Journal publisher retracted a study claiming poison oak could cure itching. Well done.

None of these plants will cure itching. 

Today I want to tell a positive story, where a science journal did the right thing.

I’ve written a lot over the years about bad science. A particular gripe of mine is when bogus scientific results, sometimes fraudulent, sometimes just sloppy, manage to sneak into the peer-reviewed scientific literature. This happens all too often, especially as the number of papers published each year has grown. These bad papers are then used by fraudsters and charlatans (and sometimes by innocent people who just don’t have the expertise to understand) to “prove” an unscientific claim.

Fortunately, a growing number of journals–the better ones, in general–are showing more concern than in the past, and taking actions (sometimes) to retract papers, even over the objections of the authors.

Before I get to the good news, a reminder about the most notorious scientific paper in recent memory: Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent study in The Lancet, published in 1998, which claimed to find a link between vaccines and autism. The Lancet, to its everlasting shame, failed to retract the article until 2010, despite an avalanche of evidence that began appearing in 2002. Ten of the original 13 authors even published their own “Retraction of an Interpretation” in 2004, but The Lancet still refused to retract unless all the authors agreed. Wakefield, who was already leading the anti-vaccine movement and is now adored by anti-vaxxers, refused.

That article has probably contributed indirectly to the deaths of thousands of people from vaccine-preventable infectious diseases. And given what we knew about it by 2002, The Lancet had no excuse for delaying retraction until 12 years after publication.

But I digress. Today I want to highlight an article whose retraction I called for a few years ago, one that the journal, Scientific Reports (published by Nature Publishing Group) did indeed retract, about 9 months later.

The paper I called out was a study that claimed that an extract of poison oak can be used to treat pain. If that sounds kind of ridiculous, that’s because it is. The actual paper sounded very science-y, as I pointed out in my original column. It was titled “Ultra-diluted Toxicodendron pubescens attenuates pro-inflammatory cytokines and ROS-mediated neuropathic pain in rats.”

Toxicodendron pubescens, in case you’re wondering, is poison oak. It’s not a tree and it has nothing to do with oaks–it’s a cousin of poison ivy, and both plants contain oils that can cause extreme itching and painful rashes on contact.

How on earth could poison oak be used to treat pain? Well, it can’t. The paper was actually about a homeopathic treatment. One of the core tenets of homeopathy is that “like cures like,” as long as you dilute it sufficiently. So the poison oak paper started with the premise that since poison oak causes pain and itching, you can also use it, after you dilute it, to treat pain and itching!

Homeopathy, as I’ve written before, is a highly implausible and easily disprovable set of beliefs about medicine. I use the word “belief” intentionally here, because homeopathy really has no claim to be a type of medicine, or even a hypothesis. It’s just a 200-year-old collection of beliefs that turned out, long ago, to be wrong.

If this sounds absurd, well, selling these products is a highly profitable business. For example, check out Boericke & Tafel’s Oral Ivy Liquid ($15 for a 1-ounce bottle on Amazon.com), a homeopathic product that is made from poison ivy, poison oak, and poison sumac. It claims to be “for the prevention and temporary relief of contact dermatitis associated with poison ivy, poison oak or poison sumac.” What’s in it? Poison oak, at very low levels. (Actually this product isn’t really diluted to homeopathic levels: the packaging says it contains 0.02g of poison oak in each drop. So it might actually cause an allergic reaction–I’d stay far away from this stuff.)

Back to the study: in the paper, the authors diluted a preparation of poison oak down to levels as low as 10-30, a common practice in homeopathy. The problem is, at that level of dilution, not even a single molecule of the original substance would remain. There’s simply no possibility that such a dilution could have any therapeutic benefit, but somehow they found an effect. Hmm.

A number of scientists wrote to the journal complaining that this result was extremely implausible, and that the experiments didn’t support the conclusions. To their credit, the journal editors took the complaints seriously and investigated. The retraction notice (read it here) pointed out another major problem as well: some of the figures were duplicates! Each figure is supposed to represent a different experiment, so duplication is a big problem, added to the fundamental implausibility of the study.

