Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza retracts four papers

A Johns Hopkins researcher who shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology has retracted four papers from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) for concerns about images in the articles.

Gregg Semenza is “one of today’s preeminent researchers on the molecular mechanisms of oxygen regulation,” the work for which he shared the 2019 Nobel, according to Hopkins. But even before that, the pseudonymous Claire Francis began pointing out potential image duplications and other manipulations in Semenza’s work on PubPeer, as described in October 2020 by Leonid Schneider.

The four papers retracted yesterday are:

•  Hypoxia-inducible factors mediate coordinated RhoA-ROCK1 expression and signaling in breast cancer cells
•  Mutual antagonism between hypoxia-inducible factors 1α and 2α regulates oxygen sensing and cardio-respiratory homeostasis
•  Anthracycline chemotherapy inhibits HIF-1 transcriptional activity and tumor-induced mobilization of circulating angiogenic cells
•  Hypoxia-inducible factors are required for chemotherapy resistance of breast cancer stem cells

A representative notice:

We are retracting this article due to concerns with Figure 5. In Figure 5A, there is a concern that the first and second lanes of the HIF-2α panel show the same data, and that the first and second lanes of the HIF-1α panel show the same data, despite all being labeled as unique data. In Figure 5D, there is a concern that the second and third lanes of the HIF-1β panel show the same data despite being labeled as unique data. We believe that the overall conclusions of the paper remain valid, but we are retracting the work due to these underlying concerns about the figure. Confirmatory experimentation has now been performed and the results can be found in a preprint article posted on bioRxiv, ‘Homeostatic responses to hypoxia by the carotid body and adrenal medulla are based on mutual antagonism between HIF-1α and HIF-2α’ (https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.07.11.499380). We apologize for the inconvenience.

Together, the papers have been cited more than 750 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. From 1998 until 2013, Semenza was principal investigator on NIH grants totaling more than $9 million.

“Francis” tells Retraction Watch:

 I saw problematic Gregg Semenza publications before his Nobel Prize.

 I recognised his name when he got his Nobel Prize and went back for a second look.

 Had I got him wrong?

 No, there were more problematic publications.

One of Semenza’s co-authors on one of the papers is Denis Wirtz, the vice provost for research at Hopkins.

Semenza, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, is hardly the only Nobel Prize winner to later retract papers. We describe four such cases in a 2019 column for STAT, and Frances Arnold did the same in 2020. Daniel Kahneman walked back some claims, although he did not retract a paper per se.

It is also not Semenza’s first retraction. In 2011, a paper he co-authored with Naoki Mori – a name familiar to Retraction Watch readers – was retracted.

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