送交者: baldhawk 于 2006-3-20, 21:18:10:
哥伦比亚大学的造假风波
Science 17 March 2006:
Vol. 311. no. 5767, p. 1533
CHEMISTRY:
Columbia Lab Retracts Key Catalysis Papers
Robert F. Service
For synthetic chemists working to craft new molecules, a carbon atom surrounded by hydrogens can be as hard to handle as a greased pig. Undaunted, in recent years researchers have scrambled to devise schemes for plucking select hydrogens off carbon and replacing them with other atoms that offer an easier handhold. A pioneer of this subfield, known as C-H activation, Columbia University chemist Dalibor Sames has developed a wealth of advances along with his group members. But some of the lab's results are now in doubt.
Last week, the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS), a leading chemistry journal, printed corrections for three papers from the Sames lab. Two of the papers on C-H activation catalysts were fully retracted, and part of a third was withdrawn. In each case, the retractions say that the work was disavowed after Sames group members could not reproduce the results following the departure of Bengü Sezen, a former Sames group graduate student, who was the lead author of the two retracted papers and a co-author of the third. JACS Editor Peter Stang says the corrections came at the request of the Sames group. Sames did not reply to repeated phone and e-mail messages from Science.
Susan Brown, Columbia's director of public affairs, says the university has launched a review of the case, but that she cannot comment on its scope or timing. "It's our policy not to comment on reviews while they are ongoing, so the integrity of the process can be maintained," Brown says.
In an e-mail exchange, Sezen, who is now a Ph.D. candidate in the group of University of Heidelberg molecular biologist Elmar Schiebel, according to the group's Web site, says the retractions came as a surprise. "Professor Dalibor Sames or anyone else from Columbia University did not contact me regarding the retractions," she says. For the two retracted papers, Sezen named two other Sames group members who she says repeated her work while she was out of town. For the third paper, Sezen says her contribution was "limited to an intellectual one." But Kamil Godula, one of the Sames group members Sezen cited, says in an e-mail that the reactions worked only when Sezen was in town. The other Sames group member Sezen mentioned did not return messages from Science.
Justin Du Bois, a synthetic chemist at Stanford University in California, calls the retractions "a bit of a blow" to the subfield of C-H activation: "These were definitely important papers," he says. Sezen has at least five publications on C-H activation with Sames in addition to those corrected in JACS. Benjamin Lane, a former Sames group member now working as a chemist with the pharmaceutical company Biogen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says some of Sezen's work has been replicated and has been used by chemists in the pharmaceutical industry. Says Lane, "She has done some good things and made an impact on the field."