As is often the case when fraud is detected, the authors did not agree with the retraction.

When I wrote my column complaining about this study, I said the “the right thing to do would be to retract this paper, because its results are simply not valid. We'll see if that happens.” Well, about 9 months later, that’s exactly what happened.

A few years ago, I was in direct contact with the Editors-in-Chief at both Scientific Reports and PLoS ONE (about different papers than the one I’m discussing above), and they expressed genuine concern about fraudulent research, as well as a determination to do better at rooting it out. When journals do the right thing, we should applaud them. So here’s to Scientific Reports, who got it right this time.

Can you patent a fraudulent stem cell method? Yes!

Woo-Suk Hwang talks to reporters after
fraud is revealed. Photo: Reuters.

At first I thought the Patent Office was having a little fun. Was it an April Fools Day joke?  No, it's only February - and the U.S. Patent Office never kids around.

What did they do? They issued a patent to Korean scientist Woo-Suk Hwang for a method to create human embryonic stem cells by cloning.  The problem is, Hwang's "invention" was one of the most famous frauds of the past decade. His publications in 2004 and in 2005, in the journal Science, are labelled in bright red letters as retracted, and Science wrote its own separate notice explaining

"the authors of two papers published in Science (2, 3) have engaged in research misconduct and that the papers contain fabricated data."

Hwang's apparent triumph, becoming the first scientist to create human embryonic stem cells in the lab, made him a national hero in South Korea, for a short time.  He was soon appointed the director of a new stem cell research center. But things quickly unraveled beginning in November 2005, when Hwang's co-author Gerald Schatten, a stem cell researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, announced that he was ending his collaboration with Hwang over ethical concerns. By January, Hwang admitted to publishing fake data, but blamed his junior colleagues. Hwang was fired from Seoul National University (SNU) in 2007 and later convicted of bioethical violations and embezzlement. The official investigation by SNU found that Hwang's laboratory

"does not possess patient-specific stem cell lines or any scientific basis for claiming to have created one."

So you wouldn't think this would be approved for a patent, no?  Is the patent office paying any attention at all?  As reported by Andrew Pollack at the New York Times, the patent office does indeed know Hwang's history, and the patent is 

"definitely not an assertion by the U.S. government that everything he is claiming is accurate."

Well, I must say I'm relieved to hear that. Hwang himself admitted the data were fake! As I've written previously, the USPTO simply can't keep up with biotechnology, and the courts don't do any better. In this case, it's hard to imagine a more obvious example of a patent that should be denied: the papers were retracted, and the lead scientist lost his job after his own university concluded that the data was fabricated. And yet the patent office is standing by their decision. What are they thinking?

Controversial GMO corn study being retracted over the authors' objections

Retractions are always interesting. When a scientific paper is retracted, it usually means the authors have found a serious error, and that the major conclusions are no longer valid. The error can be unintentional, but in some high-profile cases, the story is far more interesting.

Reading about a retraction is, for a scientist, kind of like reading about a celebrity divorce. You know something went wrong, and it just might be a bit scandalous.

Last year, I wrote a detailed takedown ("Does genetically modified corn cause cancer?") of a very poorly done scientific study by Gilles-Eric Seralini and colleagues, in which they claimed that genetically modified corn, Roundup Ready® corn, caused cancer in rats.  The study had many egregious flaws, and I explained a few of them after reading the paper.  Hundreds of other scientists criticized the study at the time, and six French science academies took the unusual step of issuing a joint statement that rejected the study's conclusions.

Among the many flaws, the study used far too few rats to make statistically valid conclusions, and it contained self-contradictory results, such as data showing that rats fed the highest amount of GMO corn lived longer than rats fed the lowest amounts.  They also used a strain of rats that is highly prone to cancer.  Basically, it was unconvincing junk science.

