For the second time in two years, a Nobel laureate, Linda B. Buck, has had to retract a published paper. Her two newest retractions, as well as one in 2008, all involved studies of the sense of smell in mice and all involved the same first author, Zhihua Zou, a postdoctoral researcher who carried out the experiments as part of Ms. Buck’s group at Harvard Medical School. Ms. Buck is now at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, in Seattle, and the retracted material does not involve findings for which she shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
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7 Responses to Linda Buck, Nobel Laureate, Withdraws 2 Additional Papers
sibusiso - September 24, 2010 at 4:24 pm
One wonders how many of the papers among the ones for which she won the prize have yet to be retracted. This is Harvard University.
djr46074 - September 24, 2010 at 9:41 pm
These retractions appear to be the result of inappropriate behavior by a single postdoc. In many laboratories, this type of inappropriate behavior is difficult to prevent and detect. Buck should be applauded for having the courage to retract these papers. It may have been easier and less embarrassing to simply ignore the issue.
raymond_j_ritchie - September 25, 2010 at 7:06 am
This sounds like another story of a senior bullfrog having a laboratory with 49 post-docs and 95 PhD students. Does she know them all by name? How many does she have this week? Proper oversight becomes impossible. It is asking for trouble and the trouble is inevitable and thoroughly predictable.Sounds quaint and old-fashioned but do not put your name on anything that you have not done yourself or actually witnessed being done in the lab.
jffoster - September 25, 2010 at 7:13 am
Soooo, When the cat’s away, the lab Post Docs will play with the mice?”
richardtaborgreene - September 25, 2010 at 9:30 pm
I was reading old Royal Society and Societe Philosophe papers from 200 years ago and today we would have to retract all of them for improper method and badly formed research questions, not to mention pre-Fisher attempts at data and analysis. The Ph.D. is best when it is a switch, from loyalty to family, nation, etc. to loyalty to TRUTH, using the best methods for truth, not the best methods for getting one’s results published in unread journals. One cannot condone the world’s turn to American meretricious publishing measures nor can one condone European let’s-worship-the-senior-professor-and-do-whatever-he-says systems, nor can one condone East Asian no-lit-review let’s-publish-correlations-first-then-find-some-half-baked-research-question-to-attach-later systems. All 3 systems are junk and unreadable (at least in my old age). TRUTH if pursued tends to shine through over periods of a decade and a half or so, but it is VERY hard to distinguish over short periods of rat research. My sympathies with this professor and the grad students, totally un-socialized to truth and science, she has to manage. It is much like managing Harvard-generated MBAs, not a single one is after anything but personal enrichment, so so so difficult to get good out of such self-interested machines.
cu_alum - September 27, 2010 at 2:58 pm
In response to #1 and #3:Buck’s Nobel Prize was for work she did in the 1980s when she worked in Richard Axel’s lab at Columbia, first as a postdoc and then as a research scientist. She didn’t have her own lab at the time. She likewise didn’t have her own postdocs or grad students (or at least not large numbers of them).
teresafr - September 27, 2010 at 5:56 pm
As a scientist, I do not condone in any way the dissemination of results that may be tainted or twisted to fit hypotheses. However, I do understand what may lead a young post doc to do it. In this horrific economy the competition in Science is phenomenal. Grants with great scores, great percentiles, and therefore most likely – include innovative and high significance, high priority proposals, are not being funded. There is little money to spare and it is NOT going to young investigators who may have few publications and little support – the money is going to the ‘sure bet’ – the highly seasoned investigator with 400 publications and millions of dollars in grants. where is the fairness in that? why did we go to school for most of our lives, study intensely in an area that we feel passionate about? the more pubs, the more chances of being funded. this is a sad sad world with the priorities all screwed up and the young people of today – scientists and others, are bearing the rotten meager fruit handed down to them by their elders. with this fruit – they are trying to survive.