I noticed that Fukuyama and Yokoshima have talked to C&E News about the rather large series of corrections that appeared recently. There appear to be 11 at the moment in publications stretching back over a number of years. A comment from Yokoshima is “We have told our students that the NMR spectra should not contain peaks of residual solvents or impurities for publication“. This apparent search for perfection led the students to use the delete button. It apparently never occurred to them that the students would use this function. Minor impurity peaks are not mentioned in this statement. For example, the signals we all have had from vac. grease, or those high boiling residues that occasionally crop up from the solvent, especially after a tedious chromatography.
Blaming it all on the students is not correct. As principal investigators both professors have a duty to oversee the work produced and published from their lab. In the cases referred to the NMR spectra are those of complicated natural products, not easy to interpret, for a student. So an assumption on my part is that surely the students and the PIs examined the spectra before publication to ensure that a) the structure was correct and b) the peaks were assigned properly? At least that is what happened at the various places I have attended. Even in industry I got someone to have a look at a particularly complex NMR. It also highlights the problem of determining reaction yields by NMR. Such yields are really meaningless and the compounds need to be isolated and the yield determined in a sound manner.
So the excuses in C&E News seem somewhat lame to me and putting the blame 100% on the students is not the correct way to go. Let’s hope that this is a fitting end to this rather distressing event.
Edit: For interest here are 2 links to a more in-depth analysis of this topic: Number 1, and 2.
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This seems rather disrespectful to me because the primary aim of doing a PhD should be to learn new things and students don’t just come up with these manipulations (hope I’m not too naive about this, I’d never do anything like this anyway…). What I am trying to say is that whatever the students do is the responsibility of their supervisor (especially that they take responsibility for all the good results), so nobody should blame students only for any misconduct like this.
I completely agree with you, the students are not to blame. Just read that interview it’s an eye-opener.