Nobel laureate retracts paper

A Nobel laureate and her co-authors on a 2001 paper on the sense of smell have retracted the study, saying they had discovered problems in the data and were unable to duplicate their findings.

Linda Buck shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering odor-sensing proteins in the nose and tracing how the nervous system delivers odor information to the brain. It was not immediately clear how important the retracted research was to the body of work that led to her Nobel.

The retracted paper reported details of how the nervous system of the mouse carries odor signals from the nose to a particular region of the brain.

Buck, who did the work at Harvard Medical School, is now at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. She did not immediately respond to requests for an interview. But she told the journal Nature, which reported the development in its news section, that data inconsistencies appeared in figures contributed to the paper by another author.