Nobel Prize Winner Frances Arnold Retracts Paper, Here Is The Reaction By Bruce Y. Lee - Forbes (Jan 5, 2020)

[Patient4Life]

Nobel Prize Winner Frances Arnold Retracts Paper, Here Is The Reaction By Bruce Y. Lee - Forbes (Jan 5, 2020)

"After publication of the Report “Site-selective enzymatic C‒H amidation for synthesis of diverse lactams” (1), efforts to reproduce the work showed that the enzymes do not catalyze the reactions with the activities and selectivities claimed. Careful examination of the first author’s lab notebook then revealed missing contemporaneous entries and raw data for key experiments. The authors are therefore retracting the paper.”

Imagine, someone actually taking responsibility for a mistake in this age of finding- someone-else-to-blame-for-problems. For the most part, reactions on Twitter were positive. (Of course, reactions to anything are never 100% positive on Twitter). Here are a few examples:

 

[Patient4Life]

And...

Yes, Arnold apparently made a mistake. Yes, the first author was a graduate student and may have needed more supervision. But there is a big, big difference between an oversight and deliberate scientific misconduct. The latter is inexcusable and includes purposely fabricating data, purposely misrepresenting yourself or your work, claiming credit for something you didn’t do, and other types of lying. The former alone is, well, being human and actually being a real scientist.

“It should not be so difficult to retract a paper, and it should not be considered an act of courage to publicly admit it,” said Arnold by email to me. “We should just be able to do it and set the record straight. Of course, ideally we would catch problems before publication, but that is not always possible.”

 

[rvallee]

Problem is the system appears to require integrity from researchers to function. It's not able to deal with immoral researchers who will never admit they are wrong, consequences (for others) be damned. Or dealing with a system that enables failure for ideological purposes, arbitrarily changing the rules and standards to allow some garbage to float through the filters.

Self-regulation is not an appropriate method of quality control, this is basically the main reason why it's noted that progress happens one funeral at a time, it's not a coincidence, it's literally designed to fail (not wittingly, of course, but the way it is designed guarantees failure). It doesn't have to be this way, but it is currently this way by choice, and maybe out of some naiveté that no one in medicine could possibly be unethical, a laughably wrong position.

Because this here is the exception. Science requires failure, but it rewards cheating to a certain degree. It should basically be normal for papers to be retracted, since no process is foolproof and the peer-review system isn't even close to be that reliable.

 

[Snowdrop]

From the article:

In many academic settings, particularly in medical schools, your research career will live or die based on three things: how much grant funding you bring in to the institution, how much you publish in scientific journals, and who happens to like and not like you, not necessarily in that order. You don’t necessarily have to do all three to advance. For example, those who can’t really do the first two may focus on doing the third, which is otherwise called kissing up or playing politics. Note that none of these three are necessarily indications of how much you really innovate and contribute to science or society.