A timing glitch prompted the temporary removal of a letter to the editor calling out a previously published study for “perpetuating historical harms” through its framing of race and ethnicity.
Mahin Khatami, a former researcher with the U.S. National Institutes of Health who has argued in print that cancer results from ‘dark energy’ and that the government and the pharmaceutical industry are collaborating in ‘scientific/medical Ponzi schemes’ to keep people sick, has lost a paper to retraction.
As we reported last fall, Robert Speth, a pharmacy science researcher at Nova Southeastern University in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., has been urging Clinical & Translational Medicine (CTM) to retract Khatami’s articles — and one in particular — for what is now more than two years.
In mid-October a spokesperson for Wiley, which publishes the journal, told us that she was trying to get more information from the editors about why Khatami’s bizarre paper was acceptable material.
A paper linking the use of a wildly popular drug for heartburn to cancer has been retracted after the authors concluded that their widely touted finding appears to have resulted from a hiccup in the way they conducted their testing.
The 2016 article, in Carcinogenesis, has played a minor role in an ongoing class action lawsuit against the makers of ranitidine (sold as Zantac, among other brand names) claiming that use of the medication has caused cancer in more than 100,000 plaintiffs. And it was a key citation in a 2019 petition to the FDA urging that such drugs be recalled.
The FDA has been investigating contamination of ranitidine and a related drug with NDMA, a known human carcinogen at high doses. On April 1, 2020, the agency announced that, although its tests did not find concerning levels of NDMA in “many” of the samples it tested, it was recalling all products that contain ranitidine:
A “costly mistake” has led to the retraction of a paper by a team of dermatology researchers in West Virginia who failed to obtain permission to use the data in their study for the specific purpose for which it was used.
The article, “Association Between Alopecia Areata and Natural Hair Color Among White Individuals,” which appeared in March 2021 in JAMA Dermatology, was a case-control study based on data from the UK Biobank — a large repository of medical and genetic data from people in the United Kingdom. The senior author on the article was Michael Kolodney, the chair of the department of dermatology at West Virginia University School of Medicine in Morgantown.
In fact, Kolodney and his colleagues had produced two articles using data from the biobank: one on alopecia areata — an autoimmune condition that causes relatively early-onset hair loss — and another that linked baldness to an increased risk of Covid-19 in men. The Covid research was published in November 2020 as a letter to the editor in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology.
The Covid paper remains intact. But as the retraction notice indicates, the folks at UK Biobank hadn’t granted Kolodney’s group permission to publish the alopecia findings:
A former endowed professor at the University of Kentucky has resigned from the faculty days before a committee at the institution was scheduled to vote on whether to fire him for misconduct, Retraction Watch has learned.
In 2018, the university began investigating Xianglin Shi, a toxicologist and cancer biologist who that year, as we reported then, lost three papers in the Journal of Biological Chemistry for image manipulation. At the time, Shi was the principal investigator of a 5-year, $7.4 million grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences to establish the UK Center for Appalachian Research in Environmental Sciences (UK-CARES).
In the wake of the retractions, Shi was stripped of his title as the William A. Marquard Chair in Cancer Research and his role as associate dean for research integration in the UK College of Medicine.
A journal has issued an expression of concern after learning that it may have published abstracts from meetings that appear not to have taken place.
As many journals do, Basic & Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology, a Wiley title, occasionally publishes meeting supplements. But according to the journal, it recently learned from several authors that a dozen of those supplements that it produced
between 2018 and 2020 might have contained suspect work. According to a statement we received from the journal:
Last month, Retraction Watch reported on the case of Hironobo Ueshima, an anesthesiology researcher found guilty of misconduct in more than 140 papers. A journal editor, John Loadsman, was the first to suspect there were issues in Ueshima’s work. But this was hardly the first time Loadsman had been the canary in the coal mine of the anesthesiology literature, placing him squarely on our ever-growing list of scientific sleuths that includes Elisabeth Bik, who has been in the news recently because of threats. In this Q&A, we ask Loadsman what happened in the Ueshima case, and for his sense of how big a problem fraud in the literature is.
Retraction Watch (RW): You were the editor who first spotted problems with Ueshima’s work. Walk us through how you cracked the case. What made you suspect that his data were not kosher?
Contemporary social psychology has been seized over the past years by a loss of credibility and self-confidence associated with scientific fraud and unsuccessful attempts to replicate the modern corpus of knowledge. The most notorious case was that of Dietrick Stapel. Fifty-eight papers published over a decade and a half were retracted due to fraud and suspicious research practices.
One of the most poignant questions raised by the review committees in three universities where he worked was how it was possible for such dubious scientific practices to escape the notice of all the academic reviewers in the high-profile journals, the funding agencies and at the scientific conferences. Many statistical anomalies were identified readily by statisticians who assisted in the review of Stapel’s papers. The committees were forced to conclude that “there is a general culture of careless, selective and uncritical handling of research and data. The observed flaws were not minor ‘normal’ imperfections in statistical processing, or experimental design and execution, but violations of fundamental rules of proper scientific research.” The culture contributed to the absence of skepticism about Stapel’s extraordinary findings.
