Rumblings over Science retractions

The conversation is not over regarding two recent retractions of papers on enzyme engineering. Two letters linkurl:published;http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/eletters/319/5863/569b this month in Science say that the explanation of retraction issued by linkurl:Homme Hellinga's;http://www.biochem.duke.edu/faculty/homme-hellinga group at Duke University does not account for many of the errors in the original publications. The linkurl:Grantsmanship blog;http://writedit.wordpress.com/2008/02/01/science-retraction-community-at-work/ has also collected long running commentary on the circumstances surrounding the retractions. On February 1, Hellinga's group issued a statement of retraction for their 2004 Science paper on redesigning ribose-binding protein (RBP) to catalyze triose phosphate isomerase (TIM) activity -- a reaction crucial to glycolysis in almost all types of cells. They explained that linkurl:John Richard,;http://www.chem.buffalo.edu/richard.php in the department of biochemistry at the State University of New York, Buffalo, found that the TIM activity of the new enzyme was due to wild-type contamination during his own experiments with the redesigned enzyme. A month later the group retracted a second paper...