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It may or may not be the most significant retraction of a scientific paper ever, but it certainly is in the ballpark.
The paper helped create and sustain the theory that amyloid protein buildups caused the symptoms of Alzheimer's Disease and was one of a number of apparently fraudulent papers written by Sylvain Lesn, a professor at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
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All the paper's authors agreed to retract, save Lesn, who has been under investigation for manipulating data.Quote:
Authors of a landmark Alzheimer's disease research paper published in Nature in 2006 have agreed to retract the study in response to allegations of image manipulation. University of Minnesota (UMN) Twin Cities neuroscientist Karen Ashe, the paper's senior author, acknowledged in a post on the journal discussion site PubPeer that the paper contains doctored images. The study has been cited nearly 2500 times, and would be the most cited paper ever to be retracted, according to Retraction Watch data.
"Although I had no knowledge of any image manipulations in the published paper until it was brought to my attention two years ago," Ashe wrote on PubPeer, "it is clear that several of the figures in Lesn et al. (2006) have been manipulated … for which I as the senior and corresponding author take ultimate responsibility."
After initially arguing the paper's problems could be addressed with a correction, Ashe said in another post last week that all of the authors had agreed to a retractionwith the exception of its first author, UMN neuro-scientist Sylvain Lesn, a protg of Ashe's who was the focus of a 2022 investigation by Science. A Nature spokesperson would not comment on the journal's plans.
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What makes this retraction so significant is that it has driven research into Alzheimer's treatments for nearly two decades, and treatment approaches based on its conclusions have failed to yield results.
If the hypothesis that amyloid protein buildups cause Alzheimer's symptoms is wrong, Lesn is responsible for perhaps billions of wasted research dollars and two decades of scientists following a false lead.
Via Hot Air.Quote:
If it turns out that the entirety of the work was fraudulent--and there appears to be some dispute--I can imagine no punishment harsh enough for Lesn. Alzheimer's is a horrible disease. Creating fraudulent research to enhance one's career when the stakes are so high is sociopathic.
There appear to be quite a number of sociopaths in the biological sciences if recent evidence is any guide, and very few checks and balances to control for this fact.
Several scientific papers have quietly been withdrawn recently.
