Shoukhrat MitalipovOREGON HEALTH AND SCIENCE UNIVERSITYThe team behind a landmark study published last week that reported the creation of human embryonic stem cells via nuclear transfer, or cloning, has admitted that several images in paper were duplicated or mislabeled, but insists the errors do not invalidate the results, reported Nature.
“The results are real, the cell lines are real, everything is real,” Shoukhrat Mitalipov of the Oregon Health and Science University, who led the study, told Nature. Mitalipov also explained that the unusually rapid review of the paper, which was accepted 4 days after submission and published just 12 days later, was a result of his eagerness to present the results at a meeting in June.
The research, published in Cell, was the first time stem cells had been generated via nuclear transfer, the same achievement claimed by Korean scientists in 2004 in what turned out to be a notorious case of scientific fraud. So alarm bells were ringing when a day after publication a commenter of the website PubPeer alleged that Mitalipov’s paper contained ...
