Harvard Team Retracts Immune System Finding
Medical researchers at Harvard University have officially retracted a series of published scientific articles in which they claimed to have discovered a natural substance that acted as a powerful stimulant of the body’s immune system.
One of the scientists reportedly has admitted to colleagues that he tampered with the data. The letter of retraction, published in the Nov. 28 issue of the journal Science, which published the scientists’ first report earlier this year, concedes that the substance does not exist.
The substance, called IL-4A, was claimed to be a chemical relative of interleukin-2, or IL-2, a genuine substance that is showing promise as a treatment for cancer and acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS).
Inquiry Launched
Baruj Benacerraf, president of Harvard’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, has established a committee to investigate the incident, and has notified other Harvard officials and the National Institutes of Health, which funded the research.
The research and the letter of retraction were done by Claudio Milanese, Neil E. Richardson and Ellis L. Reinherz, all of the Dana-Farber institute.
“In our view,” the three said in their letter, referring to their earlier claims, “those biological data are not reproducible and are incorrect, and we wish, therefore, to retract the data and the conclusions based upon them. . . .”
Letters of retraction are rare in science, but the incident may be the latest in a series of research tampering cases that have come to light at several institutions.
In the Harvard case, questions about the claims were raised in recent weeks when the researchers tried to repeat the original experiments to confirm their validity. The replication attempts came after one of the scientists, Milanese, had returned to his native Italy; his colleagues at Harvard were unable to get the same positive results that they had registered in their original research.
According to a news report on the situation in the same issue of Science, Richardson and Reinherz, the other two scientists, became concerned and asked Milanese, who had done the original tests for IL-4A, to return to Boston to help figure out what they were doing wrong.
Milanese did not return. Instead, he told Science that he wrote Reinherz admitting that he had manipulated the data to make it look as if the substance had been detected.
