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Published online 12 October 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.998
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Protein-design papers challenged
Reanalysis does not find same results as key 2003 study.
Two papers published by protein engineer Homme Hellinga's lab at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, have been challenged in a new analysis of the data.
Last year, Hellinga retracted papers in Science1 and the Journal of Molecular Biology2 after John Richard, a physical chemist at the State University of New York at Buffalo, found that enzymes designed by Hellinga's lab did not work as reported (see 'Designer debacle'.
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Non-publication of negative results did not seem inappropriate?! I don't know how "extraordinarily" common that is in science, but certainly not common at all in my publications! Negative is not equivalent to insignificant. If a particular negative result is in conflict with a questionable positive result, then the foundation of the whole experiment is rather shaky.
It seems Hellinga's research does not live up to the expected standards. There appears to be not insignificant exaggeration of the magnitude and quality of the results. Whether this is considered scientific misconduct or not, the scientific community needs to think of a system to deal with this sort of occurrences, which I expect to see more in the future.
Jeff Smith has contacted Nature requesting that the editors clarify that of the three proteins he tested, one signaled reproducibly in an in vivo assay and the other two did not signal reproducibly in the same assay. In his opinion this is quite different from the statement that 'two consistently did not work.' Additionally, he says that what convinced him that the one design worked was that another lab independently reproduced his results in another organism.