Here’s a question I’ve heard a few times: why don’t we at NN, or any of the Nature journals, strip the author names off a manuscript before sending it out to peer review? This process, where not only the referees remain anonymous to the authors, but where also the authors might remain anonymous to the referees, is termed “double-blind peer review”, and is practiced by some specialized biomedical journals. Recently, a group of young scientists published a plea to adopt “DBPR”. A 1990 study published in JAMA concluded that DBPR improved the outcome of peer review; nevertheless JAMA itself has not adopted DBPR.

When confronted with the question, I tend to reply that DBPR simply wouldn’t work for NN, because most reviewers would find it easy to guess the authors of a manuscript before them. After all, before you submit a paper to us, you have typically already presented a good part of the data to the community in the form of meeting posters, invited talks, etc. Also, authors tend to extensively cite their own previous work… My dialogue partners usually agree with these arguments, but still – DBPR would be easy to implement, so why not go ahead, even if it “worked” only some of the time?

Good question… I’d be very interested in hearing your opinions on this subject!

Kessaris et al., Competing waves of oligodendrocytes in the forebrain and postnatal elimination of an embryonic lineage

Takano et al., Astrocyte-mediated control of cerebral blood flow

Wong et al., Retinoic acid receptor 2 promotes functional regeneration of sensory axons in the spinal cord

Comments welcome!

We normally publish new papers online every Sunday, but none have gone up this week. Like the interruption to the blog over the weekend, this is because of our office move. We were planning to get new papers up today, but now we’re tripped up by the strike that’s shuttered the New York City public transit system – we cannot even get to our new office!

Good thing this blog is about neuroscience… else I’d be talking at length about what I think of a strike that keeps an eight million metropolis hostage the week before Christmas and Hanukkah…

In any case, we’ll get the new papers up as soon as we can. Sorry to keep you waiting.

I must admit I’m in “shock and awe” over the slow-motion implosion of the stem cell breakthroughs reported just months ago by Woo Suk Hwang’s lab in South Korea, and their collaborators. At this point, it seems nobody really understands what exactly went wrong, and certainly nobody knows if any part of the group’ s landmark May 2005 Science paper will stand.

First their ethics in procuring human egg cells came under scrutiny, precipitated by Pittsburgh co-author Gerald Schatten’s very sudden and very public declaration in November to sever his collaboration with the Koreans. Personally, I wasn’t too worried about these allegations, given that egg donors in the West are routinely paid to undergo the donation procedure for fertility clinic purposes. I remember well the regular ads in student papers that offered large sums of money for the eggs of those super SAT score high achievers…

But now the data reported in that paper are also under suspicion and, shockingly, the authors cannot produce the 11 cloned human stem cells lines they reported. A fungal contamination killed them, says Hwang, but some cell lines may yet be stored frozen, and could be used to verify their claims. We shall see… Hwang’s collaborator (and co-author on the paper!) Sung Il Roh has in television interviews (!!) alleged last week that data for the landmark Science paper were fabricated and possibly no cloned stem cell lines were ever derived from patients.

Both Science and Nature have put up timelines on their websites (here and here), where anyone interested can try to untangle the mess for themselves.

The most reasonable voice last week came from a group surrounding Dolly-the-sheep creator Ian Wilmut, who in a letter to Science offer to analyze the Hwang group’s cell lines as a means of independent verification. Of course, at this point it is not clear whether there are any cell lines left for them to analyze! Hwang and Schatten have asked Science to retract the paper, but still need to collect signatures from all their 25 or so co-authors…

The fallout of this disaster, for stem cell research and its public support, will be huge – not only in Korea.

Due to servers moving to a new building, “Action Potential” will be unavailable from Friday afternoon through Sunday evening Eastern Time, December 16th through 18th. We’ll be back on Monday. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Fox et al., Coherent spontaneous activity accounts for trial-to-trial variability in human evoked brain responses

Tanaka, Inactivation of the central thalamus delays self-timed saccades

Bermingham et al., The claw paw mutation reveals a role for Lgi4 in peripheral nerve development

Duff et al., Development of shared information in communication despite hippocampal amnesia

Hiramoto & Hiromi, ROBO directs axon crossing of segmental boundaries by suppressing responsiveness to relocalized Netrin

Liu et al., CaM kinase II phosphorylation of slo Thr107 regulates activity and ethanol responses of BK channels

Morgan et al., Axons and dendrites originate from neuroepithelial-like processes of retinal bipolar cells

Comments welcome.