THE name of William Nelson-Rees is enough to strike terror into the hearts of many older US biomedical researchers. Throughout the 1970s, he pursued a curious but highly effective crusade. Cell cultures, it had just been found, could be ruined by contamination with fast-growing cells. Nelson-Rees made it his mission to unearth cell lines that had been spoilt.
He exposed dozens of cases where researchers, even in prestigious labs, had failed to authenticate their cells and so published meaningless work estimated to have cost more than $10 million. His campaign, which was vitriolic and generated massive bad feeling, derailed careers and tainted labs.
A bizarre career choice perhaps, but Nelson-Rees鈥檚 reasoning was sound. Cell cultures were (and still are) a mainstay for testing vaccines, studying cancer and much more. He reasoned that researchers who did not check their cells were wasting money, holding back progress and producing potentially dangerous results.
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Today, such sloppy behaviour would not be tolerated. Or would it? A conference this week heard that corrupted cell lines are alive and well. Estimates suggest that up to 1 in 5 experiments in fields such as microbiology and cancer employ the wrong cells (see 鈥淚mpostor cells are wrecking research鈥�).
This is scandalous. Have we learned nothing in the past two decades? Even when cell lines are 鈥渙uted鈥� for being contaminated, some researchers persist in using them as though they were pristine and put their names to papers about them. What makes today鈥檚 situation so ridiculous is that we have the ideal technology for validating cell types: DNA fingerprinting, which in the UK costs no more than 拢200 a pop. Not to test is a false economy when the alternative is months or years of wasted work.
But this simple precaution is still not standard practice. In which case it is hard to see why journal editors, who normally take great pains to avoid fraud and inaccuracy in their publications, do not insist that researchers test their cell lines before their papers are published. This would go a long way to stopping the problem dead.
A more thorny issue is how to purge the existing literature of papers based on dodgy cell lines. There are doubtless researchers who suspect that their work is tainted but are reluctant to check and retract their papers if needed. It may be a vain hope, but we need some way to encourage people to own up.
A concerted effort must come from biological societies, funding agencies and heads of labs to halt what is a preventable problem. Without it, a question mark will always hang over biomedical research. If no one acts, the only solution will be for national research agencies to set up posts to continue Nelson-Rees鈥檚 crusade. But nobody wants a witch-hunt.