Dana-Farber retractions: meet the blogger who spotted problems in dozens of cancer papers

[NNadir]

From my Nature Briefing news feed:

Dana-Farber retractions: meet the blogger who spotted problems in dozens of cancer papers

Subtitle:

Nature talks to Sholto David about his process for flagging image manipulation and his tips for scientists under scrutiny.

I'm not sure if the news item is open source; hopefully it is. An excerpt:

The prestigious Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) in Boston, Massachusetts, acknowledged this week that it would seek retractions for 6 papers and corrections for an additional 31 — some co-authored by DFCI chief executive Laurie Glimcher, chief operating officer William Hahn and several other prominent cancer researchers. The news came after scientific-image sleuth Sholto David posted his concerns about more than 50 manuscripts to a blog on 2 January.

In the papers, published in a range of journals including Blood, Cell and Nature Immunology, David found images from western blots — a common test for detecting proteins in biological samples — in which bands seemed to be spliced, stretched and copied and pasted. He also found images of mice duplicated across figures where they shouldn’t have been. (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its publisher, Springer Nature, and of other Nature-branded journals.)

It was not the first time that some of these irregularities had been noted; some were flagged years ago on PubPeer, a website where researchers comment on and critique scientific papers. The student newspaper The Harvard Crimson reported on David’s findings on 12 January.

The DFCI, an affiliate of Harvard University, had already been investigating some of the papers in question before David’s blogpost was published, says the centre’s research-integrity officer, Barrett Rollins. “Correcting the scientific record is a common practice of institutions with strong research-integrity processes,” he adds. (Rollins is a co-author of three of the papers that David flagged and is not involved in investigations into them, says DFCI spokesperson Ellen Berlin.) The DFCI is declining requests for interviews with its researchers about the retractions.

David, based in Pontypridd, UK, spoke to Nature about how he uncovered the data irregularities at the DFCI and what scientists can do to prevent mix-ups in their own work...

There are still tons upon tons of Western Blots published and I was involved just yesterday in explaining to a client why Mass Spec, as expensive and sometimes challenging it is, should become the world standard for proteomic analysis, which, of course, is happening without any input from me. Yes, you can get something, even a lot, out of a Western Blot, but there are many ways to be fooled or to deliberately fool.

[erronis]

1. Thanks. DFCI is one of my providers.

I have much confidence in the institution but it is like many - grown too large to be easily governable and have every researcher completely monitored.

I've just re-read "The Emperor of All Maladies" by Siddartha Mukherjee. It goes into great depths on the growth of Farber and the incredible push for funding to wage the war on cancer. It seems that so much money was thrown at this effort that a lot of opportunists also wanted a piece of it.

[NNadir]

2. That's an excellent book. I saw Siddartha Mukherjee speak at a keynote a few years back at AAPS.

He's a very talented speaker, as I recall, as well as a scientist, and his remarks on melanoma (including a case study with a colleague that made me think) in particular stuck in my mind, but what really sticks in my mind was the very informal way he dressed and looked, like he just crawled out of bed, which perhaps he did.

It enhanced the talk to my mind, rather than detracted from it.

He acts and talks like a human being, which of course, he is, a remarkable human being, but a human being all the same.

The Emperor of All Maladies in an excellent book. I highly recommend it.