Corante

About this Author
Derek Lowe
Derek Lowe, an Arkansan by birth, got his BA from Hendrix College and his PhD in organic chemistry from Duke before spending time in Germany on a Humboldt Fellowship on his post-doc. He's worked for several major pharmaceutical companies since 1989 on drug discovery projects against schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, diabetes, osteoporosis and other diseases. To contact Derek email him directly: derekb.lowe@gmail.com

Chemistry and Pharma Blogs:
Pharmalot
Org Prep Daily
On Pharma
One in Ten Thousand
Away From the Bench
QDIS Blog
Chemical Musings
In Vivo Blog
The Chemblog
Molecule of the Day
Kinase Pro
Drugs and Poisons
Jungfreudlich
Chembark
Social Detritus
Pharmagossip
Whistling in the Wind
Organometallic Current
Great Molecular Crapshoot
Post Doc Ergo Propter Doc
A Chemist's Lab Notebook
The Curious Wavefunction Totally Synthetic
Pharma's Cutting Edge
The F- Blog
Synthetic Environment
Atom Pusher
Chemistry World Blog
Carbon-Based Curiosities
Eye on FDA
Hdreioplus
Closeted Chemistry
Chemical Forums
Curly Arrow
Power of Goo
Carbon Tet
Totally Medicinal
Sceptical Chymist
Lamentations on Chemistry
PeterMR
Mining Drugs
Regulatory Affairs of the Heart
Making Graphite Work
Liquid Carbon
Half-Decent Pharma Blog


Science Blogs and News:
The Loom
Uncertain Principles
The Crimson Canary
Fierce Biotech
Blogs for Industry
The Futile Cycle
Omics! Omics!
Young Female Scientist
Notional Slurry
Life of a Lab Rat
TP With Page Numbers
Nobel Intent
SciTech Daily
Is This Thing On?
Science Blog
Eastern Blot
Oncology Updates
FuturePundit
Flags and Lollipops
Aetiology
Gene Expression (I)
Gene Expression (II)
Sciencebase
Pharyngula
Daily Biomed
Voyage to Arcturus
Adventures in Ethics and Science
Terra Sigillata
Transterrestrial Musings
The Mass Spectrometry Blog
Nodal Point
Slashdot Science
A Scientist's Life
Living the Scientific Life
John Johnson
Humans in Science
Tobias Sing's Bioinformatics Blog
Speculist
Science, Shrimp and Grits
Biopeer
Cosmic Variance
The Capsule
Zeroth Order Approximation
Science Library Blog
Biology News Net


Medical Blogs
MedPundit
Med Tech Sentinel
DB's Medical Rants
Dr. Charles
RangelMD
GruntDoc
The Health Care Blog
Cut to Cure
Respectful Insolence
Black Triangle
Diabetes Mine


Economics and Business
Marginal Revolution
Arnold Kling
The Volokh Conspiracy
Knowledge Problem
The Stalwart


Politics / Current Events
Virginia Postrel
Tinkerty Tonk
Instapundit
Asymmetrical Information
Belmont Club
Man Without Qualities
Belgravia Dispatch
Mickey Kaus
Colby Cosh
Progressive Reaction
No Watermelons


Belles Lettres
Two Blowhards
Critical Mass
Arts and Letters Daily
God of the Machine
Armavirumque
About Last Night
Check out the The AppGap - a group blog on the tools and trends that are changing the way we work.

In the Pipeline

« Stem Cell Disaster | Main | How Not to Do It: Ether Peroxides »

January 12, 2006

Plenty of Tar to Go Around

Email This Entry

Posted by Derek

One of the glowing chunks of fallout from the South Korea stem cell scandal is the handling that Science gave to Hwang's two retracted papers. It's no secret that the top journals compete to see who can publish high-profile papers, and for research like this it's pretty much down to Science or Nature. As fate would have it, Nature got the one of Hwang's recent papers that actually doesn't have to be retracted - whether that's a coincidence or not, I don't know. But the scientific publishing world is no doubt speculating about that, and you can already see some uncharitable comments surfacing. For example:

"It sounds as though their processes were rather sloppy," said Dr. Benjamin Lewin, the founder and former editor of Cell, a biology journal known for its rigor. "At a minimum, Science should have been more careful and should never have reached the stage of publishing a paper with identical photos," he said, referring to the fact that some photos of cell colonies in Dr. Hwang's 2005 article were duplicates of one another.


Dr. Lewin said that a journal editor needed to develop an intimate knowledge of his reviewers' strengths and weaknesses, and that "Nature and Science don't have the reputation for rigorous review."


Meow! I have a lot of respect for Lewin, but this sort of thing isn't going to burnish his reputation. (Update: His deep admiration for the folks at Science turns out to go back a long way). The response of my fellow scientists has been to suggest that he try publishing in one of those non-rigorous journals under a pseudonym and see how far he gets. I guess it depends on how you define "rigorous", though, and it's true that there are other definitions besides rejecting 90% of all the papers submitted. The journal may well have rushed these hot papers through the process, since they were clearly the sort of thing that would be worth publishing. (See some thoughts on this here). The reviewers for both papers have no doubt been involved in some difficult e-mail exchanges in the last few weeks. . .

The danger with comments like this, though, is that every journal that publishes papers worth reading has published papers worth retracting. And that includes Call, naturally, although their most recent one was (weirdly) done without the lead author's consent. (Thanks to Ivan Oransky's blog at The Scientist for this). And in a fraud case that I missed last fall, Luk Van Parijs of MIT was fired after faking loads of data in several research papers. New Scientist found, while looking through his publications on their own, that one of his papers (in the journal Immunity) almost certainly contains faked flow cytometry data. The graphs shown are just too similar, and that's not a technique that churns out exact duplicates of anything, ever.

This is quite similar to the problem with Hwang's stem-cell illustrations, which Lewin is saying should have been caught. But Immunity, like several other single-noun-title journals is published by. . .Cell Press. That's the problem here. No one comes out of this business looking good, even if they try.

Comments (4) + TrackBacks (0) | Category: The Scientific Literature


COMMENTS

1. marcus newberry on January 14, 2006 12:00 PM writes...

Derek,

Very well put. What was that about the old retrospectascope?

Permalink to Comment

2. Zak on January 15, 2006 5:37 AM writes...

Seems like you're conflating "rigorous" with "competitive." Science and Nature could turn down 99.9% of submissions but still not be rigorous about verifying the content of the papers they do publish.
He never claimed they weren't competitive....

Permalink to Comment

3. SRC on January 16, 2006 9:54 PM writes...

I'd have more respect for Lewin if he weren't functionally illiterate, as anyone who's struggled to make sense of his wretched book(s) can testify.

Permalink to Comment

4. Hank on January 18, 2006 3:31 AM writes...

As my advisor back in grad school used to say, "Just because it's in Cell, it doesn't make it wrong."

Permalink to Comment


EMAIL THIS ENTRY TO A FRIEND

Email this entry to:

Your email address:

Message (optional):




RELATED ENTRIES
Pfizer's Prospects: Just Ducky
Happy Fourth of July
I Can Has Ugly Molecules?
More Pfizer Layoffs?
Leaving Comments: A Fix
The Gates Foundation: Dissatisfied With Results?
Another Alzheimer's Compound Goes Down
Unknown - But You Can Buy It