Following a final report from a prominent South Korean university, Science formally retracted a paper today (Apr. 23) from Korean researcher Kim Tae-kook purportedly reporting a new technology to identify drug targets called magnetism-based interaction capture (MAGIC).

Kim Tae-kook Image: AFP/KAIST

In February 2008, Kim was suspended from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), where he was a faculty member, after a preliminary report from the university investigating two of his studies concluded that "the two papers do not contain any scientific truth."

The studies -- the now-retracted Science paper, published in 2005, and a 2006 paper in Nature Chemical Biology (NCB) -- characterized MAGIC, a way to use magnetized nanoparticles to track protein movements in order to find new molecular drug targets.

The NCB paper was retracted last July, before the KAIST committee had wrapped up its internal investigation. All nine of the study's authors signed the retraction letter, including Kim, although Kim maintained in an editor's note that the scientific irregularities were confined to only one figure in the paper.

Science published an "editorial expression of concern" in March 2008 and started discussing the text of a retraction with Kim in May 2008, but "had concerns with some of [Kim's] proposed language," Natasha Pinol, a Science spokesperson, told The Scientist in an email. The journal then waited for KAIST's final ruling, which it received and had translated into English last month, before deciding conclusively that many of the results in the 2005 study had been fabricated. Original notebooks and data from both studies have gone missing, according to both the Science and NCB retractions, and so cannot be used to substantiate the findings of the papers.

"Since almost a year elapsed between the interim findings and release of the final report to us, we decided that we were not willing to enter into negotiations regarding the wording of the retraction," said Pinol. "Dr. Kim did offer to sign the retraction with some modifications but we did not accept his offer." Instead, the journal opted for an "editorial retraction" authored by editor-in-chief Bruce Alberts.


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