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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.
Yes, but it was also common sense. The journal published something that was demonstrably false. A newspaper that was given bad information from a source doesn't need "science" or some sort of formal scientific review to publish a retraction saying the source was wrong.
People make mistakes, that why the normal scientific process is to check it.
Actually, not really. Sure, in an ideal world this is true, but not necessarily in the "normal scientific process" as practiced.
Research grants are awarded, publications are selected, tenure is granted, etc. mostly on the basis of NEW research, not on checking up on other people's results (which is generally not considered notable unless previous results were wrong, hard to get grant money for, and hard to publish).
We have a systemic bias against replicating research in the way a lot of modern science operates. It would be better if what you said was true more often. But paper retractions are exceedingly rare, even if much (if not most) published research has serious flaws.
There are some relatively recent serious efforts to fix this, though. But it's a misrepresentation to say that checking research is part of the "normal scientific process" -- it only tends to happen in high-profile articles or ones that make extraordinary claims. For most run-of-the-mill research, it's definitely not as common as it probably should be.