Linda Buck won the Nobel Prize in Medecine in 2004 for her work on olfaction (that’s the sense of smell). Part of the work she drew on for this award was a Nature paper authored in 2001 by Zhihua Zou (a postdoc) and Lisa Horowitz ('nother postdoc). Essentially, the results (which results are not quite clear) were not reproducible and an internal review culminated in the lab’s decision to retract the paper in its entirety. Zou is now a junior faculty member elsewhere, and according to Nature’s policy, all members signed on to the retraction, although Zou is quoted as having confidence in the initial findings and hopes to replicate them.
The proximal debate is: is there something nefarious going on here? Reading comments around the web on various science blogs, I was rather surprised at how worked up people were getting. It seems to me that the Buck lab has acted about as well as could be expected, but many are incensed for reasons that are not quite clear to me in this case.
The distal debate is: is there something wrong with the publishing process? There’s been severalhigh-profile cases of scientific ethics recently, and I’m wondering how much of this disseminates into the general public, and if it undermines the credibility of scientists in such controversies as Global Warming, Evolution, and Stem Cell Research (especially). If there is something wrong, what should be done?
First, let me say that global warming and evolution do not belong lumped into the OP. If any subjects have had the ever-living daylights debated out of them, it’s those two.
Having said that, I will say that medical research, unlike a lot of other fields, has much more commercial potential built into it from the get-go - and that makes medical research far more cutthroat than any other field I know of. I had a friend, a medical geneticist, once tell me that the standard practice for submitting papers in her field involved withholding the methodology sections of their manuscripts - so crucial in my own field of science - so that peer reviewers couldn’t swipe the idea and scoop the original authors. That comment totally boggled my mind.
This to me is the reason that some faulty medical research doesn’t get caught at the review stage, where it normally would be. Sometimes it’s just sloppiness, sometimes it’s an honest mistake, sometimes there’s misconduct because the stakes are so high. Add to that in some cases that you might have someone with an ego who isn’t well liked, and, well… others engage in schadenfreude if the research turns out to have a major weakness.
On the whole, however, while peer review isn’t perfect, it does a pretty good job of weeding out the not-so-great research that gets done. Maybe the folks in medical research should visit the idea of major penalties if it’s discovered they stole someone else’s work… but I don’t see it as a problem in general for science.
My thinking was: Science is often viewed from the outside as a somewhat monolithic entity, and I’m kind of curious as to whether the sins committed in one discipline spill over and taint another in the court of public opinion.