Schadenfreude, or my second favorite German word

A friend and I were recently discussing retractions, prompted in part by this article in the NYT. My friend had emailed the article to me, and I said that I’d already seen the retraction in Nature; and for that matter, that I always read the retractions in all journals whose table of contents shows up in my inbox, regardless of whether the paper is in my subfield of biology or not.

My friend was sort of appalled by this news. “You mean, you read retractions even if they’re not relevant to you?”

Sure, I said, perhaps a bit too enthusiastically.

First, I’ll admit straight off, Schadenfreude, particularly when this is a pal-reviewed journal.

Second, it’s nice to see the journal system working more or less as intended, despite the constant moans from journalists about how the peer-review system is broken, and nobody can get an interesting grant funded any longer, etc etc. Basically, a paper was found to be gravely in error, and the authors did the right thing (whether of their own volition or under institutional pressure (in the Buck paper instance, of their own volition, clearly)) and retracted it. Huzzah, more or less.

Third, and most importantly, the retraction statements are a little slice of scientific life. If I weren’t busy with my real job, I’d compile a list of all retraction statements in top journals in the last 10-20 years, and write a paper about what those retractions tell us about how science happens. Scientific journalists and historians, take note--I’m just giving these ideas away for free!

Sometimes a paper is retracted because nobody can reproduce the results, as appears to be the case with the Buck paper. This is scary because it suggests either major malfeasance on the part of one or more of the authors, or some sort of inexplicable lab-specific mystery. At any rate, it’s good when these papers get retracted so no one keeps trying the same things over and over.

Sometimes a paper is retracted because the authors realize they made a grave error. These accounts can be horrifying, or illuminating, and there can sometimes be a little shiver of there-but-for-the-grace-of-double-checking-my-solutions-go-I. And occasionally they are just plain funny (though presumably not for the authors), such as this one.

If you’re not a biologist, the rough translation of what these poor authors wrote is:
We found a bit of RNA that inhibited a gene called Hes1.
We did a look-up in GenBank and thought that meant Hes1, hairy-enhancer-of-split.
Turns out that gene names can be tricky.
There’s another gene, also abbreviated Hes1, meaning homolog of human ES1.
We wrote a whole paper about hairy-enhancer-of-split.
Guess what our RNA actually inhibits?
Sorry.


Fave German word: Fahrvergnugen, duh.