Compile | Zhang Qingdan
Recently, a storm of fraud involving neuroscience and cancer research has swept through the academic community.
At the heart of the storm is Laurie Glimcher, a member of the American Academy of Sciences. On April 19, the journal Science retracted a paper published on April 28, 2006, of which Laurie Glimcher was the corresponding author.
The reason for the retraction given by Science is that based on internal investigation and analysis conducted since February 2021, there are many key images in the article that are problematic, and some of the authors of the paper believe that these data can no longer support the original research conclusions, so the paper is retracted.
As the saying goes, "pull out the radish and bring out the mud", and more academic fraud has been involved behind the retraction incident, and the academic misconduct of many academic "bulls" has surfaced.
On April 19, the journal Science retracted Glimcher's paper.
The first paper refuses to be retracted
The first "protagonist" to be introduced is the first author of the retracted paper, "star neuroscientist" Claudio Hetz.
When this article was published 18 years ago, Hetz was doing postdoctoral work at Harvard University in the United States, and Glimcher was a professor of immunology and medicine at Harvard University, where she was also a mentor. The research that Hetz was doing at the time was mainly related to apoptosis.
Many cells die every day in the human body, and there are various ways to die, one of which is called apoptosis. Apoptosis is one of the important mechanisms for maintaining tissue homeostasis and embryonic development, and is regulated by a variety of signaling molecules. Pro-apoptotic Bcl-2 family members BAX and BAK proteins play a very important role in apoptosis.
Hetz's study revealed the mechanism by which BAX and BAK interact with the endoplasmic reticulum stress-sensing protein IRE1α to regulate unfolded protein responses. As soon as the paper was published, it attracted widespread attention and was considered a major discovery in the field of apoptosis and protein homeostasis research.
The year after his paper was published, Hetz joined the University of Chile and continued to work on these proteins, doing so successfully. Today, Hetz is the Director of the Institute of Biomedical Neuroscience at the University of Chile, an adjunct professor at Harvard University, and one of the leading scholars in the field of neuroscience and cell biology internationally.
Subsequently, questions were raised about the images used in the paper. Hetz has responded to the paper's skepticism on PubPeer. Hetz noted that the image problem was an unintentional mistake, and he provided some raw data on the study. However, the reply has since been removed from his web page.
Hetz被质疑的实验图片。 图源:PubPeer
In response, academic detective Elisabeth Bik said that the images provided in this response do not appear to be related to the duplication found in this study. With all these issues in mind, Bik suggested that the journal retract the paper. Hetz did not respond again.
On January 13, 2021, Hetz was charged with irregularities in a number of published research papers in which he was an author or co-author – tampering with photographs.
In January, academic detective and molecular biologist Sholto David also highlighted the paper's problems in a blog post. David wrote that Hetz's university investigated him at the time and issued a condemnatory report accusing Hetz of "great carelessness and lack of rigor." Hetz, on the other hand, downplayed it and simply regretted that he didn't use a later version of Photoshop to work better with the images.
In an interview in September 2021, Hetz talked about the situation he found himself in. It was his first interview since the charges. He admitted that mistakes were made, but clarified that they were never intentional and that there was no fraud. He said the experience gave him and his team new image processing tools to prevent such mistakes from happening again. "We sent corrections to the journal in which they were published, and they were accepted. ”
One scholar said Hetz's corrections were erroneous and "not enough to restore confidence in the reliability of the data." The retraction notice, published in the journal Science, also states that the authors no longer believe the data to support the study's conclusions.
This paper is significant to Hetz and is the only paper he has published in Science to date. Meagan Phelan, a spokesman for Science publisher and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), revealed that Hetz opposed the decision to retract the paper because he "insisted on the paper's conclusions, which were based in part on additional experiments done in his lab." ”
4 renowned scholars, one of the world's top research structures
As Hetz's mentor, Glimcher's academic attainments and status were exalted.
Glimcher graduated magna laude from Harvard Medical School in 1976 and has made a series of important achievements in the fields of immunology and osteoporosis. In the late 90s, she pioneered the discovery of the mechanism by which white blood cells help the immune system fight infection and disease, revolutionizing immunology and laying the foundation for later cancer immunotherapy.
