By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Editors of scientific journals should beef up their level of skepticism about high-profile papers submitted to them and demand solid evidence that the work was completed as described, according to a review of the editorial procedures that led to the publication of fraudulent scientific papers by the now-disgraced South Korean stem cell scientist Hwang Woo Suk.

The review, released yesterday, was commissioned by Science, the American journal that published Hwang's two most important faked papers in 2004 and 2005 and then retracted them in January after investigations in Korea and the United States concluded that the results were almost all fabrications.

The fraudulent articles described what appeared to be the first creation of embryonic stem cells from cloned human embryos and the production of stem cells genetically matched to patients -- two holy grails of medicine.

Fraud will always plague the scientific enterprise, the review concluded, and it may even be on the rise, given the growing amount of fame and fortune that can accrue for those associated with major advances in science and medicine.

But more fraud could be caught in advance -- and its negative impacts on research and on public confidence in science could be lessened -- if journals reviewed submitted articles more carefully, the six-member expert panel reported.

"Progress in science depends on breakthroughs and in taking risks, both in research and in publishing," they wrote. "Nevertheless, it is essential to develop a process by which papers that have the likelihood of attracting attention are examined particularly closely for errors, misrepresentation, deception or outright fraud."

Foremost, the panel declared, Science should create a "risk assessment" process designed to flag papers that, because of their potential impact on science or public policy or their counterintuitive findings, deserve an extra dose of review.

In addition, the panel recommended that scientific co-authors be required to specify how they contributed to the work, and that more original data be included to help verify the authenticity of new findings.

Although the panel limited its investigation to how Science handles submissions, it suggested that editors collaborate with counterparts at other journals to harmonize the new protections, so scientific crooks do not simply submit their work to journals with fewer safeguards.

Experts in misconduct said the recommendations were fine but broke no new ground.

"These are good points and we should go forward with them, but they will have very little effect on the integrity of science," said Adil E. Shamoo, a professor at the University of Maryland and editor-in-chief of the journal Accountability in Research. Shamoo has called for required training in research ethics for scientists and full laboratory visits and audits of raw data by their peers. "It's ludicrous to think editorial boards can do all this," Shamoo said.

George Lundberg, editor-in-chief of the medical journal MedGenMed and of the online medical text eMedicine, also criticized the report as "business as usual."

"It isn't any change from what we all do anyway, every day," Lundberg said. What is needed, he said, is a more scrupulous review process and a willingness to "pin accountability" on those who try to scam the system.

The new report, by scientists from inside and outside the journal with expertise in stem cell science and publishing, will appear in Friday's issue of Science along with a response from Editor-in-Chief Donald Kennedy. It was released in a telephone news conference sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which publishes Science.

"We found that the procedures and standards at Science . . . were followed with exceptional care," said panel Chairman John I. Brauman, a professor of chemistry at Stanford University and chairman of Science's senior editorial board, adding that he doubted any other journal would have detected the fraud.

Only after South Korean journalists raised questions about the work did investigators look into and confirm the fakery.

Hwang lost his job at Seoul National University and has been charged with fraudulent use of government funds. Co-author Gerald Schatten of the University of Pittsburgh committed "scientific misbehavior" and sought the "media spotlight" while "shirking" his responsibilities in the research, but he probably did not know the findings were fake, a university committee found.

Kennedy said his journal is weighing the recommendations and is already creating a screening tool to identify papers worthy of extra scrutiny -- especially those dealing with such charged topics as stem cells, climate change and medical breakthroughs. One emphasis will be on photographs documenting completed experiments, he said, which can today be easily manipulated by software programs such as Photoshop.

But it will always be difficult to detect a skilful liar, he warned.

"I don't think that the procedures we've been discussing so far would necessarily have caused us to not publish or to seriously doubt the publishability of these papers," he said.

Although editors were hobbled in their review of Hwang's papers because they did not speak or read Korean, Kennedy cautioned against instituting policies unfair to emerging, non-English-speaking scientific hot spots such as Korea. "We don't want to engage in profiling," he said.