The Dirty Little Secret of Cancer Research by Jill Neimark.
From the post:
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Across different fields of cancer research, up to a third of all cell lines have been identified as imposters. Yet this fact is widely ignored, and the lines continue to be used under their false identities. As recently as 2013, one of Ain’s contaminated lines was used in a paper on thyroid cancer published in the journal Oncogene.“There are about 10,000 citations every year on false lines—new publications that refer to or rely on papers based on imposter (human cancer) celllines,” says geneticist Christopher Korch, former director of the University of Colorado’s DNA Sequencing Analysis & Core Facility. “It’s like a huge pyramid of toothpicks precariously and deceptively held together.”
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For all the worry about “big data,” where is the concern over “big bad data?”
Or is “big data” too big for correctness of the data to matter?
Once you discover that a paper is based on “imposter (human cancer) celllines,” how do you pass that information along to anyone who attempts to cite the article?
In other words, where do you write down that data about the paper, where the paper is the subject in question?
And how do you propagate that data across a universe of citations?
The post ends on a high note of current improvements but it is far from settled how to prevent reliance on compromised research.
I first saw this in a tweet by Dan Graur