I went to check one citation. It took me back to 1896.
Along the way: a receptor-binding value for THCA that cannabinoid reviews have cited for a decade, which no one can reconstruct — including the scientist whose paper it's attributed to. Two reviews cite it. They don't agree on what the number is.
It started as a routine citation check on a different paper.
The 2006 paper the number traces to is an immunology study. Its own title says the effects it measured aren't mediated by CB1 or CB2, and it contains no binding data at all. The assay behind the number was outsourced, and neither its data nor its method was ever published. In 2017, John McPartland did what no one else in the chain did: he wrote to the original author and asked. She answered honestly — she couldn't recall even which radioligand had been used. He printed her answer as a footnote. The number kept circulating anyway.
Here's the part worth a second look: this isn't a story about a bad scientist. Read one at a time, nearly every study in the THCA/CB1 "contradictory literature" is an honest report of what its authors measured. The instability came later, in how the record was assembled and re-cited. McPartland is the model here, not the cautionary tale.
The piece doesn't argue that THCA binds CB1. It argues that the literature cited to say it doesn't hasn't been checked closely enough to support that conclusion. It traces the pattern back to 1896 — the first cannabinoid ever isolated carried the wrong molecular formula for three years — proposes a six-category taxonomy separating dissonance in the science from dissonance introduced at the citation layer, and closes with a citation and assay-reporting standard to keep it from recurring.
While building PaperPup, before this was a paper, I wrote myself a note: most dissonance is terminological drift, measurement error, or a field that already knows. Traced all the way back, this one held.
End of the day, everyone had something right.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22683281
ScientificResearch #OpenScience #ResearchIntegrity #HistoryOfScience #Cannabinoids #Pharmacology #THCA #Endocannabinoid