Science關於Scripps撤論文的報導節錄
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SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHING:
A Scientist's Nightmare: Software Problem Leads to Five Retractions
Greg Miller
Until recently, Geoffrey Chang's career was on a trajectory most
young scientists only dream about. In 1999, at the age of 28, the
protein crystallographer landed a faculty position at the prestigious
Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California. The next year, in
a ceremony at the White House, Chang received a Presidential Early
Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the country's highest honor
for young researchers. His lab generated a stream of high-profile
papers detailing the molecular structures of important proteins
embedded in cell membranes.
Then the dream turned into a nightmare. In September, Swiss
researchers published a paper in Nature that cast serious doubt on a
protein structure Chang's group had described in a 2001 Science paper.
When he investigated, Chang was horrified to discover that a
homemade data-analysis program had flipped two columns of data,
inverting the electron-density map from which his team had derived
the final protein structure. Unfortunately, his group had used the
program to analyze data for other proteins. As a result, on page
1875, Chang and his colleagues retract three Science papers and
report that two papers in other journals also contain erroneous
structures.
(刪除)
The most influential of Chang's retracted publications, other
researchers say, was the 2001 Science paper, which described the
structure of a protein called MsbA, isolated from the bacterium
Escherichia coli. MsbA belongs to a huge and ancient family of
molecules that use energy from adenosine triphosphate to transport
molecules across cell membranes. These so-called ABC transporters
perform many essential biological duties and are of great clinical
interest because of their roles in drug resistance. Some pump
antibiotics out of bacterial cells, for example; others clear
chemotherapy drugs from cancer cells. Chang's MsbA structure was
the first molecular portrait of an entire ABC transporter, and many
researchers saw it as a major contribution toward figuring out how
these crucial proteins do their jobs. That paper alone has been cited by
364 publications, according to Google Scholar.
Two subsequent papers, both now being retracted, describe the
structure of MsbA from other bacteria, Vibrio cholera (published in
Molecular Biology in 2003) and Salmonella typhimurium (published
in Science in 2005). The other retractions, a 2004 paper in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and a 2005 Science
paper, described EmrE, a different type of transporter protein.
(刪除)
On reading the Nature paper, Chang quickly traced the mix-up back to
the analysis program, which he says he inherited from another lab.
Locher suspects that Chang would have caught the mistake if he'd
taken more time to obtain a higher resolution structure. "I think he was
under immense pressure to get the first structure, and that's what made
him push the limits of his data," he says. Others suggest that Chang
might have caught the problem if he'd paid closer attention to
biochemical findings that didn't jibe well with the MsbA structure.
"When the first structure came out, we and others said, 'We really
don't quite believe this is right,'" says Higgins. "It was inconsistent
with a lot of things."
(刪除)
At Scripps, colleagues are standing behind the young researcher. "He's
doing some really beautiful work, and this is just an absolute disaster
that befell him," says Chang's department chair, Peter Wright. "I'm
quite convinced he'll come out of it, and he'll go on to do great
things." Chang meanwhile has been reanalyzing his original data and
expects to submit papers on the corrected structures soon. The new
structures "make a ton of sense" biologically, he says. "A lot of things
we couldn't figure out before are very clear."
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