Dana-Farber retracts string of articles
Latest is 2006 paper co-authored by institute’s president
An ongoing investigation into data integrity at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has resulted in a string of retractions, the latest of which is a 2006 Science paper co-authored by institute president and CEO Laurie Glimcher.
The retraction notice, published in Science on Thursday, noted that the authors had become aware of discrepancies in key scientific images that led them to lose confidence in key figures in the study, although the study’s lead author opposed the retraction.
The issues with this paper, along with concerns with more than 50 other articles co-authored by four of DanaFarber’s top researchers, were highlighted in a January blog post by the scientific sleuth Sholto David. In some cases, David and others pointed out issues with papers in the last year on PubPeer, a website dedicated to research data issues, while other concerns had been posted to the site years ago. In most cases, comments had to do with concerns regarding duplicated images of experimental results. In some settings, this may affect the scientific conclusions that can be drawn from the data.
Dana-Farber, which is affiliated with Harvard Medical School, had already begun an inquiry into some of these concerns before David wrote about them on his blog post, DFCI’s research integrity officer Barrett Rollins told STAT in interviews earlier this year. In those interviews, Rollins emphasized that Dana-Farber was dedicated to correcting the scientific record and planned to issue corrections and retract articles as part of that process.
“The upcoming retraction in Science
‘With all these concerns, retraction is a good action.’
ELISABETH BIK, a scientific whistle-blower
was included in this process,” Dana-Farber told STAT earlier this week.
The institute appears to be fulfilling its promise. Over the last few weeks, Dana-Farber scientists retracted at least seven other articles including one from the Journal of Immunology and six from American Association for Cancer Research journals. Scientists have also issued corrections on several other papers included in the January blog post. In some of these cases, that was because researchers still had access to the original, raw data from the study, could correct the mistaken figure, and the correction did not alter the study’s conclusions. Retracted and corrected papers are flagged with a notice and a brief explanation.
“It is good to see this institution taking a harder stance against sloppy science and intentional data falsification that many institutes have done in the past. This is a good development, and I hope more institutions will follow their lead,” said Elisabeth Bik, a scientific whistle-blower who recently laid out evidence of data mishandling by a different Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital researcher, Khalid Shah.
It’s still undetermined if the Dana-Farber researchers committed intentional data fraud in these cases, Bik said. In reviewing the concerns highlighted in David’s January blog post, Bik said that many of the issues could easily be accidental errors introduced when creating scientific figures.
This most recent retraction in Science comes after an internal analysis began in February 2021. The paper is a prominent study that has had over 800 citations and is related to a field of research where Glimcher has made a substantial impact: understanding key molecular pathways central to endoplasmic reticulum stress. The endoplasmic reticulum, a large organelle, plays a central role in protein construction. In some settings, improperly folded proteins can accumulate in the endoplasmic reticulum, causing a stress response or even cell death. Glimcher’s work, which far eclipses this single study, was instrumental in elucidating some of these processes, which are important in multiple diseases including cancer, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes.
Specifically, this paper investigates the role of two proteins, BAX and BAK, in endoplasmic reticulum stress. Claudio Hetz, the lead author on the study and a cancer researcher at the Buck Institute and the University of Chile, has continued studying these proteins over the course of his career and recently published results on them in a very similar context in a preprint on BioRxiv. He had opposed the retraction of the Science paper because he “stands by the conclusions of the paper, partly based on additional experiments done in his lab,” Meagan Phelan, Science’s communications director, told STAT in an email.
In 2017, Hetz had responded to concerns raised about this paper in PubPeer. This response was removed from his website, but is accessible via an internet archive. In it, Hetz noted that image duplications in his work discovered on PubPeer were unintentional, and he provided some raw data from the study in question.
However, Bik said, the images provided in this response do not appear to be related to the duplications found in this study. “This is not the same blot, so why did they not provide the correct blot or state they lost that blot?” Bik said. “With all these concerns, retraction is a good action.”
Hetz did not respond to a request for comment.
The other authors, including Glimcher, who is one of the study’s corresponding authors, appear to agree with Bik’s assessment. Glimcher contacted Science to initiate the retraction. A Dana-Farber spokesperson told STAT that Hetz’s corrections were “insufficient to restore confidence in the reliability of the figures at issue.” The retraction notice published in Science also notes that the authors are no longer confident that the figures support the study’s conclusions.
‘It is good to see this institution taking a harder stance against sloppy science.’ ELISABETH BIK, scientific whistle-blower