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Journal Published Flawed Stem Cell Papers Despite Serious Misgivings About Work
sciencehabit writes: As two discredited, and now retracted, stem cell papers have produced an almost unimaginable fallout — a national hero accused of scientific fraud, the revamping of one of Japan's major research institutes, and the suicide of a respected cell biologist — researchers have privately and publicly asked how Nature could have published work that, in retrospect, seems so obviously flawed. Another piece of the puzzle has now come to light. The Science news team received a copy of email correspondence between a Nature editor and Haruko Obokata, the lead author of the papers, which indicates the work initially received as rocky a reception there as at two other journals, Cell and Science, that had rejected the work previously. The email, dated 4 April 2013, includes detailed separate criticisms of the two papers and suggestions for new data to support the authors' claims of a simple and novel way to make stem cells that could form the myriad cell types within a body. The Nature editor rejected the papers, but left open a window, writing, "Should further experimental data allow you to address these criticisms, we would be happy to look at a revised manuscript." The two papers were published 10 months later.
It's very common for a paper to get rejected on the initial go-around but for the journal in question to provide hints about how the problems with the paper could be addressed to make it publishable.
The bigger issue here appears to be that the followup process didn't happen in a thorough and rigorous manner or that all the extra data the journal requested ended up being manipulated/faked.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Notice: it was science that led to finding out they were wrong and the retraction.
People make mistakes, that why the normal scientific process is to check it.
Publishing is the first step of the peer review process.
The suicide is sad.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Peer review filters out the stuff that is obvious crap, stuff that doesn't even fit the form of a proper scientific article. The purpose is not to say that articles are true, but rather to get rid of articles that are obviously wrong.
If the scientists are lying about their data, it's hard for peer review to catch that. That's why reproducibility is important. If it's a result you care about, you can reproduce it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Human beings are flawed, even scientists. People pursue agendas and that which will make them both money and garner attention. The problem is that group think impacts scientists every bit as much as any other profession. The question is, how can we verify science when most of the population don't even understand it? Much like politicians and covert policy, the public has to trust experts in their fields. With so little oversight what can we do?
...the peer review process for publication actually works? You just have to use it? Who knew?
That Japanese dude to this to heart.
Publishing a paper and then retracting it gets you twice as much publicity. Stephen Hawkings knows this. NOT publishing a paper gets you fired. It is getting a little crazy nowadays, with scientists publishing papers contradicting basic stuff like speed of light. Still, it's a good read and gives these guys something to do until they ultimately discover that God is real.
I think the majority of the scientific publishing culture and industry is bad for science. That said, this is not a fair criticism. It's entirely reasonable to tell someone you expect to see more data in order to publish and to start a conversation among the editor, reviewers and PI as to what is necessary to prove a point. Research is not a perfect process and does not progress in an orderly, predictable manner. There are going to be typos and blind spots in any paper.
In this case, obviously Nature should not have published in the end. We can't know how that decision was reached unless we see all the correspondence between the editor, reviewers and PI. It would be much more useful to the scientific community to see how the PI managed to convince the reviewers to allow publication, rather than to debate what is really a standard rejection response.
This is why. Nobody dares to criticize the author from Harvard. Instead, the Japanese researchers become victims.
little miss dna cannot be wrong https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=stem+cell+therapy all the moms everywhere are crying for us all the time now?
so they have an interest in publicity (an PR is good PR)
google "benveniste telephone nature"
As others have pointed out, such criticism is typical early in the process. And it does nothing to alleviate Nature's failure to appropriately review the final paper before publishing.
greenwow, you fail at trolling. Quit trying you moron.
The other half are retractions.
Speaking as someone, back in the day, who had a paper rejected from Nature,
and later quite happy about that fact, I can say that Nature is not really a
science journal. It is a science magazine, pretending to be a journal.
At nearly the same time that I had my paper rejected from Nature (and later
published in a respectable journal), I saw them publish the absolute
worst paper I've ever seen in my field before or since. In a two page letter,
there were at least 3 independently fatal errors and about half a dozen
addtional debatable points.
Nature is the worst publication venue I could ever imagine.