Gregg Semenza shared the 2019 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for discovering how human cells sense and adapt to different oxygen levels. He surely must have known better days. His work is now being avidly scrutinized by journals where it got published. Serious concerns have been raised about the validity of his reported data, […]
Have you ever met a top scientist who is also an active journal editor? After years of patent litigation this question keeps coming up when seeking for technical help. The answer is: only seldom, since great minds usually have little interest in getting distracted. The consequences of this inverted selection are immediately apparent: deep […]
Frances Arnold won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2018. She also retracted a paper in January, 2020. The paper was authored by Inha Cho, Zhi-Jun Jia and Arnold, all from Arnold’s research group at the California Institute of Technology and involved a study that was published in the journal Science in May of 2019. The retraction statement published by Science […]
Science requires peer critiques, cannot do without them. But as we have amply shown, Retraction Watch (RW) only encourages unfiltered denigration. To quote Susan T. Fiske, chaired Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University and former APS president, “the self-appointed data police is volunteering critiques of such personal ferocity and relentlessness that they […]
When it comes to scientific integrity, US research institutions are stuck in a dismal situation. A breed of data thugs bullying institutions and journals, and a mob of angry losers and science dropouts are effectively running the show from the squalor of venues like Retraction Watch. Sadly, a few members of the science establishment – […]
It now turns out that the American biophysicist Michael W. Deem from Rice University was far more involved in the widely condemned “CRISPR babies” experiment than was previously known. STAT learned that Deem was the senior author on a paper entitled “Birth of twins after genome editing for HIV resistance” submitted to Nature in November, 2018. The first […]
Robert Weinberg, Carlo Croce and Olivier Voinnet are extremely gifted scientists. They have spent long hours in the lab and their amazing drive and talent have turned them into towering figures in their respective fields. Their achievements are widely recognized and have earned them solid reputations in Cancer Genetics, Cancer Biology and Plant Biology, their […]
Contributed by Dr. Ariel Fernandez Stigliano Virtually everybody recognizes that science is facing a reproducibility crisis. Whenever a result elicits attention, be it because it is published in a high-impact journal, or better still because it is important, there is a high likelihood that others will attempt to reproduce it. They often fail, disturbingly often. […]
Carlo M. Croce is a towering figure in cancer genetics. His discovery of the molecular mechanisms in leukemia and other malignancies places him in the league of pioneers in the field like Janet Rowley. Croce’s peers have recognized his contributions, elected him to the US National Academy of Science in 1996 and showered him with […]
Hilda Bastian is an NIH contractor for PubMed Health and PubMed Commons at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM). She also seems to be a prolific science writer. Bastian recently informed the blog Retraction Watch that the NLM is planning a prominent display of Expressions of Concern (EoC) published by […]