Self-proclaimed iPS pioneer admits lies but maintains pathbreaking procedure

David Cyranoski in the Nature newsblog:

The story keeps getting odder for Hisashi Moriguchi, the visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo who last week claimed a clinical breakthrough in using iPS cells. Moriguchi said he injected cells derived from iPS cells into six heart failure patients, with positive therapeutic effect. But the story was so full of holes and his scientific publication were so problematic that it was hard to believe he had done any of it. In a press conference in New York on Saturday, Moriguchi admitted that for five of the six patients he was discussing “planned” procedures rather than ones that had actually taken place. “I guess I got a little bit high. That was wrong,” he explained. “I admit that I lied.”

Read the complete story here.....

The Paris Review Interview with Octavio Paz

Wikimedia

The Paris Review interviewed the poet Octavio Paz:

Though small in stature and well into his seventies, Octavio Paz, with his piercing eyes, gives the impression of being a much younger man. In his poetry and his prose works, which are both erudite and intensely political, he recurrently takes up such themes as the experience of Mexican history, especially as seen through its Indian past, and the overcoming of profound human loneliness through erotic love. Paz has long been considered, along with César Vallejo and Pablo Neruda, to be one of the great South American poets of the twentieth century; three days after this interview, which was conducted on Columbus Day 1990, he joined Neruda among the ranks of Nobel laureates in literature. Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City, the son of a lawyer and the grandson of a novelist. Both figures were important to the development of the young poet: he learned the value of social causes from his father, who served as counsel for the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, and was introduced to the world of letters by his grandfather. As a boy, Paz was allowed to roam freely through his grandfather’s expansive library, an experience that afforded him invaluable exposure to Spanish and Latin American literature. He studied literature at the University of Mexico, but moved on before earning a degree.

In this interview, Octavio Paz talks about how thinking about morality and politics affected him:

My political and intellectual beliefs were kindled by the idea of fraternity. We all talked a lot about it. For instance, the novels of André Malraux, which we all read, depicted the search for fraternity through revolutionary action. My Spanish experience did not strengthen my political beliefs, but it did give an unexpected twist to my idea of fraternity. One day—Stephen Spender was with me and might remember this episode—we went to the front in Madrid, which was in the university city. It was a battlefield. Sometimes in the same building the Loyalists would only be separated from the Fascists by a single wall. We could hear the soldiers on the other side talking. It was a strange feeling: those people facing me—I couldn't see them but only hear their voices—were my enemies. But they had human voices, like my own. They were like me.

Read the complete interview here.....

Things Left Unsaid

Igbo garment (Nigeria 1950-1970)
via Ellen in Michigan - Wikimedia

Chimamanda Adichie reviews There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra by Chinua Achebe in the London Review of Books:

Nigeria, at independence from British rule in 1960, was called the Giant of Africa. With a large population, an educated elite and many natural resources, especially oil, Nigeria was supposed to fly the flag of democratic success. It did not, and it is clear now, in retrospect, that it could not possibly have done so. Colonial rule, as a government model, was closer to a dictatorship than a democracy. Nigeria was a young nation, created in 1914, as Nigerian children would learn in history class in the endlessly repeated sentence: ‘Lord Frederick Lugard amalgamated the northern and southern protectorates to form one country and his wife gave it the name nigeria.’

It is debatable whether, at independence, Nigeria was a nation at all. The amalgamation was an economic policy; the British colonial government needed to subsidise the poorer North with income from the resource-rich South. With its feudal system of emirs, beautiful walled cities, and centralised power systems, the North was familiar to Lord Lugard – not unlike the Sudan, where he had previously worked. In the South, the religions were more diverse, the power systems more diffuse. Lugard, a theorist of imperial rule, believed in the preservation of native cultures as long as they fitted his theories of what native cultures should be. In the North, the missionaries and their Western education were discouraged, to prevent what Lugard called their ‘corrupting influence’ on Islamic schools. Western education thrived in the South. The regions had different interests, saw each other as competitors, and became autonomous at different times; there was no common centre. A nation is, after all, merely an idea. Colonial policy did not succeed in propagating the idea of a nation: indeed, colonial policy did not try to. In the North colonialism entrenched the old elite; in the South it created a new elite, the Western-educated. This small group would form the core of the nationalist movement in the 1950s, agitating for independence. They tried to establish the idea of ‘nation’ and ‘tribe’ as binary, in opposition to each other, a strategy they believed was important for the exercise of nation-building. But the politicisation of ethnicity had already gone too far.

