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Nature retracts paper that claimed adult stem cell could become any type of cell
- Janewillie 2y ago[dead]
- arjvik 2y ago> Verfaille, agreed with the retraction. She now has four retractions, by our count. Maybe I just don't understand biology, but there seems to be something up here.
- bpodgursky 2y agoProbably too many grad students with high expectations and no careful review. PI will be "on" the paper but only do a cursory review.
- Metacelsus 2y agoAnd this is why it's expected that the PI will take responsibility for any papers published by their lab – if the PI isn't doing their job, they should face the consequences. (note I wrote "should", not "will")
- o238jro2j5 2y agoCan confirm. My PI didn't review anything. Sent their journal reviews to students and told us to sign their name at the bottom. Straight up told us to falsify our results on more than one occasion (I refused). I reported them to admin. Admin didn't investigate, didn't even contact the witnesses I named, and gave the professor tenure. This was at UT Austin about ten years ago. Academia is broken.
- alan-hn 2y agoName and shame
- selfmodruntime 2y agoI wouldn’t dare in their place. Academia is tiny.
- alan-hn 2y agoI know, I'm in academia. But this silence is why these things keep happening. PIs hold power over their students to keep them in line, through letters of recommendation to networking and post doc/job offers. We need to work to correct that.
- rf15 2y agoImagine how much research is held back/misguided because of this... I'm happy I'm out tbh, a good r&d team seems so much easier to work in.
- CoastalCoder 2y agoDamn, academia needs a #me-too moment. I find this vaguely reminiscent of Hollywood's casting couches.
- akira2501 2y agoYou can pay for an education or you can pay for a degree. It seems like some people don't mind getting the latter when they aimed to get the former.
- flobosg 2y agoAlong those lines: When a postdoc in my lab committed fraud, I had to face my own culpability – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38766484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38766484
- SketchySeaBeast 2y ago> Maybe I just don't understand biology, but there seems to be something up here. If I had a nickel for every time I've heard that.
- Turing_Machine 2y agoI realize that this probably wouldn't fit in the title, but this is about a specific kind of adult stem cell, not stem cells in general. It's trivially obvious that some kinds of stem cell can become any type of cell, given that we all had our beginnings as a single cell.
- CodeWriter23 2y ago> It's trivially obvious that some kinds of stem cell can become any type of cell, given that we all had our beginnings as a single cell. It’s not that obvious, as the brain grows, certain kind of cells die off and never come back. For example at 4-5 years of age being able to speak different phonenes is lost due to mass die off of a certain type of brain cell. Could be the same for the pair of cells that start a human life. Once their purpose is served they may never exist again.
- rf15 2y agoDo you have a source on the phonemes situation? First time I hear of it, and I'm pretty sure I've seen people learn them past that point. I know they struggle with it, but, as an example, even japanese people can learn the effective difference between l and r given enough effort.
- CodeWriter23 2y agoIt’s why certain ethnicities cannot pronounce words in their non-native language. Like people from the US not being able to make certain consonant sounds in German or Chinese being unable to pronounce the R consonant. So go look it up yourself.
- Turing_Machine 2y ago> It’s not that obvious, as the brain grows, certain kind of cells die off and never come back. I'm not sure what difference that would make. Those brain cells (and all the other brain cells that don't die off) were still formed by successive divisions of the single cell that resulted from sperm meeting egg. Therefore, that original cell is capable of producing any cell type found in the body.
- globalise83 2y agoMost-cited retracted paper ever is quite a claim to fame!
- kstrauser 2y agoCitation needed.
- abdullahkhalids 2y agoSo, according to more credible research, what type of other cells can stem cells turn into?
- rolph 2y agothat is dependent upon the origin developmental state, and biochemical history of the stem cell in question
- Kalanos 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinya_Yamanaka#Yamanaka's_Nobel_Prize%E2%80%93winning_research_in_iPS_cells https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinya_Yamanaka#Yamanaka's_Nob...
- chrbr 2y agoUnfamiliar with academia here, and I can't quite figure it out from TFA - does a retraction always imply wrongdoing, instead of mere "wrongness?" Or are papers sometimes retracted for being egregiously wrong, even if their methods were not intentionally misleading?
- fredgrott 2y agoOkay, I can answer this. Papers are never retracted for theory proven wrong and they are always retracted when wrong-doing is found. This is why the high level research stuff always has researchers recording their data and notes. Before computers, my exp early 1990s, We had to record everything in a notebook and sign it.
- delusional 2y agoThere's a difference between "theory proven wrong" and "proof being wrong". A finding that Theory A is wrong is still a valid finding. A wrong finding about Theory A is just a lie, it carries no value, and should thus be retracted.
