Nature News reports on new developments regarding the stem cell breakthrough published last week: several errors have been noted in the article and critics are unimpressed with incredibly short peer review process.
An excerpt (read in full here):
Stem-cell cloner acknowledges errors in groundbreaking paper
Critics raise questions about rush to publication.
A blockbuster paper that reported the creation of human stem-cell lines through cloning has come under fire. An anonymous online commenter found four problems in the paper, which was published online on 15 May in the journal Cell.
Shoukhrat Mitalipov, who led the stem-cell team, told Nature that three were innocent mistakes made while assembling the data. The fourth, he says, was not a problem at all. To many in the field there was an unfathomably rapid rush to publication: just three days from submission to acceptance and another 12 days to publication.
“The results are real, the cell lines are real, everything is real,” says Mitalipov, a reproductive-biology specialist at the Oregon Health and Science University in Beaverton.
Mitalipov says he returned from Europe on Wednesday and found himself swamped with e-mails and calls from editors at Cell, as well as from journalists. “I just got home a couple hours ago. The editors, everyone was going crazy,” he says.