The Right Kind of Retraction
A real bummer of a retraction in JACS last week, but it's an example of the scientific process doing what it's supposed to do.
The researchers had found a cool optical effect where a particular absorption band in a dye molecule got redshifted when you squeeze it between two plates spaced very, very close together (like microns). This effect also seems to affect things like reaction rates and selectivity and other sorts of things that, if you wanted to, could result in some very fancy reactions. But we, as a community, don't really have a super good grasp of why what's happening is happening. Noticeing a redshift in that dye's absorption band led the researchers to suggeest that the oddball chemistry happening in those tiny spaces are due to through-space electronic interactions. (If I'm reading their paper correctly, that is. I'm no spectroscopist.)
But, then, about a year and a half later, the team had been moving forward with the next set of experiments, and found that the effect they had seen was due to an optical artifact. That artifact was also present in their control experiments, making it harder to catch. Because they couldn't differentiate between the effects of those reflections and the effect they had proposed, they retracted the article.
It's really never fun to have to issue a correction or a retraction. But it appears that this one was due to the scientific process doing what it's designed to do: discover, replicate, and extend. If you're a new grad student in a lab, it's pretty typical to join a project and start by replicating the results described in a previous paper from the group. As a grad student, it gets you familiar with the equipment and process while having a good metric of whether or not you're ready to start doing new stuff. But as a PI, it gets more eyeballs on results. In the worst case, a new student can't replicate a result because a former student fabricated it. But in this case, it appears as though fresh eyes found an artifact that had gone unnoticed until then, and the authors of the paper did the right thing by retracting it.
I don't read a lot of the hardcore spectroscopy literature. But if I did, after this retraction, I'd be willing to trust the expertise of the lead auther and his lab more, not less.