In 2004, Hwang Woo-suk was celebrated for his groundbreaking discovery in creating cloned human embryos, and his work was published in the prestigious journal Science. But the discovery was too good to be true; Dr. Hwang had fabricated the data. Science publicly retracted the paper and assembled a team to investigate what went wrong.
Withdrawals are regularly in the news. The high-profile discovery of a room-temperature superconductor was retracted on November 7, 2023. A series of retractions brought down the president of Stanford University on July 19, 2023. Large early studies of COVID-19 were found to have serious data problems. and withdrawn on June 4, 2020.
Retractions are generally viewed negatively: because the science is not working properly, as an embarrassment for the institutions involved, or as an error in the peer review process. It could be any of those things. But they can also be part of a story about science working the right way: finding and correcting errors, and publicly acknowledging when information turns out to be incorrect.
A much more damaging problem arises when information cannot be withdrawn and cannot be withdrawn. There are many seemingly authoritative sources that contain flawed information. Sometimes the lack of information is intentional, but sometimes it is not. After all, to make mistakes is human. Often there is no correction or retraction mechanism, meaning information known to be wrong remains on the books without any indication of its flaws.
As a patent and intellectual property lawyer, I have found this to be a particularly damaging problem with government information, which is often considered a source of reliable data but is prone to errors and often has no means of retracting the information .
Patent fictions and fraud
Think of patents, documents that contain many technical details that can be useful to scientists. There is no way to revoke a patent. And patents often contain errors: Although patents are reviewed by an expert examiner before they are granted, examiners do not check whether the scientific data in the patent is correct.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office allows patent holders to include fictional experiments and data in patents. This practice, called prophetic examples, is common; approximately 25% of life sciences patents contain fictional experiments. The patent office requires that prophetic examples be written in the present or future tense, while real experiments can be written in the past tense. But this is confusing to non-specialists, including scientists, who tend to assume that a sentence like “X and Y are mixed at 300 degrees to achieve 95% efficiency” indicates a real experiment.
Nearly a decade after Science retracted the journal article claiming there were cloned human cells, Dr. Hwang has a US patent revoked on his discovery. Unlike the magazine article, this patent has not been revoked. The patent office did not investigate the accuracy of the data – in fact, it granted the patent long after the data’s inaccuracy was publicly acknowledged – and there is no indication on the face of the patent that it contains information that has been withdrawn elsewhere .
This is not an anomaly. In a similar example, Elizabeth Holmes, the former – now jailed – CEO of Theranos, holds patents on her thoroughly discredited claims for a small device that could quickly run many tests on a small blood sample. Some of those patents were granted long after Theranos fraud made headlines.
Long-lived bad information
This kind of under-the-radar misinformation can be very misleading to readers. The system of retractions in scientific journals is not without criticism, but compares favorably with the alternative of no retractions. Without retractions, readers won’t know when they are looking at incorrect information.
My colleague Soomi Kim and I conducted a study on patent paper pairs. We looked at cases where the same information had been published by the same scientists in a journal article and in a patent, and the journal article had subsequently been retracted. We found that although the number of citations to articles dropped sharply after the article was retracted, there was no decrease in the number of citations to patents with the exact same incorrect information.
This probably happened because scientific journals place a big red ‘retracted’ notice on retracted articles online, informing the reader that the information is incorrect. Patents, on the other hand, have no revocation mechanism, so misinformation continues to spread.
There are many other cases where authoritative information is known to be incorrect. The Environmental Protection Agency publishes emissions data provided by companies but not reviewed by the agency. Similarly, the Food and Drug Administration disseminates official-looking drug information generated by drug manufacturers and posted without FDA review.
Consequences of failure to withdraw
There are also economic consequences if incorrect information cannot be easily corrected. The Food and Drug Administration publishes a list of patents covering brand-name drugs. The FDA will not approve a generic drug unless the manufacturer of the generic drug has demonstrated that any patent covering the drug in question has expired, is not infringed, or is invalid.
The problem is that the list of patents is generated by the manufacturers of branded drugs, who have an incentive to list patents that don’t actually cover their drugs. This increases the burden on generic drug manufacturers. The list is not controlled by the FDA or anyone else, and there are few mechanisms by which anyone other than the brand name manufacturer can tell the FDA to remove a patent from the list.
Even if retractions are possible, they are only effective if readers pay attention to them. Financial data is sometimes withdrawn and corrected, but the revisions are not timely. “Markets tend not to respond to revisions,” Paul Donovan, chief economist at UBS Global Wealth Management, told the Wall Street Journal, referring to governments revising gross domestic product figures.
Misinformation is a growing problem. There are no easy answers to solve it. But there are steps that would almost certainly help. A relatively simple solution is for reliable data sources, such as government ones, to follow the lead of scientific journals and create a mechanism to retract misinformation.
This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit organization providing facts and analysis to help you understand our complex world.
It was written by: Janet Freilich, Fordham University.
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Janet Freilich does not work for, consult with, own shares in, or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.