诺贝尔得主撤回Nature文章（转）
| 03月 11th, 2008 | by zhongtiannongmin |
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By Patricia Wen, Globe Staff
A 2004 Nobel Prize winner retracted a study yesterday that was
published in a prestigious science journal, after she learned of
discrepancies in data gathered by a junior colleague who worked in
her lab at Harvard Medical School.
According to the journal, Nature, Linda Buck and her co-authors have retracted a
2001 paper that mapped nerve connections between smell receptors in
the noses of mice and their brains. The paper was not part of the
body of research for which Buck and Richard Axel
of Columbia University shared the Nobel Prize in
medicine and physiology.
Buck, who left Harvard in 2002 for the Fred Hutchinson
Cancer Research Center in Seattle, said she and other
researchers from her current lab became suspicious when they were
unable to replicate the findings from the 2001 paper.
“Moreover, we have found inconsistencies between some of the
figures and data published in the paper and the original data,”
Buck and her co-authors wrote in the retraction published by Nature
yesterday. “We have therefore lost confidence in the reported
conclusions.”
According to the journal, researcher Zhihua Zou, who is now an assistant professor
at the University of Texas Medical Branch in
Galveston, was “solely responsible” for providing data and figures
for the 2001 paper. He did not return a phone call to his office
yesterday. A statement by the school said Zou agreed to join in the
retraction, but was disappointed. The school said that Zou defends
his research and is confident in the published results.
Buck could not be reached for comment, but a statement from her
Seattle lab referred all questions to Harvard Medical School,
“since the research in question was conducted seven years ago” at
that institution.
A spokesman for Harvard Medical School, David
Cameron, said the school has formed an internal committee
to review the 2001 paper. If the panel finds sufficient cause to
believe “scientific misconduct” occurred, the school will begin an
official investigation into the research. Cameron said he does not
know the timetable for this investigation.
According to Nature, Buck has asked the Seattle cancer center to
review two later publications in which Zou was the lead author.
Buck was very distraught about the inability to replicate the
findings and the need to retract the paper, said Catherine
Dulac, one of Buck’s former Harvard colleagues who spoke
to her at a conference about a week ago. Dulac, a Harvard professor
of molecular and celullar biology, said that when she met Buck at
the conference and asked how she was doing, Buck replied,
“Horrible.”
Dulac said many top researchers have to rely on and trust the
data provided by junior collaborators.
“This is our worst nightmare,” she said.
Dulac said that this retracted paper, however, should not take
away from Buck’s outstanding work. The Nobel was largely based on a
pivotal paper she co-authored in 1991 with Axel, which showed how
humans recognize thousands of individual scents and how these
smells can trigger distinct memories of the past.
Buck, 61, is a native of Seattle and received her bachelor’s
degrees in 1975 in psychology and microbiology from the
University of Washington in Seattle, according to
a biographical sketch on the Nobel Prize website. She earned her
Ph.D in immunology in 1980 at the University of Texas
Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. She spent the next
two decades conducting research at labs at Columbia and Harvard,
before returning to Seattle.