Whipped Cream Difficulties

A while back, I linked to a story that claimed Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde filled tanks were giving off formaldehyde fumes at a level above the regulated exposure limit (5 parts per million when the exposure limit is 0.5 ppm).

Well. I was browsing Retraction Watch for unrelated reasons (looking for some information on another scientific scandal) when I discovered that one of the authors of that paper has retracted it.

I, the corresponding author, hereby wholly retract this Analytical Methods article. Further testing has been carried out and clear evidence was found that the reported findings presented are unreliable as a result of errors made in the data analysis.

So. Guess I owe Damien Hirst an apology. Sorry, Mr. Hirst.

But here’s the other funny thing: that retraction was written by one of the authors.

It should be noted that co-authors Gleb Zilberstein, Emmanuil Baskin, Uriel Maor and Roman Zilberstein do not agree to this retraction and the following author was contacted but did not respond: Shoumo Zhang.

Kind of makes you go “Hmmmmmmmmmm”, doesn’t it? But then a lot of stuff on Retraction Watch makes me go “Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm”.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 8th, 2016 at 6:56 pm and is filed under Art, Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.