- mjn 2y agoIn practice, wrong findings that aren't due to misconduct and aren't very recent are usually not retracted though. It's just considered part of the history of science that some old papers have proofs or results now known to be false. It is pretty common in mathematics, for example, for people to discover (and publish) errors they found in old proofs, without the journal going back and retracting the old proof. A famous example is Hilbert's (incorrect) sketch of a proof for the continuum hypothesis [1]. [1] https://mathoverflow.net/questions/272028/hilberts-alleged-proof-of-the-continuum-hypothesis-in-on-the-infinite https://mathoverflow.net/questions/272028/hilberts-alleged-p...
- cycomanic 2y agoThat statement is wrong. Papers do get retracted because a major innocent error is found. This often happens at the request of the author (typically with an explanation from the authors). . See the comment a bit further up for an example.
- rolph 2y agofrom the submission; 1- "The errors the authors corrected “do not alter the conclusions of the Article,” they wrote in the notice." 2- "the Blood paper contained falsified images, but Verfaillie was not responsible for the manipulations. Blood retracted the article in 2009 at the request of the authors. " 3- "The university found “no breach of research integrity in the publications investigated.” " 4- "The notice mentions two image duplications Bik wrote about on PubPeer. Because the authors could not retrieve the original images, it states: the Editors no longer have confidence that the conclusion that multipotent adult progenitor cells (MAPCs) engraft in the bone marrow is supported. Given the concerns above the Editors no longer have confidence in the reliability of the data reported in this article."
- newzisforsukas 2y ago> contained falsified images This is so common. Why aren't there more legal outcomes around this like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Poehlman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Poehlman
- b112 2y agoI think the grant application provided a strong case of benefit from the fraud, likely why it succeeded. (I agree... fraud is fraud, and should be handled with criminal law)
- renewiltord 2y agoThis is a big problem with Belgian scientists. Their culture puts a lot of pressure on publishing and so on so they tend to falsify flashy results over just doing the science.
- rafram 2y agoThe authors were all employed by the University of Minnesota Medical School, and I think only one is Belgian. Not sure how much Belgian science culture has to do with it.
- renewiltord 2y agoPI is Belgian. That culture seeps through to the lab. It's a risk to science.
- hangonhn 2y agoThis heavily cited but then retracted paper also involved University of Minnesota: https://www.science.org/content/article/researchers-plan-retract-landmark-alzheimers-paper-containing-doctored-images https://www.science.org/content/article/researchers-plan-ret...
- f6v 2y agoI hope you realize there’re many different labs with different attitudes. I have one of my degrees from Ghent and what you describe never came up. AFAIK there wasn’t even a requirement to publish a paper for a PhD student to graduate anymore.
- JonChesterfield 2y agoThis statement holds up pretty well if you drop the country from it. Academia follows incentive structures just like everything else. Say you were a software engineer who was paid by how often you shipped code with a nice title but you didn't have to give people the binaries so noone ever ran them. That is, the difference between nice documentation about code that never quite existed and scruffy documentation about code that does really useful things is you get money for the first and fired for the second. Academia isn't quite that extreme but it does have incentives pointed in that direction.
- BenFranklin100 2y agoI have long maintained that the NIH should set aside 25% of its budget to fund spot checking of the research output of the remaining 75% of funded research. Even if this funding is only sufficient to review a handful of papers each year, it stands to have a transformative effect on the level of hype and p-hacking in many fields, and could nearly eliminate the rare cases of actual fraud. It would also improve the overall quality and reliability of the literature too.
- epgui 2y agoI think if we devoted only 1% to this it would be a huge improvement.
- ta988 2y agoAgreed, once you know what to look for and how to reproduce it. What do you do if you can't reproduce? That may mean the original research paper doesn't disclose everything (malicious or not, but malicious is REALLY frequent) or missed an important factor (sometimes doing a reaction in a slightly scratched glass container will change the outcome entirely). To come back to the malicious part, for many researchers, not publishing the exact way they do things is part of how they protect themselves from people reproducing their work. Some do it for money (they want to start a business from that research), others to avoid competition, others because they believe they own the publicly funded research...
- jltsiren 2y agoAnd sometimes you fail to reproduce something because you failed to do it properly. I don't know how often that happens in the field on in the lab, but it's extremely common on the computational side. Very often, the thing you are trying to reproduce isn't exactly the same that was published. You have to adapt the instructions to your specific case, which can easily go wrong. Or maybe you did a mistake in following the instructions. Or maybe you mixed the instructions for two different cases, because you didn't fully understand the subtleties of the topic. Or maybe you made a mistake in translating the provided scripts to your institute's computational environment.
- purpleblue 2y agoDoes this mean that stem cells cannoot become any type of cell? Certainly this should have been easy to test over the last 22 years?
