Robert Weinberg

Research

He is best known for his discoveries of the first human oncogene Ras and the first tumor suppressor gene Rb^p. 371-381, which is partially documented in Natalie Angier′s book, Natural Obsessions, about her year spent in Weinberg's lab.

In the late 20th century, advances in genetics led to the discovery of over one hundred cancer cell types. Cancer cells were noted for their bewildering diversity. It was hard to identify the principles that cancers had in common.

He and Douglas Hanahan wrote the seminal paper, "The Hallmarks of Cancer", published in January 2000, that gave the six requirements for one renegade cell to cause a deadly cancer: In 2011, they published an updated review article entitled "Hallmarks of cancer: the next generation".

Weinberg is well known for both his cancer research and for his mentorship of many eminent scientists, including Tyler Jacks, Clifford Tabin and Cornelia Bargmann. He is currently studying cancer cell metastasis.

He is also the author of the textbook The Biology of Cancer published by Garland Science, as well as two important accounts intended for a wider audience: One Renegade Cell: How Cancer Begins (1999) (Science Masters Series); and Racing to the Beginning of the Road: The Search for the Origin of Cancer (1996).

Awards and honors

Weinberg won the National Medal of Science and the Keio Medical Science Prize in 1997. In 1999, he received the Albert Einstein World Award of Science in recognition of his valuable and pioneering contributions in the field of Biomedical Sciences and for his productive trajectory related to the genetic and molecular basis of neoplastic disease. He obtained the Wolf Prize in Medicine in 2004 (shared with Roger Y. Tsien), and he is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. In 2007 he received an honorary doctorate degree in commemoration of Linnaeus from Uppsala University. He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences since 1992. In 2009 he was presented the Hope Funds Award in Basic Research. In 2013 he was awarded the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for his work.

Retractions

To this day Weinberg has retracted five research papers where he is listed as a co-author. The retractions include one paper in Cell, one in Cancer Cell, two in Genes & Development and one in Cancer Research. The reasons given for these retractions remain obscure but appear to involve misconduct in the form of data manipulation that renders the published data invalid or false. For example, in the retracted Cell paper of 2009, the authors inform the readership that “original data were compiled from different replicate experiments in order to assemble the presented figure. The scope of the figure preparation issues includes compiling data from independent experiments to present them as one internally controlled experiment, statistical analyses based on technical replicates that are not reflective of the biological replicates, and comparisons of selectively chosen data points from multiple experiments.”