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Absolutely shameful. Nature editors should step down and issue a public apology immediately.
by lolgay5 13y ago
Absolutely shameful. Nature editors should step down and issue a public apology immediately.
- cantankerous 13y agoI'd tend to agree if we had some 3rd party verification of the inability to reproduce the results of the initial study. Right now it's somebody vs somebody else.
- prospero 13y agoThe article mentions several independent failures to reproduce.
- dllthomas 13y agoFurther, "We think it's reproducible" is an absurd defense. If it's reproducible, point to a reproduction. If it hasn't been reproduced, you don't have any clue if it's reproducible.
- ScottBurson 13y agoI agree that some caution seems advisable. What I would really like to see in such cases is not so much other people simply trying to reproduce the results, but an investigation into why one group got different results. Certainly it could be for a scientifically uninteresting reason -- ranging from outright fraud, to sloppy experimental technique causing contamination, to arithmetic errors in analyzing the results -- but it could also be for a scientifically interesting reason: perhaps they used cells from a different supplier that differ in some relevant property that nobody had previously noticed, for example. In short, there might be some interesting discovery to be had, buried underneath the discrepancy. I hate to see us overlook that possibility in our haste to get the "right" answer.
- duskwuff 13y agoEr... it's not like this just happened. The retraction being discussed was in 1998.