MICHAEL WINOKUR PHOTOGRAPHYn late summer of 2005, budding developmental biologist Jeremy Reiter was expecting the three other members of his two-year-old lab for a celebratory dinner at his house. After weeks of working feverishly, they had finally resubmitted a revised manuscript to Nature. The paper told the story of how primary cilia—microtubular structures that jut out of cells’ membranes like antennae and help cells receive and interpret signals from the extracellular environment—were intimately involved in embryonic development, serving as the focal point for key components of the Hedgehog signaling machinery. Although these nonmotile cilia had been observed in the majority of vertebrate cells for more than a century, their function remained mostly a mystery. Reiter and his team had a feeling they had stumbled upon an important discovery.
But his excitement was short-lived. When his guests arrived, they served him with a paper that had just been published in Science, which told the exact same story. “It knocked the wind off my sails,” Reiter says. Having another team scoop his most promising project was very bad news for Reiter who was untenured and under a five-year research contract with the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)—a temporary position he landed after his postdoc had been cut short when his mentor left for the UK.
METHOD: Luckily for Reiter, the paper was a hoax—a Photoshop creation courtesy of his lab mates. “Poor guy,” says conspirator and PhD student at the time Veena Singla between bursts of laughter, as she remembers how he snatched the ...
