BIOL 210 Lecture Notes - Lecture 22: Embryonic Stem Cell, Snuppy, David Baltimore
11/23/2017
Lecture 22
• Famous retractions
o Doing ecstasy once causes parkinsons…
▪ Paper from John Hopkins claiming that if you take Ecstasy ONCE you get
symptoms like parkinon’s disease
▪ Realized later that they gave the animals the wrong drug
• Thought it was ecstasy but actually it was methamphetamine
▪ Even in the retraction statement, the authors still believed that ecstasy
causes Parkinson
▪ It is the combination of the retraction + insisting that ecstasy still causes
Parkinson’s that led to the downfall of his rep.
o Half of the offspring in a troop are from males outside the troop..
▪ Found to not be true
▪ When paper was retracted, this didn’t have an implication on the career of
the person that made the mistake
▪ Gagneaux wrote a paper on how it is easy to make a mistake looking at the
DNA in hair and was pardoned by the scientific community
• Papers that are retracted are cited more often than normal papers..
o Retracted papers were cited 10 times on avg. each!!
o If no one cares about a paper, it is less likely that it will be retracted!
o More people looked at the retracted papers
o Retracted papers were in higher impact factor journals!!!
▪ In journals where no one cares, no one scrutinizes the papers
• Thereza Imanishi-kari
o 1985 paper comes out suggesting new way to stimulate immunity; co-author is
Nobel prize winner David Baltimore
o The initial suspicion of fraud comes from a whistle blower!
▪ In this case it was her post doc student
▪ Student claimed that she didn’t think Theresa did what she said she did
▪ Discrepancies between data in lab notebooks and in paper
▪ However, this was never able to be proven!
o Two employees at the Office of Scientific Integrity and one congressman pursue
enquiry and conclude on fraud. Baltimore resigns as Rockefeller U president
▪ Analyzed the notebook by looking at the ink and seeing how old it is to
see if she added data after she was accused of fraud
▪ In this case Thereza is guilty before being proved innocent and her
supervisor Baltimore had to resign because he was defending her
▪ Finally the enquiry in 1996 concludes that there was no fraud
• Roger Poisson
o Tested whether the outcome of treatment for breast-cancer was the same whether
you simply removed the tumor or the entire breast and lymph nodes
o Poisson enrolled ineligible patients!!!!
▪ If you enroll a women who’s 29 or 51 but when you put it in the data you
change it to 29 to 30 or change 51 to 50
▪ Where it become really bad is when you fake the date of diagnosis
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