She is the director of Harvard University's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI), the world's premier cancer treatment institution, which has produced a Nobel Prize winner. Among the cancer treatment drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), DFCI drugs account for half of the total.
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI), Harvard University.
Who would have thought that such a level of academic "bulls" would also be retracted. Not only did Glimcher make a big deal, but the DFCI she led was also involved in academic fraud. Three other senior researchers at DFCI have also been accused of academic misconduct: William Hahn, executive vice president of DFCI, Irene Ghobrial, senior vice president of experimental medicine, and Kenneth Anderson, professor at Harvard Medical School.
In January this year, David pointed out in a blog post that he used a combination of artificial intelligence image analysis software ImageTwin and manual detection to find errors in the paper, and found that many papers by these four "big bulls" were suspected of falsifying experimental data. The 57 papers complained of were published between 1999 and 2017. These papers cover basic cancer research and are published in a series of journals such as Cell, Nature Medicine and Science, but the main problem is that the data is falsified by modifying the images, and duplicate traces are found in multiple images, and some are even directly copied and pasted.
In 2003, Glimcher was the corresponding author of a paper published in Nature Immunology, and the images were obviously copied and pasted. Source: PubPeer
Of the four, William Hahn had a more serious problem with his academic integrity. He has been questioned for more than 40 articles on PubPeer, 18 of which are related to image issues. One of the more typical is a paper published in Cancer Research in 2005, which has a lot of splicing and duplication. The paper was now retracted on March 15 this year.
In a 2005 paper published in Cancer Research by Hahn as corresponding author, there were a lot of stitching and duplication problems with the images. Source: PubPeer
Academic misconduct so concentrated in the same research institution is jaw-dropping to the academic community. In the past few weeks, DFCI has retracted six papers and made data corrections to another 31 papers, with 16 more papers under investigation. The investigation could last up to a year, and it is not clear when the fraud storm will come to an end.
Counterfeiting continues, and the situation will only get worse
In recent years, academic misconduct has emerged one after another, and many elite universities have not been spared.
Earlier, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, the former president of Stanford University in the United States, was accused of tampering with images and paper data, and the Stanford Daily first exposed his academic misconduct, resigning last summer after eight months of censorship.
Around the same time, Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino was accused of falsifying data, leading the university to begin a formal evaluation of her tenure.
Calls for her resignation were further fuelled by accusations of dozens of plagiarism throughout her academic career last December, when former Harvard University president Claudine Gay was accused of dozens of plagiarism throughout her academic career, and her response to antisemitism on American college campuses sparked a huge controversy in congressional hearings. She announced her resignation in January of this year, serving a six-month term, making her the shortest-serving president in Harvard's history.
More and more academic fraud incidents have had a negative impact on the academic ecology. It not only affects the public's trust in scientific research, but also harms the development of scientific research.
The retraction of the paper proves that the findings in the paper are not valid, and since the results of the study are not valid, it also means that the money invested in the relevant research is meaningless. This time, there are 57 papers suspected of data fraud, and DFCI receives a lot of research funding every year. Last year, the National Institutes of Health provided more than $160 million in research funding to DFCI.
David has pointed out that the United States has invested billions of dollars in cancer research, but the progress of related research is very slow, and academic misconduct plays a role in this.
In addition, other research work that cites the content of these retracted studies would be misleading. The retracted paper by Science is a very well-known study. So far, it has been cited more than 800 times, and the impact is difficult to estimate, which may be a heavy blow to research in this field.
Reference Links:
https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1123480
Hatps://pubpir.com/publication/c6b3ab4aa887c2d05639a8b0729124
Hatps://pubmed.nakbi.nalam.nih.gov/16645094/
https://www.latercera.com/que-pasa/noticia/revista-science-finalmente-se-retracta-y-retira-publicacion-de-estudio-de-cientifico-chileno-claudio-hetz/HK7JNDYASND4TGJCDKBFNN22YY/
https://www.pressreader.com/
Hatpas://mp.vexin.k.com/s/4kurahvj03-adpv
httpps://pubpier.com/publication/a52b423a7f819c3a78182a846bd4b3
https://pubpeer.com/publications/CF14E205A17927ADE0ACE0F148660E
https://www.science.org/content/article/errors-found-dozens-papers-top-scientists-dana-farber-cancer-institute