Scientific Method / Science & Exploration

Retraction reactions

Although peer review is the first line of defense in scientific publishing, a …

Although peer review is widely acclaimed as the mechanism which keeps science honest and interpretations of results based in reality, it's ultimately a human process, and far from perfect.  As a couple of recent events point out, though, it's not science's last line of defense if someone publishes results that are either mistaken or downright fraudulent.  As reported at CNN, MIT has recently gotten rid of a professor due to one or more unspecified acts of scientific fraud.  The professor in question, Luk Van Parijs, has an extensive publication record on immunology in prestigious journals.  It's currently unclear how many of these publications - if any - are fraudulent.  In a disturbing echo of past scandals, it turns out that Van Parijs had done his post-doctoral work in David Baltimore's lab, who had earlier been involved in immune research that raised accusations of scientific fraud and cost him a position as president of Rockefeller University.  As with other cases of this sort, it's assumed that Van Parijs's career is now over.

Meanwhile, over at Cell, strange things have been afoot regarding an article originally published in 2004.  The original paper suggested that parts of a parasite genome were commonly integrated into specific locations in a hosts' DNA, those hosts including rabbits, chickens, and humans.  This would suggest that horizontal gene transfer (shuffling of genetic material between species), thought mostly to occur in bacteria, might be occurring in vertebrates and in a more organized manner than expected.  The September 23 issue, however, contained a retraction of the paper, meaning the original publication should not be viewed as valid.  Retractions happen in cases of fraud, if new data comes to light, or repeats of original experiments don't consistently yield the same results. In most of those cases, the original author performs the retraction.  This one was different, in that the original author refused to retract the article, and the editors of Cell had to do so over his objection.  I certainly had never seen this before, and it must have struck a lot of people as unusual, since there were enough inquiries about it to compel an editor to write an extensive follow up in the October 21 issue.

It seems things all went bad because someone found the results interesting, and attempted to check them against publicly available genome sequences.  This check produced the same sequences reported in the paper, but it became clear that this identification was so weak that it could not be considered statistically significant.  The interpretation of the remaining data depended on these results and, without them, the whole intellectual structure of the paper collapsed.  This still anonymous individual wrote the editor, who obtained the original data from the author and sent it to the paper's original peer reviewers along with a description of the concerns.  The reviewers agreed that the paper wasn't valid, leading the editors to ask the author to retract.  He refused for reasons he has yet to explain, so it was done for him.

Events such as these make me both nervous and confident.  I read lots of papers, and I rarely follow up on the original data unless it directly applies to what I'm doing.  Even if this one was relevant to my field, I doubt I would have caught the mistake.  It's also a worry that some of Van Parijs's fraudulent work may still be part of the scientific record.  I get nervous that some things I view as demonstrated might be equally weak.  At the same time, such events are rare enough that they make CNN or cause a flood of letters to an editor.  And in the case of the Cell paper, the editorial process worked exactly as it should have.  That leaves me feeling a bit better about things.

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