Panic at Cold Springs Harbor

Imagine you're a distinguished US laboratory dating back to 1890, and has hosted work that has gone on to win the Nobel Prize. You'd rather not mention the dodgy work in Eugenics that went on from 1910 to 1940M, stopping because the Carnegie Institution came and had a look and noticed it was all utter rubbish.

So, what do you do when your former Nobel Prize winning chancellor opens his mouth and takes you right back to those discredited days of the early 1930s?

Yep, Watson's been suspended. .

A fraud who didn't need to lie

Woo Suk Hwang, the South Korean who went from national scientific hero to disgrace, is now well known as a fraud.

But it now appears he may have unknowingly made a scientific breakthrough - and one that is more important than those he claimed to have achieved.

A team largely based in Boston/Cambridge MA led by George Daley (Children's Hospital Boston /Harvard) have looked closely at his data and found that, indeed, he did not create stem cells by somatic cell nuclear transfer (i.e. cloning)

The distinct genetic fingerprint of the stem cells produced suggests they may be the first in the world to be extracted from embryos produced by parthenogenesis ("virgin birth")

Reports all over the media, including at Nature, the BBC and the NY Times.

The paper itself is in the journal Cell Stem Cell.

More misconduct in science

While following the Tour de France this year, I did notice one or two cycling supporters questioning whether the high level of scandal was because cycling was particularly drug-ridden, or because most sports had become particularly drug-ridden but cycling was finding more of theirs, so didn't deserve the reputation for being particularly dirty.

I sometimes fear that science could get the same reputation in some sections of the media, particularly since there are people out there who would like to discredit science in general so they can get their way.

So seeing another retraction of an article in Science last week was disappointing. This time the guilty party is is a former University of Missouri-Columbia researcher, Kaushik Deb, who has been found by his employers of intentionally falsifying and fabricating digital images in a paper. Deb has since disappeared from view, leaving his co-authors to apologise profusely for trusting him in the first place.

I have to ask myself if I could be similarly fooled given a sufficiently irresponsible co-author, and I have to admit the answer would probably be yes - if they presented data coming from a technique outside my experience, I may well not be able to tell if the data was genuine or had been fudged. Am I expected to demand the raw data? Would I be able to tell that this was the original raw data, and hadn't been reverse engineered?