Image copyright MILLENNIUM PRIZEAmerican scientist Frances Arnold, who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry, has retracted her latest paper. Prof Arnold shared the award with George P Smith and Gregory Winter for their research on enzymes in 2018.
A subsequent paper on enzymatic synthesis of beta-lactams was published in the journal Science in May 2019.
It has been retracted because the results were not reproducible, and the authors found data missing from a lab notebook.
Reproduction is an essential part of validating scientific experiments. If an experiment is a success, one would expect to get the same results every time it was conducted. Prof Arnold came forward with the news herself on Twitter on 2 January.
“For my first work-related tweet of 2020, I am totally bummed to announce that we have retracted last year’s paper on enzymatic synthesis of beta-lactams. The work has not been reproducible,” she tweeted.
“It is painful to admit, but important to do so. I apologize to all. I was a bit busy when this was submitted, and did not do my job well.”
Frances Arnold@francesarnoldIt is painful to admit, but important to do so. I apologize to all. I was a bit busy when this was submitted, and did not do my job well. https://twitter.com/francesarnold/status/1212796190711959552 …
Frances Arnold@francesarnoldFor my first work-related tweet of 2020, I am totally bummed to announce that we have retracted last year’s paper on enzymatic synthesis of beta-lactams. The work has not been reproducible. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/364/6440/575 …
End of Twitter post by @francesarnold
That same day, Science published a note outlining why it would be retracting the paper, which Prof Arnold co-authored with Inha Cho and Zhi-Jun Jia.
“Efforts to reproduce the work showed that the enzymes do not catalyze the reactions with the activities and selectivities claimed. Careful examination of the first author’s lab notebook then revealed missing contemporaneous entries and raw data for key experiments. The authors are therefore retracting the paper.”
The announcement is the latest example of the “reproducibility crisis” facing the sciences.
In October 2018, the journal Nature wrote online that there was “growing alarm about results that cannot be reproduced”.
An earlier survey conducted by the journal found that more than two-thirds of researchers had tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments.
Reaction to Prof Arnold’s tweets was mostly positive, however, as her colleagues commended her honesty.
“Can I please express my respect for you bringing this to everyone’s attention. This shows that anyone can make an honest mistake and acting to correct that is the best response. Thank you,” wrote Dominique Hoogland, a researcher at King’s College London.
Prof Arnold is a widely respected chemical engineer, whose work pioneering “directed evolution” won her the €1m (£0.8m) Millennium Technology Prize in 2016.
She is also on the board of directors for Google’s parent company Alphabet.
Read more at www.bbc.co.uk
PRINCIPIA SCIENTIFIC INTERNATIONAL, legally registered in the UK as a company 
incorporated for charitable purposes. Head Office: 27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX.Â
Trackback from your site.
Jerry Krause
| #
Hi PSI Readers,
I read: “American scientist Frances Arnold, who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry, has retracted her latest paper. Prof Arnold shared the award with George P Smith and Gregory Winter for their research on enzymes in 2018.”
Do not miss the apparent fact that ‘three’ independent research programs must have produced reproducible experimental data upon which Prof Arnold had formed her idea (theory) of ‘directed evolution’ before 2016. For she was not only considering her own group’s experimental results but those of George P Smith’s and Gregory Winter’s groups’ experimental results.
Which idea (theory) according to Einstein can never be proven to be ‘the truth’. “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right, a single experiment can prove me wrong. (A. E.)
And more recently this fact of real Science was endorsed by Jim Allison. “In 2018, Dr. Jim Allison was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering an effective way to attack cancer through immunology. In his lab, Allison urges researchers to get rid of the idea that they can prove something with science. All they can do is fail to disprove.” (https://principia-scientific.com/prove-or-disprove-a-nobel-prize-winners-approach-to-science/)
I make this comment because here at PSI I read argument after argument that the idea of the greenhouse effect, as proposed by Svante Arrhenius in 1896, does not exist. But I do see anyone citing reproducible evidence which refutes the idea of the GHE. Even I, who has called attention to such reproducible evidence, have not clearly simply stated that the range of the daily temperature (whether of the measured air temperatures or of the earth’s measured solid surface temperature) oscillation during a reproducible 24hr period, refutes the idea that anything in our atmosphere is hindering the transmission to space of the infrared radiation being emitted by the earth’s surface according to a well established scientific law.
Have a good day. Jerry
Reply
geran
| #
Jerry, did you have a point?
Or did you just fall victum again to that irresistible urge to ramble aimlessly?
Reply
Tom O
| #
Oddly, as I read that quoted paragraph, I was of the impression that the three of them worked on the same research program, not that there were 3 separate programs, that Prof. Arnold was the lead author. Of course, this was not the paper that she recently retracted.
As for the last paragraph, I can only say “what was it you just said?”
Reply
Jerry Krause
| #
Hi Tom O,
You are correct: I made an unwarranted assumption.
But I checked it out and found that it was not a unwarranted assumption.
So it seems your assumption was unwarranted.
Have a good day, Jerry
Reply
K Kaiser
| #
Indeed, the BBC article is misleading as to the authors.
The retracted paper was not authored by Arnold, Smith & Winter but by
Inha Cho*, Zhi-Jun Jia*, Frances H. Arnold, with the title
“Site-selective enzymatic C‒H amidation for synthesis of diverse lactams”
The full reasons for the retraction do not appear to be clear either.
Reply
tom0mason
| #
Frances Arnold should loose her Nobel Prize for Chemistry and immediately get a Nobel Prize for Scientific Honesty!
Reply
WhoKoo
| #
And take up climatology.
Reply