Mexican Chemistry Scandal!
As reported in La Jornada, two Mexican scientists retracted three articles published in Journal of Organic Chemistry, Tetrahedron, and Tetrahedron Letters after finding that the results were irreproducible. The principal investigator is Prof. Eusebio Juaristi, a very well-respected chemist. It should be pointed out that this is being reported over a year after the initial retraction, so one can’t say that the scientists didn’t admit that there was something wrong with the results in a timely fashion. Making this the main front-page story in a national newspaper is an exaggeration in my opinion, especially giving it a conspiracy-theory title, but we all know that some newspapers like to dramatize things a bit…
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Check out the Sames scandel on these two blogs. JACS beats out JOC and Tetrahedron.
Comment by Anonymous — 2006-3-10 @ 8:53 pm
It is interesting how “La Jornada” actually portraits the facts implying that the publication of these papers was done knowing that the results were false. I think they are overreacting, everybody, including the scientists, is prone to making a mistake, if anything, they were simply a little sloppy. I have encountered similar situations in my research, were the NMR looks as if I got the compound that I was expecting and other analysis techniques give you ambiguous results. Fortunately in all these cases I have caught the mistakes because my compounds did not react as I was expecting them to or the NMR started to look “funny” after an extra round of purification. My point is that this looks like an honest mistake although we would have to read his thesis to find out if he simply misinterpreted his data or if he intentionally concealed the results indicating that the synthesis was not yielding the expecting products. If the whole thesis was based on the system which does not work, then his degree should be reevaluated (because this would mean he was “sloppy” during several years). However, if this merely constituted a chapter or a section of the dissertation then it was an honest mistake which could happen to anyone who is too eager to publish.
Comment by Sergio Granados — 2006-3-21 @ 1:38 pm