Following quickly on the heels of Hausergate and the Mount Sinai misconduct, we now have a Nobel laureate – Linda Buck – retracting two papers because results from her lab at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (FHCRC) were not reproducible (which is a euphemism for faked data). This was not the first time. She also retracted a Nature paper in 2008 for much the same reason. One particular (former) postdoctoral researcher Zhihua Zou is identified as the culprit.
Dr. Buck is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and also a Member of the Basic Sciences Division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and an Affiliate Professor of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Washington. She was at Harvard Medical School from 1994 – 2002.
Linda B. Buck
The Scientist reports that:
Two prominent journals have retracted papers by Nobel laureate Linda Buck today because she was “unable to reproduce [the] key findings” of experiments done by her former postdoctoral researcher Zhihua Zou, according to a statement made by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (FHCRC), where Buck worked at the time of the publications.
These retractions, a 2006 Science paper and a 2005 Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences (PNAS)paper, are tied to a 2001 Nature paperthat she retracted in 2008, due to the inability “to reproduce the reported findings” and “inconsistencies between some of the figures and data published in the paper and the original data,” according to the retraction. Zou was the first author on all three papers and responsible for conducting the experiments.
The FHCRC is currently conducting an investigation into the issue, said Kristen Woodward, senior media relations manager, but no findings of misconduct have been made. John Dahlberg of the Office of Research Integrity declined to comment on the matter.
Yesterday The Scientist reported another case of faked data from the University of Washington. Postdoc fudged epigenetic data.
A former postdoctoral fellow at Washington State University has reportedly falsified data presented in two figures of an epigenetics paper, according to the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) report released late last month. The data fabrication resulted in the retraction of a 2006Endocrinology paper, but a repeat of the original study, which uses newer and more quantitative technology and confirms the paper’s conclusions, will be published next week inPLoS ONE.
“This was an extremely difficult issue for myself and the laboratory to deal with,” said Michael Skinner, a professor of reproduction and environmental epigenetics at WSU who headed the research.
According to the ORI’s report, Hung-Shu Chang, a visiting postdoc from Taiwan who worked in Skinner’s lab from 2005 to 2006, falsified sequencing data used to identify DNA regions in rat sperm cells that had different methylation patterns following treatment with an endocrine disruptor known as vinclozolin.
( Is it just coincidence that the post-docs apparently faking data both at Mount Sinai and in these cases all seem to be of foreign origin? Is it a case of “cheap labour” being pressurised by the need for publications?)
Read more:More retractions from Nobelist – The Scientist – Magazine of the Life Scienceshttp://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/57699/#comments#ixzz10Q4NXwiY
Postdoc fudged epigenetic data – The Scientist – Magazine of the LifeScienceshttp://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/57696/#ixzz10QD852cp
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