A virtually “deified” academic luminary has, in the twilight of a stellar career, encountered his first ever “crash”-a retracted paper.

In the field of genomics, George Church is undoubtedly a towering figure, who is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and a professor of health sciences at MIT. In 1984, he helped launch the Human Genome Project (HGP). His own genome was the fifth human genome ever to be fully sequenced, and he was the first person to make his DNA openly available to researchers. Beyond research, Church is also a serial entrepreneur, whose lab has helped launch more than 50 biotech companies.

However, recently, a research paper regarding anti-aging gene therapy coauthored with Church has been officially retracted by PNAS due to image data issues. This is the first retraction in Church’s career with 716 publications.

As early as 2023, this paper has already sparked discussion on PubPeer over duplicated images and questionable data, prompting two rounds of corrections. Church himself also underscored the issues were likely “carelessness rather than misconduct” and agreed to the retraction. However, another author Elizabeth Parrish, the CEO of American Biotechnology Gene Therapy Company BioViva, strongly opposed the retraction and claimed that this decision “hinders longevity technology to be public.”

A life’s first retraction

The retracted paper was published on PNAS in May 2022, focusing on BioViva-developed anti-aging gene therapy. This therapy utilized cytomegalovirus as a carrier in gene therapy, and adopted monthly inhalation or injection methods to treat aging-related decline.

Church is one of the joint corresponding authors of this paper and a science consultant for BioViva. The coauthor lists also include Elizabeth Parrish and other researchers from BioViva, as well as multiple researchers from Rutgers New Jersey Medical School.

Based on the author lineup and research content, this should have been a breakthrough research with both a solid scientific foundation and broad application prospects. However, just one year after publication, the paper was questioned and criticized.

In May 2023, a well-known academic anti-counterfeiting expert Elisabeth Bik raised questions on PubPeer, pointing out that two figures among a group of figures “seemingly display the same sample.”

Later, two corrigenda of the paper has been issued on August 2022 and July 2023, of which the first corrigendum updated conflict of interest disclosure and the second corrigendum explained the reason of figure repetition discovered by Bik, but did not mention the problem of supersaturation.

However, in 2024, Bik commented on PubPeer again, claiming that the newly corrected figures “appear to differ in resolution/compression from the originals” and asking the authors to clarify whether the data had been freshly generated or simply sourced from the original study. But her question remains unanswered.

Finally, in August this year, at the urging of Rutgers University, PNAS has now posted the official retraction notice.

This is the first retraction among Church’s 716 papers, which he co-authored with others.

Retraction ≠ Academic Misconduct

Will this retraction affect Church’s long-maintained academic reputation?

To the public, a retraction have become conflated with academic misconduct. Tim Kersjes, the Springer Nature’s Research Integrity Director, once proposed, “Retractions have a bad reputation. If an article gets retracted, it seems someone somewhere must have done something terribly wrong.”

In fact, such “stereotype” does not always conform to the actual situation, because a retraction sometimes does not end the academic path; rather, it also may act as a key step toward a researcher’s maturity.