Read more here.....

God wielded the buzzer

Christian Lorentzen writes in the London Review of Books:

David Foster Wallace
Wikimedia Pabouk

David Foster Wallace’s parents, Sally and Jim, were the sort of couple who read each other Ulysses in bed while holding hands. Jim read David and his younger sister AmyMoby-Dick as a bedtime story. It wasn’t inevitable that the boy would grow up to write an epic novel, but it wasn’t accidental. Jim was a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois; Sally taught English at a community college, and at home with her children was what her son in his fiction would term a ‘militant grammarian’, constantly monitoring their usage and syntax, turning it into a game. David was a creature of university campuses: Champaign-Urbana as a child; Amherst for college; Tucson for his MFA at the University of Arizona; back to Amherst to teach fiction writing; Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a stint as a graduate student in philosophy at Harvard, then teaching fiction at Emerson College in Boston; Syracuse, where he went to be close to the poet Mary Karr; Bloomington-Normal for his first secure position at Illinois State; and finally Pomona College, in Claremont, California, where he killed himself in 2008 at the age of 46. He emerged as a writer from a university-based avant-garde tradition, but was adopted at an early stage by the New York mainstream; he was sought after by editors of glossy magazines and touted in the media as a ‘voice of his generation’ from his early thirties onwards, photographed with his long hair and bandana and two big dogs. This combination of academic prestige and big city popularity is fairly rare, and it’s one reason Wallace’s canonisation in the US has proceeded so rapidly. Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story (the line is Christina Stead’s but Wallace used it twice in his fiction and once in an essay, in reverse; Stead seems to have been misremembering or paraphrasing a line of Virginia Woolf’s about Henry James) grew out of D.T. Max’s post-mortem profile of Wallace for the New Yorker, and is very much the version of his life as seen from Times Square.

Read more here..... 

Austerity Budget Includes Increased Spending for Science and Education

Expanding bubble in space
NASA

Rigid and naive approaches to reducing government budget deficits usually involve significant cuts in all areas of spending. It is therefore quite impressive that the new French austerity budget under President François Hollande has a more measured and thoughtful approach.  As reported by Barbara Casassus in Nature News, the French government is targeting a reduction in spending of roughly 3% in most areas, but not in the area of higher education and research:

French Higher Education and Research Minister Geneviève Fioraso had something to smile about as she briefed reporters the day before the government unveiled its 2013 austerity budget on 28 September. Hers was one of the few ministries to escape spending cuts as socialist President François Hollande and his team strive to honour their commitment to slash the deficit from 4.5% of gross domestic product (GDP) to 3% next year. Instead of pruning spending by 3.5% as ministers had been instructed, Fioraso managed to negotiate a 2.2% spending increase to give a 2013 budget for her ministry of just under €23 billion (US$29 billion), or €26 billion if contributions from other ministries are included. This was even more than the increase given to schools, which were one of the three priorities touted by Hollande in his election campaign earlier this year.

This is very good news, because the long-term goal of austerity measures is to improve the economy. Reduced spending for research and education would likely undermine this goal. The increased budget allotment will be used to directly create jobs and support research grants:

The upshot of the cash increase is that 1,000 new university posts will be created, a third each going to lecturer-researchers, researchers and support staff, and none of the 68,449 publicly funded research jobs will be cut. Funding for research grants will rise by 1.2% to €7.86 billion, although that is a drop in real terms as inflation is expected to average 1.75% for the year. As Hollande had pledged, the funding split between the National Research Agency (ANR), which finances most projects, and basic research institutes is rebalanced. ANR allocations will shrink from €709 million to €687 million this year, and institutes will receive an extra €60 million for operating expenses. More than €1.1 billion is slated for international programmes, up from just over €1 billion this year. The European Space Agency (ESA) will get a 3.8% rise, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) will get 58% more.

In addition to directly creating new jobs, this support for research and education is an important investment in the future of France. The French government will also give tax breaks to smaller companies that are developing innovative technologies. One can only hope that this recognition of how important it is to invest in education and research will also be shared by the US government. 

Do Not Write Love Poems

Let us have a look at some of the best advice on writing that has ever been given to an aspiring poet. Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was one of the greatest poets of the German language. He wrote a series of ten letters to Franz Xaver Kappus, an aspiring poet, that were later published as "Briefe an einen jungen Dichter", or in the English translation as "Letters to a Young Poet".

