Nobel Prize-Winner Tallies Two More Retractions, Bringing Total To 13 (retractionwatch.com)
- Reference: 0175006867
- News link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/24/09/16/1433245/nobel-prize-winner-tallies-two-more-retractions-bringing-total-to-13
- Source link: https://retractionwatch.com/2024/09/13/nobel-prize-winner-tallies-two-more-retractions-bringing-total-to-13/
> A Nobel prize-winning genetics researcher has [1]retracted two more papers , bringing his total to 13. Gregg Semenza, a professor of genetic medicine and director of the vascular program at Johns Hopkins' Institute for Cell Engineering in Baltimore, [2]shared the 2019 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for "discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability." Since pseudonymous sleuth Claire Francis and others began using PubPeer to point out potential duplicated or manipulated images in Semenza's work in 2019, the researcher has retracted 12 papers. A previous retraction from 2011 for a paper co-authored with Naoki Mori -- who with 31 retractions sits at No. 25 on our leaderboard -- brings the total to 13.
[1] https://retractionwatch.com/2024/09/13/nobel-prize-winner-tallies-two-more-retractions-bringing-total-to-13/
[2] https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/10/08/1736213/nobel-prize-in-medicine-goes-to-3-scientists-for-discovering-how-cells-use-oxygen
Return a Nobel? (Score:2)
Has such a thing ever happened? I know it's been warranted before in the sciences (and most the peace prizes), but not done. Was his prize winning work found to be plagiarized? I could prolly make a list offhand without even having to google it of Nobel sciences awards (peace is too easy) that should be retracted because the person's work was either completely false or plagiarized / false attributed.
Re: (Score:2)
A number of Nobel prizes have been awarded for work that was later found to be wrong. Fraud was not necessarily involved, just poor science. The selection process for the prizes is also rather opaque and awards have been given or denied based on the biases of the selection committee rather than the quality of the work. The original concept of the prizes has also been lost. Nobel's intention was that the prizes would allow the give the recipients the financial independence to work on what they wanted rat
Return or taken back? (Score:2)
I can see the person voluntarily returning the award, or the group snatching it back (retracting their name, even if they never get anything else back).
It's sad to me you think you know of enough other people to create a list already. It's not something I can remember hearing about, though I don't focus on the Nobel's a ton.
They kind of feel like lots of other awards (Grammy, Oscar, etc), and without being an expert in the group too I don't think I can know why each person was or wasn't recognized. I'd al
Retract ALL papers he was (Score:1)
...involved with. Everything he ever touched is tainted. No need to review them piecemeal after count 13.
Re: (Score:2)
Science should always work on evidence. What does it mean to retract a paper? The work is still available (as it ought to be), except it has the word "Rectracted" stamped on it. I'd say the works for which we have no evidence of plagiarism should have the stamp "Note: This author has had 13 out of X number of published papers retracted for plagiarism". Then anyone reading the work can make their own decision whether to build on the findings or what.
Re: (Score:2)
This would probably have the added perk of disincentivizing putting too many names on a paper.
If you're reputation is at risk for having your name next to someone else's, you'll likely want to make sure you only get added to papers you're really involved in.
190 Citations (Score:2)
One of the papers that has been retracted has been cited 190 times in other cancer research. I'm not a researcher, so maybe this question is obvious:
If a paper has been retracted because of issues, how come all papers that build upon this research are not automatically retracted?
Re:190 Citations (Score:5, Informative)
Just because the paper is cited, does not mean that the new work depended on it. The paper being retracted does not even mean that the conclusions were wrong, only that there is a question of whether the data provided supports it. The problem is that researchers, not necessarily the primary author since he rarely does the actual work, become attached to an idea or conclusion and ignore the data that does not support it.
Re: (Score:2)
Especially since sometimes the reference is, "While BogusPaper93 concluded that the sky is 'plaid with a green tint on March 96th of this year', our work found otherwise. We do not feel this is relevant to our conclusions in this paper."
Re: (Score:2)
> One of the papers that has been retracted has been cited 190 times in other cancer research. I'm not a researcher, so maybe this question is obvious:
> If a paper has been retracted because of issues, how come all papers that build upon this research are not automatically retracted?
It would depend on whether the cited work would be considered meaningful to the results of the other study and publication. However, those other papers will likely need to be reviewed now to make that determination.
