Cloned stem-cell study under fire for sloppy errors

Once again, controversy is swirling around a paper describing human embryonic stem cells created by cloning.

Just over a week ago, researchers led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov of the Oregon National Primate Research Center in Beaverton announced their success in achieving the feat. It was the culmination of a quest that had frustrated the field since 2005, when a previous claim to have produced cloned human stem cells, made by a team led by Woo Suk Hwang of Seoul National University in South Korea, was shown to be fraudulent.

Now Mitalipov's work is itself under scrutiny, after anonymous scientists noted online that his paper contains duplicated and mislabelled images and plots. "This is really like dj vu all over again," says Arnold Kriegstein, a stem cell researcher at the University of California, San Francisco.

To be clear, no one is suggesting that Mitalipov's group is guilty of fraud. But given that the paper was accepted for publication by the journal Cell within four days of being submitted, the incident is drawing attention to the errors that can occur when scientists and journals race to get exciting research findings into print.

"In my view, this is a typical problem when you rush something into press so quickly," says Robin Lovell-Badge, a developmental biologist at the National Institute for Medical Research in London, UK.

Both Cell and the Oregon Health Sciences University (OHSU), which runs the primate centre, have issued statements describing the problems as "minor errors" made when the researchers put together the figures for the paper.

In one example, a photograph of cells growing in culture is used twice, once labelled as being a cloned cell line, the other time showing regular human embryonic stem cells isolated from an IVF embryo. The errors were first highlighted on a website called PubPeer, which provides anonymous peer discussion of papers after publication.

Additional photos and data are being sent to Cell to enable a correction to be made, says OHSU spokesperson Jim Newman: "Neither OHSU nor Cell editors believe these errors impact the scientific findings of the paper in any way. We also do not believe there was any wrongdoing."

Newman adds that even before the errors were spotted, Mitalipov had already started distributing his cell lines to other researchers so that they could verify his findings. The key will be whether genetic analysis confirms that the cells really are clones of the donor cells used in the experiments.

Simple duplications and mislabelling of images, while sloppy, do not usually result in findings of scientific misconduct. When New Scientist highlighted errors in papers from stem cell biologists at the University of Minnesota, the resulting inquiries did lead to a finding of misconduct, but only where the images seemed to have been altered to change their scientific meaning.

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Cloned stem-cell study under fire for sloppy errors