Pressure on the scientific journals from those that have so courageously contributed to the B-P saga played out on this Web site appears to be bearing fruit. There is a long way to go but at least one retraction seems likely.
Appended below is an e-mail sent to this Web site. We have been asked to make the name anonymous because the person is, so we are told, a senior member at Manchester University and a close colleague of B-P and her long-time collaborator Professor Dr. Dr. Ralf Paus. It shows that one paper is now in the pipeline for retraction.
| From: Luis Montaner
<lmontaner@Wistar.org> To: redacted Sent: Sun, 2 January, 2011 15:30:24 Subject: Re: request status: LJB 85, 692-702. Dear, Upon request of the corresponding author, this paper is in process of retraction. Sincerely, Luis Montaner On Jan 2, 2011, at 6:59 AM, redacted wrote: Dear professor Montaner, What is the current status of the LJB paper mentioned in this website? http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101213/full/news.2010.671.html?s=news_rss Namely: Bulanova, E. et al. J. Leukoc. Biol. 85, 692-702 (2009). Yours sincerely, |
There will be no greater scientific contribution by B-P during her (in)famous career than the retraction of the fraudulent papers published by her group over the last dozen years that likely began with her own Habilitation and the 1999 FASEB paper, the latter being the subject of the withering Wiebauer analysis.
Let us be clear: retractions of the other manipulated papers must also come. Not silently through-the-back-door but openly with the same vainglorious fanfare that heralded the birth of the “Shooting-Star der Wissenshaft” - da lachen ja die Hühner!
Retracting the tainted papers quickly would be of great benefit. For once, the more vulnerable members of the scientific community will be the winners. It would help PhD students and post-doctoral scientists that have (and still will be) labored under the mis-conception that the B-P papers provided a faithful insight into how Mother Nature works. The ordinary tax-payer will also be the winner. After the contamination of the B-P work is removed from the literature there will be the wonderful prospect of potential therapies based on sound scientific work rather than fantasy based on image manipulation. Lives may be saved from the efforts of those that have attempted to rid the scientific record of the bonanza of scientific misconduct rushed into print by the B-P laboratory.
Let us be clear: It was Karin Wiebauer and the “Marco Berns” character, whosoever s/he might be, that began the cleansing of the record for the benefit of all. Any suggestion that the “victim” B-P was the prime mover in ridding the literature of her own laboratory’s decade of mischief is at best ill-informed and at worst a lie; a limp-wristed attempt at re-writing history. How does one explain the eye-sores in B-P’s Habilitation and her tour-de-force in the FASEB journal of 1999 that was finely dissected in these pages by Wiebauer?
Questions still need to be answered:
Was the reason that B-P so dramatically retracted another six papers because Wiebauer intimated in the preface to her analysis that further B-P and Paus papers would soon come under her gimlet eye? On this note, is B-P suppressing knowledge of further misconduct in her laboratory’s work?
Where does the prestigious Nature journal stand in all of this? Does it not feel that maintaining a truthful scientific record is important? Or will it sulk like a spoilt child smarting from the “internet smear campaign” that stole its thunder and without which the B-P laboratory’s scientific misconduct would, no doubt, have been swept-under-the-carpet?
What in heaven’s name has the DFG been up to in supporting the B-P “Alice-in-Wonderland” fantasy for a decade and then recently refunding it again? Does “D” in DFG in fact stand for “Disney”?
For answers to these pressing questions watch this space.
Martin Frost
Panama
04-01-2011
See also:
Where are the retractions?
Twelve and counting ... but which ones are they?
It was Elena and Vadim and the journal editors should have caught us
including full name
