stem cell retraction, page-5

Hi Danboy8 and others,

Surprise, surprise but I have a different "spin" to that of Timkiely.

Firstly I will let you know my experience of scientific papers. Scientists are basicly driven by the publish or perish rule. ie If you don't publish your results then you won't last long in the field. The paper in question was published by a junior scientist and I have no doubt that there were many "authors" on the paper. It has been many years since I worked in the field but my experience may set this in some context.

I only published 1 paper and there were about 10 "authors" listed. In reality I was the only one who did any of the research or the wrting of the paper. There was one other "author" who looked at my results and offered editing suggestions regarding the paper. None of the other "authors" had the slightest thing to do with the paper. There was my boss and my boss' boss and a girl who was doing a PhD but had nothing whatsoever to do with my work.

My point here is that Upton's name may have been on the erroneous paper but she may have only had the slightest inkling that it was being published. Rightly or wrongly, that was (and is??) the way the scientific field operates.

The other point made by the article seems to be that there is a conflict of interest with Upton part owning TIS while being involved in authorship of papers for QUT. Quite frankly I don't see how this is a conflict and the article doesn't seem to explain this point very well. In the scientific field it is (or was) quite common for authors from different areas to be cited on the same paper. I don't know the intricacies of the relationship between QUT and TIS but I believe they are very closely associated. Why is this a conflict??

My view is this is a storm in a teacup which would not really affect anyone in the scientific field. The only people it may affect are investors with a lack of understanding about how the field operates and those have an agenda of spinning doom and gloom.

DYOR

Rev