The laboratory of Vera Gorbunova and Andrei Seluanov, a husband-and-wife team of biologists at the University of Rochester, has the feel of a petting zoo. They maintain colonies of several species of rodents — some familiar, like mice and guinea pigs, and some much more exotic, like blind mole rats from Israel and naked mole rats from East Africa.

Amusing children with furry creatures is not their goal, however. The biology of animals is mysteriously diverse, and lurking within it may be clues to new kinds of medicine.

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The stories of scientists create new scientists. Alexander von Humboldt — the most famous naturalist of the early 19th century — chronicled his epic expeditions, between 1799 and 1804, in his “Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent.” When a nature-loving student at Cambridge named Charles Darwin read the book, it changed his life. He read passages aloud to his professors and learned Spanish so that he could follow in Humboldt’s footsteps.

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Naoki Mori, the Japanese cancer researcher who has had 30 papers retracted by scientific journals, was asked to give his side of the story. In an e-mail, he acknowledged that his colleagues “were lax in certain regards in the preparation of papers,” but he denied having committed a grave offense.

The studies were retracted because they used pictures from older papers, rather than from the experiments described in the studies. “I think this reuse is not a scientific misconduct,” Dr. Mori wrote.

He and his colleagues studied the response of human cells to infection by bacteria and viruses.

Continue reading “After Mistakes, Scientists Try to Explain Themselves” →