刚到的一期Science上还报道一中土出生的杜邦公司科学家偷公司机密被开除:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/sci;325/5947/1485-a?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=dupont+scientist&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT

受中土风气影响，少数老中在美国也不自律，迟早会败坏整个老中群体在科学界的信誉。

Paper Retracted Following Genome Data Breach
Constance Holden

Here's a nightmare scenario: You go to the Web site of a leading journal, and there on your screen is a paper based on data you have painstakingly gathered but not yet had time to analyze.

That's what happened to psychiatrist Laura Bierut, who discovered last week that other researchers had broken an embargo on use of data she and her colleagues had deposited in dbGaP, the National Institutes of Health's (NIH's) database of genotypes and phenotypes. Bierut, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis in Missouri, and colleagues had collected the data as part of genetic studies of alcoholism and other addictions collectively known as SAGE (Study of Addiction: Genetics and Environment).

dbGaP was established in 2006 to facilitate sharing of the oceans of genetic data generated by federal grantees. Other scientists can submit papers based on the material after an embargo period of 9 to 12 months so those who generated the data can have first crack at analyzing them.

he SAGE embargo ends on 23 September. But on 31 August, a paper based on SAGE data appeared online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). In it, a team led by Heping Zhang, a biostatistician at Yale School of Public Health, reported a positive association between a gene called PKNOX2 and addictions in women of European origin. It was submitted to the journal last March, breaching the embargo by 6 months.

Bierut immediately shot off e-mails to Yale, Princeton University (home of coauthor and National Academy of Sciences member Burton Singer, who contributed the paper), PNAS, various NIH officials, and colleagues. "[t]his was likely an unintentional act, [but] this incident remains very concerning," she wrote, adding that it "sends a very chilling message to investigators."

The responses were swift. Yale took down a press release it had posted about the study. NIH froze the researchers' access to dbGaP. And on 9 September, PNAS retracted the paper (www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/09/09/0910252106.full.pdf).

What went wrong? That's still not clear. When an investigator gets permission to access the raw data stored at dbGaP, he or she signs an agreement pledging not to submit any paper before the embargo date. Author Zhang, who signed the access agreement last year, told Science he doesn't want to say anything until NIH concludes its review.

Alan Guttmacher, acting director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, and Elizabeth Nabel, director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, said in an e-mail that the NHGRI Data Access Committee is working with all parties to figure out how the breach occurred—and how to ensure it won't happen again. But, they wrote, "We do not anticipate that the underlying ... publication policy will change based on a single, unfortunate incident."

Bierut agrees with NIH that data sharing is a good thing, and the policy should stay in place. "I think NIH and PNAS moved very quickly to resolve the issues," she says. "The good news is I think the system worked."

The paper is still on the PNAS Web site. PNAS Editor-in-Chief Randy Schekman says, "We thought about whether it was feasible to remove the online version and decided against it," because of the "very awkward consequences—librarians get confused about papers being cited that no longer exist." Schekman says there is not much likelihood that the paper will be accepted if it's resubmitted after the embargo date. Instead, "we've invited Laura Bierut to submit." Schekman says PNAS will probably expand its author checklist to include a question about whether any data used is under embargo. He adds that "Dr. Zhang may be further sanctioned" by PNAS if the circumstances warrant such action.

The episode still leaves a bad taste in some mouths. Michael Miller, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says it has reinforced sentiments of those who feel NIH's policy of gene data sharing is too generous. "Other teams can start working with the data almost as soon as the group that collected the data," he points out. "They can write a dozen papers ahead of time and submit them all on that 1-year embargo date." Nicholas Martin, a behavioral geneticist at the Queensland Institute for Medical Research in Brisbane, Australia, agrees. The relatively short embargo periods "leave ... the gate open for predators with no investment in the data to do quick-and-dirty analyses that pick the eyes out of the data without looking at any of the subtleties," he says. "This breach only heightens these concerns."