NOBEL-WINNING BRAIN RESEARCHER RETRACTS TWO PAPERS
Baku, September 25 (AZERTAC). Nobel laureate Linda Buck has retracted two papers that describe how the mammal brain processes smells, after she and her colleagues lost confidence in their results. One paper was published in Science in 20061, the other in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in 2005.
Buck shared authorship of the retracted papers with a colleague, neuroscientist Zhihua Zou, whom she employed as a postdoc from 1997 to 2005.
Zou was first author of both retracted papers, as well as of a 2001 paper published in Nature3 that was retracted in 2008. According to a statement from Buck`s employers, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, that retraction prompted Buck and her colleagues to review the two later papers.
They "were unable to reproduce key findings in both papers", the statement says. "In addition, they found figures inconsistent with original data in the PNAS paper. Buck has therefore simultaneously retracted both the PNAS and Science paper."
Zou and Buck co-authored one further paper, published in Cell in 20054, on the neural links between odour, pheromones and reproduction. According to Buck, Zou`s contribution to that study was minimal and its findings are not in question.
Zou was a postdoc in Buck`s lab at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, from 1997, and then at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center from 2002.
In a notice published in Science today5, Buck says that Zou "declined to sign this retraction". He also stood behind the 2001 paper in Nature, even though that retraction noted that the authors had "lost confidence" in the paper`s findings after being unable to reproduce them6.
The paper in Science, which according to the ISI Web of Knowledge index has been cited 73 times, reported that two odours in combination stimulate a different set of neurons in the olfactory region of rats` brains to those stimulated by either odour individually.
The paper in PNAS, which the ISI Web of Knowledge says has been cited 61 times, mapped out how odour perception is organized in the brain. The journal has confirmed that a retraction will be published in its online early edition, but has provided no further information.
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