In these letters, Rilke initiates Kappus into the mysteries of writing poetry as well as into the art of living a meaningful life. The advice given by Rilke is just as valuable today, as it was more than a century ago. Perhaps, in a networked world in which solitude has become a rare luxury and treat, I feel that Rilke's advice has become even more valuable.

I will present some excerpts of the letters in the original German as well as a translation into English.

The letter dated February 17, 1903 contains the following passage:

Schreiben Sie nicht Liebesgedichte; weichen Sie zuerst denjenigen Formen aus, die zu geläufig und gewöhnlich sind: sie sind die schwersten, denn es gehört eine große, ausgereifte Kraft dazu, Eigenes zu geben, wo sich gute und zum Teil glänzende Überlieferungen in Menge einstellen.  

Darum retten Sie sich vor den allgemeinen Motiven zu denen, die Ihnen Ihr eigener Alltag bietet; schildern Sie Ihre Traurigkeiten und Wünsche, die vorübergehenden Gedanken und den Glauben an irgendeine Schönheit - schildern Sie das alles mit inniger, stiller, demütiger Aufrichtigkeit und gebrauchen Sie, um sich auszudrücken, die Dinge Ihrer Umgebung, die Bilder Ihrer Träume und die Gegenstände ihrer Erinnerung.

My translation of this passage is:

Do not write love poems; try to initially avoid those forms that are too commonplace and ordinary: they are the most challenging, because it takes great strength and maturity to create something of your own, when you have to compete with so many good and even great predecessors. 

 So save yourself from these general themes and instead write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, your fleeting thoughts and your belief in some form of beauty - describe all this with heartfelt, quite and humble sincerity. When you express yourself, use the everyday items around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects from your memories.

Why is Rilke's advice so important? And why does it apply to all writers, not just to poets?

Many of us who try to write run into the highly prevalent and painful condition known as "Writer's block". Here is what Professor Wikipedia says about "Writer's block":

Writer's block is a condition, primarily associated with writing as a profession, in which an author loses the ability to produce new work. The condition varies widely in intensity. It can be trivial, a temporary difficulty in dealing with the task at hand. At the other extreme, some "blocked" writers have been unable to work for years on end, and some have even abandoned their careers.

There is no straightforward cure for this agonizing ailment, which can paralyze the mind and soul alike. In an aspiring writer, it awakens the desire to eat junk food, watch mind-numbing sitcoms and snap at all fellow primates that try to communicate with you.  Most of my Writer's block flare-ups occur when I try to right about lofty and grand themes, such as Love, Death or Justice. Whenever I sit down in front of my keyboard to start writing about such a profound theme, I think about all the wonderful poems, essays and novels that have been written about these topics in the past. My fingers are paralyzed, because I feel there is nothing I can add to what Goethe, Rilke, Eichendorff and Star Wars have already eloquently put in words.

But Rilke tells us that this is the wrong approach. We should focus on the tedious details of our lives. Let us face it, most of our lives are quite boring and ordinary, but these mundane and tedious details are what really define us and distinguish us from other writers. When I have to decide whether my sixth "How-to-be-a- Writer" self-help book should be either "Write Is a Verb: Sit Down, Start Writing, No Excuses" or "Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch: Let Verbs Power Your Writing" or when I experience Schadenfreude that I made it onto the commuter train on time, but the person who pushed me aside earlier is left standing angrily at the platform. These mundane moments are much easier to describe, because they are truly my own experiences and when I write about them I am not burdened by the history of great writing. I do not know what self-help writing guides Shakespeare used, but I am pretty sure he did not read "Write Is a Verb: Sit Down, Start Writing, No Excuses" and I am also pretty sure he did not experience the Schadenfreude of getting on the train.

Once I start writing about these seemingly mundane topics, my writing is more sincere. I also realize that extraordinary ideas are derived from ordinary details. 

The complete German text of the letter can be found on www.rilke.de.

An English translation of the complete letter is available here.

Libricide in the Digital Age

Plaque in Frankfurt, reminding us of the Nazi book-burning
Via Wikimedia - ArcCan 

My bookshelves are bulging and I am just running out of space for books. I enjoy buying books, but I have a very hard time when it comes to getting rid of them. After I have finished reading a good book, I become attached not just to the physical book, but also to the ideas and memories associated with that book. When I look at the book, I remember the fun I had reading it and I also think about how it made me feel and how it inspired me to think or write.

