Manipulated photos cast doubt on the cloning of embryos - La Vanguardia

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a storm in a petri dish . At least four images of research on human embryo cloning filed last week do not represent what the authors said.

labor director, Shoukhrat Mitalipov, University of Oregon Health and Science (U.S.), has recognized the anomaly, but has argued that it is not a scam but a error . However, the anomalous photos have cast doubt on the validity of research among the scientific community. The controversy concerns the journal Cell, one of the most prestigious scientific publications in the world. Cell took only three days to accept the publication of the job, an exceptionally short time in the world of research.

It’s been a (or a) anonymous user who has denounced the problem of images through pubpeer.com web, which are discussed and published scientific articles. The Internet, which has been identified as Peer 1 has discovered four pairs of images that the researchers presented as disti nct and are actually repeated images.

In two cases, are pictures of cell cultures mother who at first seem different because they’re cropped. In the other two, are graphical representations of the biological activity of the cells.

Speaking to the website of the journal Nature, has argued that Mitalipov error photo cell cultures in the legend explains what each image. Due to the haste with which they prepared the manuscript of the article, says Mitalipov, legends do not match the photos you refer.

As for the graphics of the biological activity of cells in one of them mistakenly put an image that did not fall. Since these graphs only appear in the Cell provides supplementary information on line, this error will be corrected, said the researcher.

In the other, there is no error or copying, as Mitalipov. What happened was that two different cell cultures showed almost identical biological activity. “The results are real, the cell lines are real, e verything is real,” said the lead researcher, who offers that other scientists have access to their crops. “The first thing we do is that others confirm our results.’re Not hiding these cell lines.”

Lack clarify why the journal Cell, a great advocate of scientific rigor, agreed to publish the research in just three days. According to data provided by the journal, April 30 Mitalipov received the manuscript, accepted May 3 publication, the May 15 broadcast it online and on June 6 as published in the print edition.

“Are you kidding? ‘Three days for an article on human cloning?” said a specialist in stem cells in the lab blog Paul Knoepfler, University of California, Davis (USA). Knoepfler himself argues that five experts have had to revise the manuscript line by line and frame by frame before publication.

Cell magazine replied that “given the great interest, importance and expectation of the conclusions of the article, given the prominence of scientific reviewers, we have no reason to doubt the completeness or the rigor of the review process. ” Cell adds that “the reviewers kindly agreed to prioritize the review of this article quickly” and recognizes “some minor errors committed by the authors to prepare images” that “do not believe that scientific discoveries affect the investigation in any way “.

Mitalipov has recognized that requested that the results be published quickly for presentation at the congress of the International Society for Stem Cell Research. But Congress will not take place until mid-June, so that reviewers could have more time to analyze the manuscript.

According to the conclusion that brings Martin Pera, University of Melbourne (Australia) , on the website of Nature, “Mitalipov explanations are plausible, but we’ll have to wait for the results of a thorough investigation.”