Re: (Score:2)
If the paper is wrong, does that invalidate the other papers that cited it? MAYBE, There's no simple way to tell.
And, of course, as another poster noted, retracting the paper doesn't mean that the claims are wrong, merely that the data doesn't sufficiently support them. (Also most papers make multiple claims, and some can be wrong without others being wrong.)
I don't see any easy way to solve this.
Re: (Score:2)
There's an easy way to solve it. Just as it is now.
Cited sources getting retracted doesn't have any bearing on a paper.* Published papers aren't Truth with a capital T, they're just fancy lab reports. They might be wrong for all sorts of perfectly ordinary reasons, and often are.
* Unless they're math papers, and the current one specifically assumes something erroneously proved in the cited one.
The system rewards cheating (Score:2)
You get tenure and grants based on how often you publish. Universities get prestige based on the published material of their professors. Entities, like the National Research Council of Canada, get their funding based on published results. It is in no one in the systems interest to actually check the results. No one is actually trying to make a finished product. We may complain about big American Pharmaceuticals but other than them and Bill Gates no one is actually trying very hard to make new medicine.
as long we been together / still dunno what u mean (Score:2)
Science fraud for purposes of prestige is just comical. The best case scenario for a scientist is that your work is cited in hundreds of other papers. And, if you score enough cites, you win the Nobel Prize! (I know that's not one of the actual criteria for winning, but it's probably a pretty good proxy.) But when your scientific paper gets passed around like a dutchie from coast to coast for decades, sooner or later one of the million professional dutchie inspectors involved is bound to notice that it'
Bad for Science (Score:2)
A philosophy of science prof on the Theories of Everything podcast recently described the gravitational wave community and the major impact to transparency and the scientific process that are caused by scarcity, competitiveness, and striving for a Nobel Prize.
The incentives turn out to be opposite of the intended ones.
That's fine - good try - but a good scientist would look at the result and end the program.
Re:Bad for Science (Score:4, Insightful)
> A philosophy of science prof on the Theories of Everything podcast recently described the gravitational wave community and the major impact to transparency and the scientific process that are caused by scarcity, competitiveness, and striving for a Nobel Prize.
> The incentives turn out to be opposite of the intended ones.
> That's fine - good try - but a good scientist would look at the result and end the program.
From a rational perspective, 100% this. From a human perspective, it is hard to shut down the project which feeds your kids and pays your mortgage. :)
Re: (Score:2)
Even without a Nobel prize there are still grants and university positions to compete over. Perhaps those systems pervert the incentives just as much (or more as they're more realistically attainable) as the Nobel prize, but I doubt getting rid of it would change much. Is this particularl scientist only under scrutiny because he won? If so, it did some good, even if the manner in which it was accomplished was unintended.
Re:Bad for Science (Score:4, Insightful)
> Even without a Nobel prize there are still grants and university positions to compete over. Perhaps those systems pervert the incentives just as much (or more as they're more realistically attainable) as the Nobel prize, but I doubt getting rid of it would change much. Is this particularl scientist only under scrutiny because he won? If so, it did some good, even if the manner in which it was accomplished was unintended.
I've often thought that some of this could be a natural result of the problem space getting larger while results are more difficult to obtain. The low-hanging fruit in physics, chemistry, biology, computer science, these are all long-since gone even if the movers and shakers who solved these problems are in some cases still alive currently.
What remains are mostly harder problems, but the system which rewards researchers is unchanged, so they engage in ever more ridiculous feats of one-up-manship and play looser and faster with the rules to out-compete their peers.
It is also a thing that more and more kids are pressed into Universities who really have no aptitude, preparation or personality for it, so those few positions are not only being fought over with more and more opaque and esoteric concepts, but also by a larger pool of people with more widely varying skills, capabilities and grasps of professional ethics.
A sticky situation for everybody.
Re: (Score:2)
You left out the problem of increasing specialization making it so that a smaller and smaller percentage of the evaluators understand what is being evaluated.
Re: (Score:2)
Too true. Another problem is that prominent scientists often have little to do with the work that is published under their names. The research is done by post-docs and graduate students with very little supervision. Once someone gets a big enough reputation, people are reluctant to challenge anything that the top dog has hisn name on. A quiet bad word from a big-name researcher to someone in research administration can scuttle a career.