Responsibility for truth in research

Abstract

For over half a century, cell cultures derived from animals and humans have served researchers in various fields. To this day, cross-contamination of cultures has plagued many researchers, often leading to mistaken results, retractions of results, cover-ups and some out-and-out falsification of data and results following inadvertent use of the wrong cells. Also, during years of examining cultures for purity we learned that many virologists were not too concerned about the specificity of the cultures they used to propagate the particular virus under study as long as the substrate (whatever it might have been) gave optimal virus yield. Polio virus propagates in primate cells, and much research has involved cells from man and various species of primates. In the 1950s a large number of chimpanzees were held in captivity in Africa for extensive studies of the efficacy of polio vaccine in production at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia and elsewhere. Chimpanzee tissues, particularly kidneys, were thus readily available and could have also provided substrates for polio virus production, since little was known about the purity of substrates and little attention was paid to their specificity at that time.