Human Stem Cell Cloning Paper Contains Reused Images 38
An anonymous reader writes "A very recent paper in the prestigious biology journal Cell — 'Human Embryonic Stem Cells Derived by Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer' (openly accessible) — reports the novel creation of human embryonic stem cells from somatic nuclei. It has received massive media coverage and is surely penciled in as a strong candidate for scientific publication of the year. It does however have several examples of image reuse that have been pointed out by a submission on PubPeer. In the paper, it is recorded that the journal Cell accepted this paper just 4 days after submission. Perhaps, under the circumstances, the pre-publication peer review had to be a little hasty? At least at PubPeer, while conducting post publication review, we can take as long as necessary to make up for that lost time. 'In 2004 scientists led by Woo Suk Hwang of Seoul National University claimed to have produced human embryonic stem cells through the same technique used by the Oregon team. Their paper, published in Science, turned out to contain fabricated data. That came to light when scientists figured out that some of the images in the paper were copied or manipulated.''"
Re:Misleading headline (Score:5, Informative)
The reuse was in both articles. From PubPeer [pubpeer.com];
It does however have several examples of image reuse which might be of interest to PubPeer members and readers.
- Fig. 2F is a slightly cropped version of the cell microscopy image in Fig. 6D top left.
- Fig. 6D top right, the cell microscopy image is a slightly cropped version of supplementary Fig. s5, top right. The cells in 6D are labelled as "h-ESO-NT1 Ph" yet in figure s5 they are labelled to be "hESO-7". We understand the former to inherit caffeine-treated somatic nuclei whereas the latter are original stem cells.
Under pressure to assemble the figures for rapid publication, one can understand making a cut and paste figure assembly mistake. Nevertheless it should be noted that image cropping does take extra work.
- Figure S6 top centre and top right are the same image.
The second article was mentioned to draw parallels between image reuse and scientific misconduct.