As an old-fashioned and traditional bookophile, I was a bit reticent when it came to trying it out E-books. I was worried that I would miss the tactile pleasure of thumbing through the physical pages. I was concerned that the digital highlighting on a Kindle reader would be no match for the visual pleasure elicited by the fluorescent glow of my German Stabilo highlighters. I also did not like the fact that I would have to pay the full price for every E-book, because one could not walk into a used ebook store and get bargain books for a few cents.

Nevertheless, I gave it a try. Once I started using the Kindle App on the iPad, I realized that the ability to carry thousands of books around with me, gave me a completely new kind of bookophile pleasure. I missed my Stabilo highlighter and the ability to physically grasp books, but the fact that Rilke, Orwell and Zadie Smith were all tucked away in my backpack, gave me a completely new kind of bookophile pleasure. I was about to extol the pleasures of ebooks to everyone and was thinking about gradually becoming an ebook-only kind of person.

Then I read two articles. The first one was "Will Your Children Inherit Your E-Books?" by Amanda Katz and asked the simple question of how does one inherit E-books?

In the age of the e-book, the paper book faces two possible and antithetical fates. It may become something to be discarded, as with the books that libraries scan and cannibalize. (In the introduction to another book, Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books, Price mentions the severed book spines that hang on the wall at Google, "like taxidermists' trophies.") Alternatively, it may become a special object to be preserved and traded. My grandfather's copy of War of the Worlds obviously falls into the second category — but very few of the millions of books published since the mid-19th century are ones you'd want to own. If Amazon has a "long tail" of obscure but occasionally purchased titles, the tail that goes back 150 years is near endless and thin as thread.
 Meanwhile, the kind of "serial" book sharing (as Price describes it) that occurs over time is giving way to simultaneous, "synchronous" sharing. With the Kindle, you can see what thousands of other Kindle readers are highlighting in the book you're reading — a fairly astonishing innovation. But the passage of books from hand to hand, gathering inscriptions along the way, is not part of the e-book economy. Will your grandchild inherit your Kindle books? No one knows, but given password protection and the speed at which data becomes obsolete, that seems highly unlikely.

Read more here...

I was stumped by this article. Of course I want my children and grandchildren to inherit my books. I still treasure a small century-old dictionary that my grandfather gave me, and I hope that my grandchildren will also enjoy thumbing through my old books. But how will they do this, if all I leave them are a bunch of files, many which may or may not be password-protected. Will I remember to tell them my Kindle password before I die? Does a dying bookophile gather around their family and tell them "My Kindle password is Lolita underscore Camus" before he passes on? Or will my E-books die with me?

The second article "How to Make a Book Disappear" was written by Maria Konnikova and discussed the ironic disappearance of George Orwell's 1984 from some Kindle devices because the retailer Amazon had detected that certain versions of these E-books were violating the copyright. Konnikova also brought up the excellent point that making digital books vanish could be the future version of book-burning:

An e-book is not a physical book. That point might seem trite until you stop for a moment to think how much simpler it is, in a certain sense, to destroy electronic than physical traces. There's no need of inciting mass cooperation in book-burning enterprises. No need for secret police or raids or extensive surveillance. The power to remove a book from a device, to remove all traces of it from retailers' websites, to expunge it from a publisher's online record: It would simplify the work of a would-be Soviet Union or Oceania multifold, would it not? It's ugly. For all kinds of reasons.     

Read more here...

After reading these articles, I am now rethinking my conversion-in-progress towards ebookophilia. I still like the physical feel of books and do not like the idea of my books dying or disappearing. I cannot afford to buy both, the hardcopy and E-book version of each book, so I am probably going to stick to buying old-fashioned books for now.

Buddhist ‘Iron Man’ found by Nazis is from space

Buddhist Iron Man via Elmar Buchner (Nature News Blog) 

I just love the headline of this article on the Nature blog. It sounds like the plot of a Sci-Fi-New-Age-World-War-II-Superhero Thriller.

A Buddhist statue brought to Germany from Tibet by a Nazi-backed expedition has been confirmed as having an extraterrestrial origin.
 Known as the ‘iron man’, the 24-cm high sculpture may represent the god Vaiśravaṇa and was likely created from a piece of the Chinga meteorite that was strewn across the border region between Russia and Mongolia between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago, according to Elmar Buchner of the University of Stuttgart, and his colleagues.

