Seeing Double: Errors In Stem-Cell Cloning Paper Raise Doubts

Biologist Shoukhrat Mitalipov stands outside the monkey enclosure at his lab in Oregon. He says the mistakes in his recent paper were caused by the rush to publish quickly.

Biologist Shoukhrat Mitalipov stands outside the monkey enclosure at his lab in Oregon. He says the mistakes in his recent paper were caused by the rush to publish quickly.

This feels a bit like deja vu.

Scientists report a major breakthrough in human stem-cell research. And then just a week later, the findings come under fire.

Biologists at Oregon Health & Science University said May 15 that they had cloned human embryos from a person's skin cell.

Researchers have been trying to do this for more than a decade. Many scientists in the field were heralding the announcement as discovery of the Holy Grail because now they could make personalized stem cells for treating an array of diseases.

But several images in the paper aren't quite right, a commenter said Wednesday on the website PubPeer.

Specifically, three pairs of photos are duplicated and then labeled as different results. There are also some questions about data demonstrating that the scientists had created stem cells.

The lead author on the study, Shoukhrat Mitalipov, staunchly defended his findings Thursday to the journal Nature. "The results are real, the cell lines are real, everything is real," he said.

Mitalipov claims the problems in the paper were innocent mistakes made because he rushed to publish the findings in the journal Cell.

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Seeing Double: Errors In Stem-Cell Cloning Paper Raise Doubts