In 2004, Hwang Woo-suk was celebrated for his groundbreaking discovery of 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.
Retractions appear frequently in the news. The high-profile discovery of the room-temperature superconductor was retracted on November 7, 2023. On July 19, 2023, a series of retreats ousted the president of Stanford University. The first major studies on COVID-19 turned out to have serious data problems and were withdrawn on June 4, 2020.
Retractions are often framed negatively: as science not working properly, as an embarrassment for the institutions involved, or as a flaw in the peer review process. All these things can happen. But they can also be part of the story that science works the right way: finding and correcting errors and publicly acknowledging information when it turns out to be wrong.
A much more dangerous problem arises when information cannot and cannot be retrieved. There are many seemingly authoritative sources that contain flawed information. Sometimes flawed information is intentional, but sometimes it is not; After all, making mistakes is human. Often there is no correction or retraction mechanism, meaning that information known to be inaccurate remains on the books without any indication of fault.
As a patent and intellectual property law expert, I have found this to be a particularly pernicious problem with government information, which is generally considered a reliable source of data but is error-prone and often lacks any means to retract the information.
Patent fictions and fraud
Think of patents and documents that contain many technical details that can be useful to scientists. There is no way to withdraw the patent. And patents often contain errors: Although patents are reviewed by an expert examiner before they are issued, examiners do not check whether the scientific data in the patent is accurate.
In fact, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office allows patent holders to include fictional experiments and data in their patents. This practice, called prophetic examples, is common; Approximately 25% of life sciences patents involve fictional experiments. The patent office requires that prophetic examples be written in the present or future tense, while actual experiments can be written in the past tense. However, this is confusing to non-experts, including scientists, who tend to assume that a statement such as “X and Y are mixed at 300 degrees to obtain a 95% yield rate” indicates an actual experiment.
Almost a decade after Science retracted its journal article claiming cloned human cells, Dr. Hwang was granted a US patent on his discovery, which was withdrawn. Unlike the journal article, this patent has not been 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 made public – and there is no indication on the face of the patent that it contained information that had been retracted elsewhere.
This is not an anomaly. In a similar example, former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes holds a patent for completely debunked claims for a small device that can quickly perform many tests on a small blood sample. Some of these patents were granted long after the Theranos scam made headlines in major newspapers.
Long lasting bad information
Such overlooked false data can be deeply misleading to readers. The retraction system in scientific journals is not immune from criticism, but it compares favorably with the alternative of non-retraction. Without a retraction, readers wouldn’t know they were looking at misinformation.
My colleague Soomi Kim and I conducted a study on patent-paper pairs. We looked at cases where the same information was published in a journal article and a patent by the same scientists, and then the journal article was retracted. While there was a rapid decline in citations to articles after the article was retracted, we found that there was no decrease in citations to patents containing the same misinformation.
This is probably because scientific journals draw a big red “retracted” notice on retracted articles online, informing the reader that the information is false. In contrast, patents have no revocation mechanism, so misinformation continues to spread.
There are many other examples where seemingly authoritative information is known to be false. 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 information about drugs produced by drug manufacturers and released without any evaluation by the FDA.
Consequences of not withdrawing
Not being able to easily correct misinformation also has economic consequences. The Food and Drug Administration publishes a list of patents covering brand-name drugs. The FDA will not approve a generic drug unless the generic manufacturer can show that every patent covering that drug is not expired, infringed, or invalid.
The problem is that the patent list is created by brand-name drug manufacturers, who have an incentive to list patents that do not actually cover their own drugs. Doing so increases the burden on generic drug manufacturers. The list is not controlled by the FDA or anyone else, and there is little mechanism by which anyone other than the brand 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 made in a timely manner. “Markets don’t tend to react 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 this. But there are steps that will almost certainly help. One relatively simple one is for trusted data sources, such as the government, to follow in the footsteps of scientific journals and create a mechanism to retract erroneous information.
This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent, nonprofit news organization providing facts and analysis to help you understand our complex world.
Written by: Janet Freilich, Fordham University.
Read more:
Janet Freilich does not work for, consult, own shares in, or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond her academic duties.