Read more here..... 

Obama and Romney: The Future of American Healthcare

The New England Journal of Medicine asked President Obama and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney to “describe their health care platforms and their visions for the future of American health care” and published their statements on the journal’s website. The (roughly) 1,300-word statements released by the two presidential candidates are rather vague, do not address specific issues and sound like political campaign speeches.

Floating (Via Massimo Valiani - Flickr)

President Obama’s statement emphasizes the importance of the Affordable Care Act (also known as “Obamacare”), and criticizes his opponents Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan for how their plans would be detrimental for medical research in the US and for Medicare, as seen in this excerpt:

My opponent in this election, Mitt Romney, has a radically different vision for the future of our health care system — even if it means running from his past as the architect of health reform in Massachusetts. He would begin by repealing Obamacare on day 1. Your patients would once again be charged excessive copays for preventive care, and millions of Americans would be one illness or injury away from bankruptcy. He would undo the progress we are making toward a more coordinated delivery system. Romney and his running mate, Congressman Paul Ryan, have proposed a budget that could force drastic cuts to investment in medical research, eliminating 1600 National Institutes of Health grants and slowing our progress on scientific and medical breakthroughs. They have pledged to turn Medicaid into a block grant and slash its funding by a third — plunging tens of millions more Americans into the ranks of the uninsured and leaving our hospitals and health care providers to grapple with an increasing burden of uncompensated care. And they are committed to ending Medicare as we know it by turning it into a voucher program, with insurance companies set to make millions while seniors and people with disabilities are forced to pay thousands more every year.

Mitt Romney’s statement, on the other hand, does not directly address medical research, but instead focuses on criticizing Obamacare and wants the states to play a bigger role in providing healthcare:

Nor can our society ever turn its back on those who cannot afford the care they need. We will provide support for low-income Americans and those uninsured persons whose preexisting conditions push the cost of coverage too high for them to pay themselves. But my experience as a governor and the lessons from the President's attempt at a one-size-fits-all national solution convince me that it is states — not Washington — that should lead this effort. I will convert Medicaid into a block grant that properly aligns each state's incentives around using resources efficiently. Each state will have the flexibility to craft programs that most effectively address its challenges — as I did in Massachusetts, where we got 98% of our residents insured without raising taxes.

I have to admit that I am underwhelmed by both responses because they just repeat the political rhetoric that we have already heard during the national conventions and other appearances. One problem is that the editors of the journal asked them for very broad statements instead of asking them to address specific questions and solutions. This is in contrast to, for example, the approach of Scientific American and ScienceDebate.org, who asked the candidates 14 specific questions related to science and technology.

The New England Journal of Medicine could have also asked very specific questions about the future of American healthcare. After all, the future of American healthcare does not just depend on health insurance, Medicare and Medicaid. Specific questions for the candidates could have included questions about how they will address the current crisis in the federal funding of medical research, how they want to deal with the growing problem of obesity and diabetes among children, how they intend to improve preventive healthcare for all, how we should facilitate translation of research findings into clinical practice, how we should curb the staggering cost of healthcare or how we can ensure adequate numbers of primary care healthcare providers, especially in underserved areas.

Such specific questions would force the candidates to focus on the same issues and allow the audience to compare and contrast their responses. I hope that in the future, the candidates will be asked more specific questions regarding their vision for American healthcare.

