Lest readers of Retraction Watch had forgotten about Naoki Mori, the cancer researcher who liked his Western blots so much he decided to reuse them — and reuse them some more — he’s back.
The British Journal of Haematology (BJH) has retracted two papers Mori published in that journal, and BMC Microbiology has retracted another, bringing the total of retractions involving his work to at least 19 by our count. [See update at end.]
Sometime in 2009, the University of Nottingham’s Uwe Vinkemeier thought something was wrong with two papers he read in Genes & Development, one from 2006 and one from 2009. The papers claimed to show how changes to a protein called STAT1 affect programmed cell death. So he did what scientists are supposed to do: He tried to repeat the experiments, to replicate the results.
The study, “Human monocytes constitutively express membrane-bound, biologically active, and interferon-gamma-upregulated interleukin-15,” has been cited 124 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. Its corresponding author is Tiziana Musso, of the University of Turin.
The authors retract the 19 March 2009, paper cited above. Recently, the authors discovered that some primary data presented in this paper could not be independently reproduced. All coauthors concur with the retraction of the paper and apologize to the readers, reviewers, and editors of Blood for publishing these invalid data.
Retraction Watch readers are likely to be familiar with Germany’s Research Center Borstel, because it is home to Silvia Bulfone-Paus, who has recently retracted 12 papers. Now it turns out that Borstel’s managing director, Peter Zabel — who was involved in the Bulfone-Paus investigation — has stepped down because of allegations of duplication of his own work.
We have an update to our coverage of the retractions involving papers from a group of researchers in Iran that were published in Computational and Theoretical Chemistry (formerly called the Journal of Molecular Structure: THEOCHEM)
Petter Portin, of the University of Turku, Finland, has been forced to retract four papers because they were duplicates of work he had already published.
Two of those retractions appear in the February 2011 issue of Hereditas. Here’s one retraction notice (link added):
Retraction Watch readers may have been following the case of Silvia Bulfone-Paus, whose lab has been forced to retract 12 papers amid allegations of scientific misconduct. As is often true in such cases, the story doesn’t end with those retractions. We’ve just become aware of a fascinating exchange in March and April between Bulfone-Paus’s supporters and her home institution, Germany’s Research Center Borstel.
First, some background: Karin Wiebauer, a former post-doc in Bulfone-Paus’s lab, flagged the potential misconduct, in great detail, for Bulfone-Paus in a November 2009 email. (In fact, she had brought it to her attention years earlier.) But Bulfone-Paus did not tell Borstel officials about the allegations until late February 2010. Borstel’s investigation into Bulfone-Paus’s lab began in July 2010.
Once that began, a person referring to himself as “Marco Berns” began emailing officials, journalists, and others about the situation. Nature called that move a “smear campaign,” and the emails “libellous,” but in retrospect they — and Wiebauer’s analysis — appear to have been spot-on, based on the eventual report of the Borstel committee. That report — which found data manipulation by two of Bulfone-Paus’s post-docs — led the institute’s Scientific Advisory Board to ask for Bulfone-Paus’s resignation. She only tendered that a month later, after more pressure.
Back in March, we reported that the journal Computational and Theoretical Chemistry (CTC) had retracted a pair of 2006 papers by a group of Iranian researchers. As the notices stated, the scientists had recalled their articles after detecting “serious errors” with the work post-publication.
At the time, the authors still had three other articles in good standing with CTC. No longer.
Lest readers of Retraction Watch had forgotten about Naoki Mori, the cancer researcher who liked his Western blots so much he decided to reuse them — and reuse them some more — he’s back.
