Journal editors know that press coverage can burnish a journal’s reputation. Scientists, in turn, like to have their work cited in the news media because it helps draw attention to their fields and raise money. And science journalists, competing for space with political and sports news, welcome astounding claims without always kicking the tires as hard as necessary. These factors sometimes combine to give substantial publicity to scientific claims that may not fully deserve such attention.  The Boston University study was widely reported, uncritically in many cases, after Science held a press conference about it last week. Reviews from geneticists were less enthusiastic.  “I think it is very unlikely indeed that the findings in the Science paper are correct, or even mostly correct,” David B. Goldstein, a geneticist at Duke University, wrote last week in an e-mail message.  “I am pretty surprised that Science carried it,” he added. “And I think this also raises an interesting, more general point, which is how the press ought to handle stuff when there are serious questions about the security of the finding.”  Another expert, Dr. David Altshuler of Massachusetts General Hospital, explained that using different types of gene chips to scan the genome, as the Boston University researchers had done with their centenarians, was widely recognized as a source of possible problems.  By Tuesday, another critic, Dr. Kari Stefansson of the gene-finding company Decode Genetics in Iceland, had identified what seemed to him to be the specific problem. One of the two kinds of chip used by the Boston researchers, called the Illumina 610, attributes a less common form of a gene to having come from both parents instead of just one, Dr. Stefansson said. He calculated that if only 10 percent of the Boston centenarians had been typed with this chip, it would have made the genetic variants appear associated with longevity even though they were not.  The Boston team did not report in its article how many patients had been typed with which chip. But responding to a request, Paola Sebastiani, the group’s statistician, said in an e-mail message that 108 of the 1,055 centenarians had been tested with the Illumina 610 array, almost exactly the 10 percent that Dr. Stefansson had predicted.  Dr. Sebastiani said that “the problem should be limited to the top two SNPs,” referring to the genetic variants the team found to be associated with extreme longevity.  “The conclusions of this analysis, even if one or two SNPs have bad genotype data, are not going to change,” she said.  Dr. Stefansson, however, believes the problem affects all the results, including the 33 genetic variants that the Boston University team said had been confirmed in a second study. “It is absolutely clear that there is nothing to this,” he said.  Scientific journals cannot guarantee the truth of the reports they publish, but they do try to weed out obvious error by submitting manuscripts to expert reviewers. Dr. Sebastiani said she had performed extra analyses that “were suggested by the anonymous reviewers of the article, who were then satisfied with the results.”  But whether because the reviewers were not rigorous enough, or because Science’s editors ignored their cautions, the result was a publication that leading experts felt had not been sufficiently scrutinized. “Accurate typing of the associated SNPs should have been required, and hence there is a very specific failing in the review process,” Dr. Goldstein said.  A version of this article appears in print on July 9, 2010, on Page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Scientists Criticize Study On Genetics of Old Age. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
They said an article in the journal Science saying that a test could predict who would live to extreme old age was probably incorrect.