Max Kozlov in Nature:
The prestigious Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) in Boston, Massachusetts, acknowledged yesterday that it would seek retractions for six papers and corrections for an additional 31 — some co-authored by DFCI chief executive Laurie Glimcher, chief operating officer William Hahn and several other prominent cancer researchers. The news came after scientific-image sleuth Sholto David posted his concerns about more than 50 manuscripts to a blog on 2 January. In the papers, published in a range of journals including Blood, Cell and Nature Immunology, David found Western blots — common tests for detecting proteins in biological samples — where bands seemed to be spliced and stretched. He also found images of mice duplicated across figures where they shouldn’t have been. (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its publisher, Springer Nature, and of other Nature-branded journals.)
…You recently left your 2,000th comment on PubPeer. What keeps you coming back?
I enjoy the ridiculous back and forth with the authors over e-mail. I care a lot about the animals [whose lives are taken to conduct these experiments] as well. The level of expectation we should have when we’re dealing with animals and high-profile institutions is that they’re super careful and that they get things right, so it’s frustrating when you see errors.
More here.