Last week, Retraction Watch reported that this paper is being retracted. Particularly interesting was the news that the retraction is being made by the editors of the journal, not by Seralini and his co-authors, who are pretty darned upset about it. The journal conducted a lengthy investigation (much too lengthy, I might add - they should have been able to act more quickly) and decided that the many flaws in the paper mean that its major findings are not valid.  It is very unusual for editors to force a retraction like this, especially when fraud is not involved. The journal, Food and Chemical Toxicology, issued a statement that said:

"A more in-depth look at the raw data revealed that no definitive conclusions can be reached with this small sample size regarding the role of either NK603 [RoundupReady corn] or glyphosate [Roundup] in regards to overall mortality or tumor incidence. Given the known high incidence of tumors in the Sprague-Dawley rat, normal variability cannot be excluded as the cause of the higher mortality and incidence observed in the treated groups."

In other words, the editors concluded that Seralini's results were not supported by the data. Together with the rest of their statement, it seems pretty clear the editors are admitting that they screwed up during the peer review process, and they never should have published the article.

Seralini is very unhappy.  So unhappy, in fact, that he's threatening a lawsuit, as Forbes contributor Jon Entine reported.

But is this grounds for retraction? Lots of bad science gets published, often due to sloppy peer review, and most of these papers aren't retracted. In this case, it's pretty clear that the high-profile nature of the paper played a role.  Seralini is part of an anti-GMO organization, CRIIGEN, which has used this paper as justification for an aggressive campaign to ban GMO crops in Europe and elsewhere.

As bad as this study is, and as much as I'd like to see it retracted, I'm not sure that the justification given by the editors of Food and Chemical Toxicology is sufficient for retraction. Maybe it's because their statement is too carefully worded - wimpy, in fact. If they just came out and stated clearly that the study's conclusions are erroneous, then they would have a much better case for forcing the retraction. But they don't quite say that.

Here's what they are trying to say: "we screwed up and did a shoddy job in the peer review process, and now we realize that we never should have published this piece of dreck. Now we want to retract it so that no one will associate our journal with this bad science."

I know some very good scientists who have retracted papers merely because they couldn't replicate the results, and they grew worried that something was wrong. That's how science should work: rather than publish something erroneous, most scientists will admit their errors and retract their findings, or at least issue a correction. Obviously, Seralini has no plans to do this. His intent on publishing this paper was to make a political point, not a scientific one, and he distorted his findings in the paper itself, overstating his results with insufficient statistical evidence, and more so in statements to the press.

Retractions are indeed interesting. I'm still not sure the journal did the right thing to retract this paper, but I know they never should have published it in the first place.

(And for those who don't have time to look at the controversy after the original study: no, genetically modified corn does not cause cancer. Not even a little bit.)

Chronic fatigue syndrome researcher arrested

A brief update today: I've written twice before about the mistaken hypothesis that chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is caused by a virus known as XMRV. After many followup studies failed to replicate the original findings, other scientists finally determined conclusively that XMRV was a contaminant in the original cells used in the experiments. Lead researcher Judy Mikovits continued to claim she was right and that everyone else was wrong, despite the evidence, but in a surprising move less than two months ago, all the authors (including Mikovits) retracted the paper. (Actually it was a "partial retraction", but they did admit that XMRV was a contaminant which pretty much blows up the whole claim.) Science is now investigating whether some of the data in the paper was falsified, as Trine Tsouderos reported in the Chicago Tribune last month.

In a bizarre twist in this saga, Mikovitz was arrested and thrown in jail on Friday in California. Science magazine's Jon Cohen reported that her former employers, the Whittemore-Peterson Institute, which fired Mikovitz on September 29, filed felony charges against her in Nevada for stealing their laboratory data. It appears that WPI claims Mikovitz kept data about her experiments on her personal computer and has refused to give it back to WPI. Mikovitz' lawyer denied the charges.

I suspect this isn't the last we'll hear of this story. But the science is done: XMRV isn't the cause of CFS, and the search for a cause continues.