Human Stem Cell Cloning Paper Contains Reused Images

An anonymous reader writes "A very recent paper in the prestigious biology journal Cell — 'Human Embryonic Stem Cells Derived by Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer' (openly accessible) — reports the novel creation of human embryonic stem cells from somatic nuclei. It has received massive media coverage and is surely penciled in as a strong candidate for scientific publication of the year. It does however have several examples of image reuse that have been pointed out by a submission on PubPeer. In the paper, it is recorded that the journal Cell accepted this paper just 4 days after submission. Perhaps, under the circumstances, the pre-publication peer review had to be a little hasty? At least at PubPeer, while conducting post publication review, we can take as long as necessary to make up for that lost time. 'In 2004 scientists led by Woo Suk Hwang of Seoul National University claimed to have produced human embryonic stem cells through the same technique used by the Oregon team. Their paper, published in Science, turned out to contain fabricated data. That came to light when scientists figured out that some of the images in the paper were copied or manipulated.''"

Comments

Misleading headline

[walmass]

The reused images were in a 2004 article. So while the substance of the headline is accurate, it would make people think that the recent paper was guilty of that. Whether the hasty review of the current paper results in missing some mistake is a totally different question

Re:Misleading headline

[Frosty Piss]

Misleading headlines at Slashdot are not a new phenomenon, as most of the story submitters, /. "editors", and readers have a strong bias. This is normal for any non "News" (with a capital "N") web site. Bloggers may like to think of themselves as "journalists", but it's really not often accurate.

But it's been getting worse and worse here at /. and I think it's mostly driven by two things: Slashdot employees who call themselves "editors" but in fact are not, and a mandate for page views.

Page views I understand, but honestly, can we really say that there is any real "editing" going on? Do these so-called "editors" actually get paid to make minor formatting changes and for the most part simply push the most salacious / scandalous / titillating crap to the front page?

Has Slashdot become the National Enquirer of the Tech World?

Re:Misleading headline

[jklovanc]

The reuse was in both articles. From PubPeer;

It does however have several examples of image reuse which might be of interest to PubPeer members and readers.

- Fig. 2F is a slightly cropped version of the cell microscopy image in Fig. 6D top left.

- Fig. 6D top right, the cell microscopy image is a slightly cropped version of supplementary Fig. s5, top right. The cells in 6D are labelled as "h-ESO-NT1 Ph" yet in figure s5 they are labelled to be "hESO-7". We understand the former to inherit caffeine-treated somatic nuclei whereas the latter are original stem cells.

Under pressure to assemble the figures for rapid publication, one can understand making a cut and paste figure assembly mistake. Nevertheless it should be noted that image cropping does take extra work.

- Figure S6 top centre and top right are the same image.

The second article was mentioned to draw parallels between image reuse and scientific misconduct.

Isn't it obvious?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

They found the "Cloning" feature in Photoshop, and said: "Hey, someone else has already done the research for us! How convenient."