by In 2004, Hwang Woo-suk was celebrated for his breakthrough discovery that created cloned human embryos, and his work was published in the prestigious journal Science. But the discovery was too good to be true; The details were made by Dr. Hwang. Science publicly retracted the article and assembled a team to investigate what happened.
Retractions are often in the news. The high-profile discovery of a room-temperature superconductor was retracted on November 7, 2023. A series of retractions hit the president of Stanford University on July 19, 2023. Early major studies of COVID-19 were found to have serious data problems and were retracted on the 4 June 2020.
Retractions are usually negative: as science that doesn’t work properly, as an embarrassment to the institutions involved, or as a flaw in the peer review process. They can be all of those things. But they can be part of the story of science doing the right thing: finding and correcting errors, and publicly admitting when the information turns out to be wrong.
A much worse problem occurs when information is not, and cannot, be withdrawn. Many apparently authoritative sources contain faulty information. Sometimes the information is deliberately flawed, but sometimes it isn’t – after all, to err is human. Often, there is no mechanism for correction or retraction, meaning that information known to be incorrect remains on the books with no indication of its flaws.
As a scholar of patent and intellectual property law, I have found this to be a particularly pernicious problem with government information, which is often considered a reliable source of data but is prone to errors and often has no means to withdraw the information.
Patent fiction and fraud
Think of patents, documents that contain a lot of technical data that could be useful to scientists. There is no way to withdraw 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.
In fact, the US Patent and Trademark Office allows patents to include fictional experiments and data in patents. This practice, called prophetic examples, is common; about 25% of life sciences patents contain fictional experiments. The patent office requires prophetic examples to be written in the present or future tense and real experiments can be written in the past tense. But this is confusing for nonspecialists, including scientists, who tend to assume that a phrase like “X and Y mixed at 300 degrees to achieve a 95% yield rate” represents a real experiment.
Almost ten years after Science retracted the journal article claiming cloned human cells, Dr. Hwang withdrew the US patent on his discovery. Unlike the journal article, this patent was not withdrawn. The patent office did not investigate the accuracy of the data – in fact, it granted the patent long after the inaccuracy of the data was publicly acknowledged – and there is no indication on the face of the patent that it contains information that was withdrawn elsewhere.
This is no anomaly. In a similar example, former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes – who is now in prison – has patents on what she claims is a small device that can quickly perform many tests on a small blood sample. Some of those patents were granted long after the Theranos fraud dominated major newspapers.
A lifetime of bad knowledge
This type of misinformation about the radar can be very misleading to readers. The retractions system in scientific journals is not without its critics, but it compares favorably with the alternative of no retractions. Without retractions, readers don’t know when they’re looking at incorrect information.
My colleague Soomi Kim and I studied pairs of patent papers. We looked at cases where the same information was published in a journal article and in a patent by the same scientists, and the journal paper was subsequently retracted. We found that while the number of citations to papers dropped significantly after the paper was retracted, citations to patents with the same incorrect information did not.
This is probably because scientific journals paint a big red “retraction” notice on retracted articles online, informing the reader that the information is incorrect. In contrast, patents have no revocation mechanism, so misinformation continues to spread.
There are many other cases where information that looks authoritative turns out to be wrong. The Environmental Protection Agency publishes emissions data provided by companies but not reviewed by the agency. Similarly, the Food and Drug Administration disseminates official drug information generated by drug manufacturers and posted without FDA evaluation.
Consequences of non-withdrawals
There are also economic consequences when misinformation cannot be easily corrected. The Food and Drug Administration publishes a list of patents covering brand name drugs. The FDA will only approve a generic drug if the generic manufacturer has demonstrated that all patents covering the drug in question have expired, are not infringed or invalid.
The problem is that the list of patents is generated by the brand-name drug manufacturers, who have an incentive to list patents that do not actually cover their drugs. This increases the burden on generic drug manufacturers. Neither the FDA nor anyone else checks the list, and there is little mechanism for anyone other than the brand name manufacturer to tell the FDA to remove a patent from the list.
Even when retractions are possible, they are only effective when readers pay attention to them. Sometimes financial data is withdrawn and corrected, but the revisions are not made in a timely manner. “Markets don’t tend 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 will almost certainly help. A fairly simple one is for reliable sources of data such as those from the government to follow the lead of scientific journals and create a mechanism to retract erroneous information.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a non-profit, independent news organization that brings you facts and analysis to help you make sense of 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 does not she has disclosed any relevant connections beyond her academic appointment.
