An American scientist who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry just retracted their latest paper on Monday. Professor Arnold had shared the prize with George P Smith and Gregory Winter for their 2018 research on enzymes, reports the BBC (in an article shared by omfglearntoplay):
It has been retracted because the results were not reproducible, and the authors found data missing from a lab notebook… “It is painful to admit, but important to do so. I apologize to all. I was a bit busy when this was submitted, and did not do my job well.”
That same day, Science published a note outlining why it would be retracting the paper, which Professor Arnold co-authored with Inha Cho and Zhi-Jun Jia. “Efforts to reproduce the work showed that the enzymes do not catalyze the reactions with the activities and selectivities claimed. Careful examination of the first author’s lab notebook then revealed missing contemporaneous entries and raw data for key experiments. The authors are therefore retracting the paper.”
Professor Arnold is being applauded for acknowledging the mistake — and has argued that science suffers when there’s pressures not to:
“It should not be so difficult to retract a paper, and it should not be considered an act of courage to publicly admit it… We should just be able to do it and set the record straight… The very quick and widespread response to my tweets shows how strong the fear of doing the right thing is (especially among junior scientists). However, the response also shows that taking responsibility is still appreciated by most people.”
Those remarks come from a Forbes article by the Professor of Health Policy and Management at the City University of New York. His own thoughts?
What the heck happened with scientific research? Exploring, making and admitting mistakes should be part of the scientific process. Yet, Arnold’s retraction and admission garnered such attention because it is a rare thing to do these days…
If you need courage to do what should be a routine part of science, then Houston and every other part of the country, we’ve got a problem. And this is a big, big problem for science and eventually our society… [T]ruly advancing science requires knowing about the things that didn’t work out and all the mistakes that happened. These shouldn’t stay hidden deep within the recesses of laboratories and someone’s notebook.
of this story at Slashdot.
Source:: Slashdot