Retraction of Scientific Papers to Correct the Scientific Literature

Wikimedia - Colin Smith

Most biomedical researchers encounter situations in their research careers during which they are unable to replicate the findings of a published scientific paper. This prompts a nerve-wracking search for the underlying causes. Frequently, the reason is quite trivial, such as the use of slightly different reagents or cells from those in the published paper or minor discrepancies in the experimental protocol. Nevertheless, even when all the experimental procedures are followed appropriately, some published findings simply can't be replicated. As frustrating as this sounds, it is unfortunately not a rare occurrence. In a recent paper entitled "Drug development: Raise standards for preclinical cancer research" published in Nature, the scientists Glenn Begley and Lee Ellis describe the attempts of a biotechnology company to replicate the results of "land-mark" scientific papers in the field of cancer biology. They were only able to replicate the scientific findings in 11% of the cases! This is a shockingly poor rate of replicability for published studies, many of which appear to have been published in very prestigious biomedical journals. Begley and Ellis appropriately call for higher standards in biomedical research to improve replicability, both by the researchers themselves who conduct the experiments as well as for the peer-review process that currently allows the publication of so many papers that cannot be replicated.
            Many of us have had similarly frustrating encounters with published papers that cannot be replicated, but we also realize that there are no "quick fixes" to solve the problem. The current peer-review process is based on the opinion of one or more editors who depend on the assessments of multiple scientific experts. Neither the editors nor the scientific experts have any way of testing the replicability of the results prior to deciding whether or not a study should be published. they simply have to trust the authors of the manuscript and believe that they took all the necessary steps to ensure the replicability of the results. If it turns out that the central findings of a published paper cannot be replicated, this information is frequently not officially published or acknowledged, but instead, it is shared unofficially among scientists who have had problems replicating the findings of that paper. In many cases, there is a presumption that the authors of the published paper may have made errors in how they conducted the experiments or interpreted the data, or that they perhaps forgot to disclose some key details that are necessary to conduct the experiments and obtain the same results. Even if multiple colleagues feel that the experiments, data or conclusions in a paper are flawed, published papers are rarely retracted by a journal. Retractions of papers are usually reserved for gross misconduct by the authors of a paper, such as overt fabrication of data. Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus are two science journalists, who founded the website Retraction Watch, which tracks papers that are retracted by scientific journals and nearly all the posted retractions are usually a consequence of such gross misconduct and violation of ethics that has come to light. Retractions because of honest scientific errors are rare.

            This may change. In a recent blog post, Virginia Barbour (editor of PLOS Medicine) and Kasturi Haldar (editor of PLOS Pathogens) propose that scientific papers can and should be retracted by a journal, if there is ample evidence that its major conclusions are wrong, even if there was no overt misconduct and the erroneous conclusions were the result of an "honest error". They reference a 2006 paper that was recently retracted by PLOS Pathogens because its claim that a new gammaretrovirus XMRV was associated with prostate cancer did not hold up; the virus may have been a laboratory contaminant. The editors state:

 At PLOS our mission is to accelerate progress in science and medicine by leading a transformation in research communication. We firmly believe that acceleration also requires being open about correcting the literature as needed so that research can be built on a solid foundation. Hence as editors and as a publisher we encourage the publication of studies that replicate or refute work we have previously published. We work with authors (through communication with the corresponding author) to publish corrections if we find parts of articles to be inaccurate. If a paper’s major conclusions are shown to be wrong we will retract the paper.

            This is quite a major decision, because it suggests that papers without gross misconduct (such as fabricated data or plagiarism) can be retracted. The paper that PLOS Pathogens retracted did not disappear from the website, but can still be read in full (as of today) and carries a big "Retraction warning". I have to admit that in many ways I am glad the editors recognize the importance of formally flagging scientific errors. This will prevent future researchers from wasting their time and resources trying to replicate the results of flawed papers. However, I am concerned about the idea of "retracting" papers because of scientific errors. Even though the PLOS editors say "there is no shame in correcting the literature", the idea of retraction already carries the connotation of shame because in the past years it has been associated with fraud and overt misconduct and not with honest scientific errors. It may therefore be better to use a distinct terminology. Just like there is a huge difference between a murder and an accidental killing, there is also big difference between intentional fabrication of data and the unintentional oversight of a viral contaminant. The editors' goal of correcting the literature and highlighting errors in published papers is laudable, but perhaps one could introduce a more neutral terminology that is not burdened with the connotation of fraud. One such example would be "flagging" papers and indicating why they are being flagged. "Category 1 flagging" could be reserved for intentional fraud and misconduct (i.e. the traditional retraction), "Category 2 flagging" could indicate an honest scientific error when the authors agree that the conclusions of their published paper were erroneous and "Category 3 flagging" would indicate that the overwhelming majority of scientists have failed the replicate the results, but the authors maintain that there was no error and that their conclusions and results are solid.  Such post-publication "flagging" would depend on formal post-publication peer review and tracking of replicability, as Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus have previously suggested.

            The discussion of how to address scientific errors after publication is very important and it comes at a time when the internet provides the tools necessary for us to easily document and share our attempts to replicate published scientific data. No matter whether the outcome is to formally retract flawed papers or whether new categories of flagging flawed and questionable papers are developed, we can be optimistic that scientific research will likely benefit from this discussion and the realization that published scientific work still needs to undergo scrutiny.