Thursday, June 14, 2007

Science in India

I was reading the latest Nature and saw this news article [Nature 447, 764 (14 June 2007) doi:10.1038/447764a; Published online 13 June 2007, "Indian scientists battle journal retraction", http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v447/n7146/full/447764a.html ] which says:
The arguments centre on a 2005 paper in the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC), which examined signalling pathways in the development of skin cancer (Rangaswami, H., Bulbule, A. & Kundu, G. C. J. Biol. Chem. 280, 19381–19392; 2005). It was authored by Gopal Kundu — 2004 winner of the India's highest honour in science, the Bhatnagar prize — and two colleagues at the National Centre for Cell Science (NCCS) in Pune. The journal retracted the paper in February 2007 after an investigation prompted by an anonymous email. The authors were told that the paper contained "data that was reproduced without citation and with different labelling" from a paper the same group had published in 2004 (Rangaswami, H., Bulbule, A. & Kundu, G. C. J. Biol. Chem. 279, 38921–38935; 2004). Journal editors claimed the errors amounted to "deliberate misrepresentation".
I don't know who is saying the truth? Very confused. As I flipped pages, I note the ENCODE [ http://computationalbiologynews.blogspot.com/2007/06/dejunking-genome.html ] consortium does not have any Indian or any Indian Institute as a member [ http://www.genome.gov/12513391 ].

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