Ecstasy Paper Retracted

I remember when this paper came out in Science, claiming that a "typical night's dose" of ecstasy could cause brain damage. I didn't give it much credence because the study managed to kill 20% of the monkeys they tested on, and two others weren't even given the full dose because they showed signs of severe distress. I simply assumed that this meant that monkeys weren't a good model for human response to ecstasy.

Turns out, the authors of the paper have now retracted it, because the monkeys weren't actually given ecstasy at all. They were given speed.

You would think that a scientist publishing this kind of paper would realize that something just wasn't quite right about their results. You would think that even if the scientist didn't realize something was up, at least the reviewers or editors of the journal would. But the fact is that it's quite common for the large science journals to be less rigorous than you'd expect. They're big because they're popular, and they're popular because they're controversial, not because they're authoritative. The ecstasy paper was published mainly because it was shocking.