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News - Science 2013 - Review of Cloning Paper Prompts Questions
News - Science 2013 - Review of Cloning Paper Prompts Questions
authors, the editors, and the reviewers. Its been missed by three sets of people, LovellBadge says. Inconsistencies in the Mitalipov paper first surfaced on 22 May on PubPeer, a site for postpublication peer review where commenters can describe concerns about a paper and authors can respond. Although its hardly the rst time that anonymous voices on the Internet have proven critical, I dont think we should be relying on the crowd to be policing research papers, says Hany Farid, a computer scientist at Dartmouth College who is working to commercialize software that can detect duplicated images and other manipulations. Reviewers are already overburdened, and Farid believes its the journals that must take this on. At Science, which in 2004 and 2005 published the stem cell work by South Korean scientist Woo-Suk Hwang that turned out to be fraudulent, Executive Editor Monica Bradford says that she empathizes with her counterparts at Cell. I know what position theyre in. You go from this amazing high to Oh my God. You feel like, How did we make these mistakes? Bradford was at Science during the Hwang debacle and was interviewed at the time by the authors of this article about the journals response. The Hwang fraud, she says now, had a lasting impact. Science commissioned an external report led by Stanford University chemist John Brauman to examine what it might do differently in the future. It is essential to develop a process by which papers that have the likelihood of attracting attention are examined particularly closely for errors, misrepresentation, deception, or outright fraud, wrote the authors of the Brauman report, as it was called. After the Hwang case, which involved deliberate image manipulations, Science began checking all gures in papers at the revision stage and launched previously planned routine analysis of images using Photoshop software. My level of trust is way different than when I started this job, Bradford says. In the area of stem cells weve been very cautious, maybe too cautious. But other papers that later were dis-
BIOMEDICINE
recommendations for acceptance, with our focus on author service and because of the interest and importance of the work, we then decided to take special efforts to keep the delay between acceptance and publication to a minimum to reduce the likelihood that the ndings would come out rst in the popular press. That desire to snag the hottest of hot papers, and bask in their limelight, is often at odds with what it takes to fact-check them as thoroughly as possible. These things happen, says Robin Lovell-Badge, a stem cell researcher at the MRC National Institute for Medical Research in London, though he notes that time pressure raises the chance that mistakes will slip through. I think the fault lies with the combination of the
VOL 340 SCIENCE
1026
31 MAY 2013
www.sciencemag.org
Published by AAAS
CREDITS (TOP TO BOTTOM): COURTESY OF OREGON HEALTH & SCIENCE UNIVERSITY; M. TACHIBANA ET AL. CELL (ADVANCED ONLINE EDITION)
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credited have continued to slip through, such as work claiming that a virus called XMRV causes chronic fatigue syndrome. It was later retracted. Its like whack-a-mole. We keep trying, Bradford says, but we are far from perfect, so thats why I really have sympathy for Cell. The software that Science and some other journals use isnt designed to detect duplicated images, although it can make them easier to spot. Rather, it reveals various inappropriate modications made to an image to
U . S . I M M I G R AT I O N P O L I C Y
enhance it. Marcus declined to say whether Cell uses image analysis technology. In 2006, she expressed reluctance to cast blanket suspicions in a story in The New York Times about screening images. Why say, We trust you, but not in this one domain? And I dont favor saying, We dont trust you in any, Marcus told the Times reporter. Stem cell scientists expressed dismay that their eld is again under scrutiny. Some say that they are working hard to replicate Mitalipovs results. Even if the image dupli-
cations and mislabelings are quickly correctedas Cell and the authors say theyre working to doFarid warns that cases like this one can ripple well beyond the labs parsing the cells. Suddenly the public starts wondering what the hell were doing, he says. Its important and natural for science to move slowly, he says, perhaps especially so when the results seem remarkable. After all, Farid says, This isnt cable news.
JENNIFER COUZIN-FRANKEL AND GRETCHEN VOGEL
1027
Published by AAAS