Category: Articles

After Mistakes, Scientists Try to Explain Themselves

Posted on by Lori Jia

The New York Times, April 16, 2012

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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.

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The Secret Life of Bees

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Smithsonian, March 31, 2012

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On the front porch of an old Coast Guard station on Appledore Island, seven miles off the southern coast of Maine, Thomas Seeley and I sat next to 6,000 quietly buzzing bees. Seeley wore a giant pair of silver headphones over a beige baseball cap, a wild fringe of hair blowing out the back; next to him was a video camera mounted on a tripod. In his right hand, Seeley held a branch with a lapel microphone taped to the end. He was recording the honeybee swarm huddling inches away on a board nailed to the top of a post.

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2 Studies Point to Common Pesticide as a Culprit in Declining Bee Colonies

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The New York Times, March 29, 2012

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Scientists have been alarmed and puzzled by declines in bee populations in the United States and other parts of the world. They have suspected that pesticides are playing a part, but to date their experiments have yielded conflicting, ambiguous results.

In Thursday’s issue of the journal Science, two teams of researchers published studies suggesting that low levels of a common pesticide can have significant effects on bee colonies. One experiment, conducted by French researchers, indicates that the chemicals fog honeybee brains, making it harder for them to find their way home. The other study, by scientists in Britain, suggests that they keep bumblebees from supplying their hives with enough food to produce new queens.

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The Connections May Be the Key

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Discover, March 20, 2012

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If I didn’t know Sebastian Seung was a neuroscientist, I would have pegged him as a computer game designer. His onyx-black hair seems frozen in a windstorm. He wears black sneakers, jeans, and a frayed bomber jacket over an untucked shirt covered in fluorescent blobs. If someone had blindfolded me on Vassar Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, led me into Building 46 on the campus of MIT, past the sign that says Department of Brain and Cognitive Science, taken me up in the elevator to the fifth floor and whisked off the blindfold in Seung’s lab, I still wouldn’t have guessed he had anything to do with brains.

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Antiviral Drugs Could Blast the Common Cold—Should We Use Them?

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WIRED, March 20, 2012

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There’s a moment in the history of medicine that’s so cinematic it’s a wonder no one has put it in a Hollywood film. The scene is a London laboratory. The year is 1928. Alexander Fleming, a Scottish microbiologist, is back from a vacation and is cleaning up his work space. He notices that a speck of mold has invaded one of his cultures of Staphylococcus bacteria. It isn’t just spreading through the culture, though. It’s killing the bacteria surrounding it.

Fleming rescued the culture and carefully isolated the mold. He ran a series of experiments confirming that it was producing a Staphylococcus-killing molecule. 

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