While doing a literature search for a manuscript recently, I came across an interesting web blog from Michael Eisen, a geneticist at UC Berkeley and a Howard Hughes Investigator. The article started with "I confess, I wrote the arsenic DNA paper." For those of you not familiar with this story, the paper was published in Science in 2011, describing the discovery of a bacterial species that used arsenic instead of phosphorus in its nucleic acids. This bizarre finding received tons of press, but alas was shown to be incorrect. Dr. Eisen, later in the web article, confesses that he didn't actually write the Science paper, but rather uses it as an example of a disturbing trend in scientific publication.
展开▼
