A high-profile retraction

There are an announcement and a news article in the current issue of Nature retracting a paper from Linda Buck's lab about mapping olfactory connections in the mouse. The paper was retracted following the inability of their group and others to reproduce the data. There is often a great deal of controversy following a retraction like this, but it seems that this is one good example that the system of peer-review, publication, and independent replication works well as a road to scientific truth. Falsification (or legitimate, unintentional error) may persist for a while in the literature, but eventually, we hope, the truth comes out.

This is, of course, yet another argument in favor of making published research reports and even primary data as widely available as possible.


Zou, Z., Horowitz, L.F., Montmayeur, J., Snapper, S., Buck, L.B. (2001). Genetic tracing reveals a stereotyped sensory map in the olfactory cortex. Nature, 414(6860), 173-179. DOI: 10.1038/35102506
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