Stem-cell cloner acknowledges errors in groundbreaking paper

Shoukhrat Mitalipov says honest mistakes were made in a push to get cloning results published quickly.

Richard Clement/Reuters

A blockbuster paper that reported the creation of human stem cell lines via cloning has come under fire. An anonymous online commenter found four problems in the paper, which was published online 15 May in the journal Cell1.

The lead author of the Cell paper, Shoukhrat Mitalipov, told Nature that three were innocent mistakes made while assembling the data in what was to many in the field an unfathomable rush to publication: just three days from submission to acceptance and another 12 days to publication. The fourth, Mitalipov said, was not a problem at all.

The results are real, the cell lines are real, everything is real, says Mitalipov, a reproductive biology specialist at the Oregon Health and Science University in Beaverton.

Mitalipov said he had just returned from Europe on Wednesday and found himself swamped with emails and calls from editors at Cell, as well as from journalists. I just got home a couple hours ago. The editors, everyone was going crazy, he says.

Mitalipov says he consulted with first author Masahito Tachibana, who compiled the data for the paper, and confirmed that the paper contains simple errors. The scientists say they plan to talk with Cell today to discuss an erratum to the paper.

The problems were raised in a critique on PubPeer, a website where people can make anonymous comments about published papers.

The first problem was an image duplication. Figure 2F, which shows a cloned stem cell colony with typical morphology, is reproduced in the top left of Figure 6D where it is labelled as hESO-7 an embryonic stem-cell line derived not from cloning but from in vitro fertilization (IVF). Mitalipov says that the duplication was intentional but that the labelling was reversed. The top left panel in 6D should have been labelled hESO-NT1, indicating a cloned colony, as in Figure 2F. The top right figure should have been hESO-7.

He says that label reversal also explains another set of duplicated images the top right figure in 6D and the top right figure in Supplementary Figure S5. With the labels reversed, the identical images are both representing the hESO-7 cell line. Then everything falls into place, Mitalipov says.

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Stem-cell cloner acknowledges errors in groundbreaking paper