to p53 on the p21WAF1/CIP1 promoter blocks transcription resulting in cell death,” which appeared in the journal Oncotarget.

The paper, which Hill wrote while he was at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, had drawn scrutiny on PubPeer four years ago, with one poster noting “many indications of blot image manipulation” in the figures. Additional comments appeared earlier this month.  

In a comment on PubPeer posted this week, Hill wrote:

Continue reading “I sincerely apologise:” UK cancer researcher calls for retraction of his work years after it’s flagged on PubPeer

Former University of Kansas researcher who plagiarized Harvard prof banned from Federal funding for two years

Rakesh Srivastava

A researcher fired from the University of Kansas Medical Center (KUMC) in 2014 for plagiarizing the work of a Harvard scientist has been barred from receiving Federal U.S. funding for two years.

The sanctions come three years after the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) tried to impose a three-year ban on funding for Rakesh Srivastava, who appealed the move. In September of this year, Department of Health and Human Services  administrative law judge Keith Sickendick recommended a two-year sanction.

In his decision, Sickendick noted that there was no evidence that Srivastava had engaged in research misconduct other than in this incident, and that he denied adding the plagiarized passages to the grant application himself. (Srivastava, who had also worked at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, is last author on a 2002 retraction from the Journal of Biological Chemistry for plagiarism, but it is unclear who was responsible.)

ORI tells Retraction Watch that it is “pleased that the ALJ upheld its findings.

An ‘Eminent Scholar’

Srivastava — along with his wife, Sharmila Shankar — joined KUMC in 2009 to great fanfare: Continue reading Former University of Kansas researcher who plagiarized Harvard prof banned from Federal funding for two years

Judge dismisses most of Carlo Croce’s libel case against the New York Times

Carlo Croce

Carlo Croce, a prolific cancer researcher at The Ohio State University in Columbus who was the subject of a front page story in The New York Times last year about allegations of misconduct against him, has had most of a lawsuit he filed against the newspaper thrown out.

As first reported by Courthouse News Service, United States District Judge James Graham tossed all but one of Croce’s claims for defamation against the Times and two of its reporters. That claim — which involved a statement in a letter that reporter James Glanz sent Croce as part of his reporting — survived dismissal, but not on grounds that it inflicted emotional distress, Graham ruled.

The March 2017 story ran on the front page of the Times under the headline “Years of Ethics Charges, but Star Cancer Researcher Gets a Pass:” Continue reading Judge dismisses most of Carlo Croce’s libel case against the New York Times

Researcher who once tried to sue critics has another dozen papers retracted

Fazlul Sarkar

A cancer researcher who went to court — unsuccessfully — claiming that commenters on PubPeer had cost him a new job has just lost another 12 papers.

The twelve now-retracted papers by Fazlul Sarkar and colleagues — as well as another by Sarkar that is now subject to an editor’s note — all appeared in Cancer Research, which made for a long table of contents in its September 15 issue. Continue reading Researcher who once tried to sue critics has another dozen papers retracted

Cancer journals retract 10 papers, flag 8 more, and apologize for the delay

Bharat Aggarwal

Five journals published by a prominent cancer research society have retracted a total of 10 papers — most of them by a former researcher at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

Nine of the 10 retractions share that researcher, Bharat Aggarwal, as an author. Aggarwal — who more than five years ago threatened to sue us for reporting on an investigation into his work — is now up to 28 retractions, and has left his post at MD Anderson. The AACR is also appending an editor’s note to eight of his other papers — but it has not explained the reason for what it acknowledges is a lag in moving on these articles.

“Unfortunately, we have been delayed in correcting the published record, and for this we apologize,” writes the publisher of The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), Christine Rullo, in a note in this month’s issue of Cancer Research. Rullo doesn’t say how long the journals took to handle the retractions. Continue reading Cancer journals retract 10 papers, flag 8 more, and apologize for the delay

A 2015 PNAS paper is six pages long. Its correction is four pages long.

Sometimes, corrections are so extensive, they can only be called one thing: Mega-corrections.

Recently, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) issued a four-page correction notice to a paper about a compound that appeared to reduce the chances a cancer will recur. The notice describes figure duplication, problems with error bars and figure legends — as well as the loss of statistical significance for some data.

According to the authors’ statement in the notice:

Continue reading A 2015 PNAS paper is six pages long. Its correction is four pages long.