In February, days after the UK General Medical Council censured the unethical behavior of gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield, The Lancet retracted his notorious 1998 paper that first linked autism with the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine.

In August, less than a month after Virology Journal first published an opinion paper speculating that a biblical woman supposedly healed by Jesus actually had influenza, the journal's editor apologized for running the article, noting the authors did not provide “robust supporting data” for their hypothesis. Researchers from the Chinese University of Hong Kong had used symptoms described in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke to diagnose the mother-in-law of the apostle Simon Peter, who lay sick in bed before being miraculously “cured by our Lord Jesus Christ.”

After being found guilty of eight counts of scientific misconduct by Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Marc Hauser, a famed evolutionary psychologist, in August retracted a 2002 paper in Cognition reporting that cotton-top tamarins can learn to distinguish between different patterns of syllables just as human infants do. Problems were also found in two 2007 studies published in Science and the Proceedings of the Royal Society B that described the ability of various primate species to understand human gestures; the former was corrected with missing field notes, and the latter is under investigation.

In September, Savio Woo, a noted gene therapy researcher at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, retracted six papers published from 2005 to 2009 in the journals Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Human Gene Therapy, Molecular Therapy and the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Two of papers focused on using genetically engineered bacteria to target cancer, and the other four described a method for using bacteriophage enzymes to introduce therapeutic genes. Two postdocs in Woo's lab were fired for committing scientific misconduct, but an internal investigation cleared Woo of any wrongdoing.

After failing to reproduce findings by her former postdoc Zhihua Zou, Nobel laureate Linda Buck, a neuroscientist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (FHCRC) in Seattle, retracted two papers in September that described how the brain processes odor. Zou was first author of both retracted papers, published in Science in 2006 and in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA in 2005, as well as of a 2001 Nature paper that was retracted two years ago. The FHCRC is currently investigating whether Zou committed misconduct.

In October, Amy Wagers, a rising star at the Harvard Medical School's Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, retracted a January 2010 paper she coauthored in Nature purporting to show that age-related changes in blood stem cells can be influenced and even reversed by environmental factors. The retraction, which was not signed by the study's lead author, postdoc Shane Mayack, did not specify whether the paper was flawed because of a mistake or scientific misconduct, nor did it assign blame. The journal Blood also posted a “notice of concern” regarding a 2008 study led by Mayack.