91av

Update 16 March 2010: Jizhen Lin’s has been retracted by the American Physiological Society. It states: “aspects of the data presented have now been shown to be unreliable”. The University of Minnesota’s investigation into Lin’s research continues.

Update 11 November 2009: The University of Minnesota’s inquiry into the work of Jizhen Lin has proceeded to a formal investigation. However, the university has decided not to launch an inquiry into a concern with a separate paper, by authors including Yuehua Jiang and Catherine Verfaillie, which is described in the box “An unexplained resemblance“, below.

LIGHTNING never strikes again in the same place? Tell that to the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, which has launched yet another inquiry into research at its after 91av raised further concerns about papers that seem to contain duplicated and manipulated images.

, and a finding of misconduct against , formerly a PhD student at Minnesota. In October 2008, an expert panel ruled that Reyes falsified images in (vol 98, p 2615), describing a versatile type of stem cell from human bone marrow (91av, 11 October 2008, p 8).

Reyes, who is now at the University of Washington in Seattle, protested her innocence, blaming “inexperience, poor training and lack of clear standards about digital image handling”. She also argued that she followed standards for image processing that were common at Minnesota at the time. So 91av decided to look more closely at other papers co-authored by the Stem Cell Institute’s former director, , in whose lab Reyes worked.

In doing so, we stumbled across problems in the lab of another researcher affiliated with the Stem Cell Institute, , who published in December 2008 (American Journal of Physiology – Cell Physiology, ).

This paper explores how stem cells from the inner ears of lab mice can give rise to neurons and specialised “hair cells” that detect sound waves. The question is whether images of gels documenting the activity of various genes have been spliced together, and whether some bands on the gels have been duplicated. In one case, an entire gel appears to have been used twice to describe results for different genes (see images).

After combing through more of Lin’s research, we found possible duplications within images in six further papers, published between 2001 and 2007. None involved Verfaillie.

In April, 91av told the university of our concerns about Lin’s work. The university took the decision to begin an inquiry in mid-July, but it has not clarified which papers will be covered. Lin declined to comment on the concerns about his work while the inquiry is under way.

Other stem cell biologists are disturbed that so many problems have been found in papers from a single institution. “It’s pretty discouraging,” says of the University of California, San Francisco. Given the pressure on scientists in such competitive fields, he wonders what might emerge at other research centres if their publications were subjected to similarly close scrutiny. “It raises serious issues about how widespread this could be,” he says.

“What might emerge at other research centres if their publications were given similar scrutiny?”