- jjw1414 2y agoIt's important to distinguish between the types of stem cells when referring to pluripotency (i.e., the ability for a cell to differentiate into almost any cell type in the body). Embryonic stem cells are considered pluripotent. Adult stem cells are more correctly referred to as "multipotent" in that they can be coaxed into differentiating into other cell types, but typically into cell types close to their own lineage.
- Kalanos 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinya_Yamanaka#Yamanaka's_Nobel_Prize%E2%80%93winning_research_in_iPS_cells https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinya_Yamanaka#Yamanaka's_Nob...
- JackFr 2y agoDoesn't this paper make a fairly straightforward claim, which is either true or not? Hasn't there been any further research in the past 22 years to either effectively support or undermine the conclusions?
- fnord77 2y agoThere used to be so much hype about the potential for stem cells in medicine.
- throwitaway222 2y agoNothing should be publishable to the public until it is vetted.
- mkl 2y agoI'm guessing you consider "vetting" to be confirming as correct, rather than the vetting that referees already do? In that case, how would anybody know about it to vet it? As soon as it's communicated to other researchers to work on it's effectively public, as trying to keep all research secret like that would lead to enormous amounts of duplicated effort and slow scientific progress almost to a halt. Besides, some research (especially theoretical) takes years or decades to be confirmed and accepted, and some research is reporting extremely rare things that may be unconfirmable but will eventually, because they were published, be part of a larger theory.
- Kalanos 2y agoresearch is comprised of peer-reviewed observations. we attempt to triangulate truths
- neilv 2y agoI personally know two people who complained about fabrications, and both had to restart their careers, no longer pursuing research. I've heard stories from others, such as when a fabrication was known to students in a lab, and of some playing along with it anyway. We routinely hear on HN of fabrications discovered in journal publications. Exactly how bad is the problem? What's the prevalence, scale, and impact? What are the causes, and how does society address the problem?
- caddemon 2y agoStraight up fabrication is more common than we'd hope, but probably not systemically threatening. I'm much more concerned about how poorly replication goes even when authors are not malicious/generally following the "status quo" for methodology in their subfield.
- coolhand2120 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis In some fields more than half of the research is somehow not reproducible. Some is attributed to fraud, some incompetence. As a whole it makes science produced by these fields worse than a coin flip. Psychology is by far the worst culprit. We're at an inflection point in history where the scientific method dictates we shouldn't trust many fields that use the title "science".
- izacus 2y agoI don't think there's a single academic research lab out there that doesn't heavily doctor their data to make it publishable to some extent. The best of them "merely" cherrypick data. The pressures of academia make being honest an extremely bad career choice that can end up with your unemployment. Publish or perish. You can't publish if your results aren't good.
- gershy 2y agoIt would be so interesting if we came to a consensus that "cascading deletes" should apply to research papers. If a paper is retracted 20+ years later, and it has 4,500 references, those references should be retracted non-negotiably in cascading fashion. Perhaps such a practice could lead to better research by escalating the consequences of fraud.
- CoastalCoder 2y agoI suspect this would have some unintended consequences, not all good.
- thaumasiotes 2y agoLike what? Currently, there are no consequences when a paper is retracted. If we retracted more papers, what would the difference be?
- dyauspitr 2y agoLike very valid research being lost because they mention a retracted paper for some minor point that doesn’t really have a major impact on the final results.
- thaumasiotes 2y agoThat's already something that doesn't happen to blatantly invalid research which is retracted directly. What are you worried about?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jfengel 2y agoThat would certainly lead to people checking their references better. But a lot of references are just in passing, and don't materially affect the paper citing it. One would hope that if some work really did materially depend on a bogus paper, then they would discover the error sooner rather than later.
- __lbracket__ 2y ago[flagged]
- Harmohit 2y agoWe strongly need a "prestigious" journal devoted to publishing reproductions of other studies. Moreover, we need to change our perception of a good scientist. Doing novel research is awesome and great but reproducing other people's work is also important - it is a fundamental pillar of science. The problem is even more pronounced with more and more specialized and expensive equipment required for doing certain experiments.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- brightball 2y agoIs there a site that tracks retractions?
- mkl 2y agoYou mean like https://retractionwatch.com https://retractionwatch.com, the site that this very article is on? It's pretty popular on HN too: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=retractionwatch.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=retractionwatch.com
- brightball 2y agoExactly like that. Thank you.
- crakenzak 2y agoSo, can adult stem cells become any type of cell or not?
- Kalanos 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinya_Yamanaka#Yamanaka's_Nobel_Prize%E2%80%93winning_research_in_iPS_cells https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinya_Yamanaka#Yamanaka's_Nob...
- Kalanos 2y agoWARNING - title is misleading. this theory has been validated repeatedly, even inadvertently by its skeptics. it is the subject of a nobel prize: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinya_Yamanaka#Yamanaka's_Nobel_Prize%E2%80%93winning_research_in_iPS_cells https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinya_Yamanaka#Yamanaka's_Nob...