[0] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/16/reinhart-rogoff-aus...
Judging academically, the original paper and the refuting paper is a healthy debate, but the dynamic of the society and politics ab-use them to attack a whole school of thought at large (the austrian school: less bailout, less intervention by government, less control over everything) in favor of keynesian school (more bailout, more government spending, more public debt, especially in recession and crisis).
Anyway, it remains a controversy, because theoretically one can do what one wants, but once it involves policy and real life matters, it is hard to argue for what method is right and what is wrong, in the presence of so many (ready to b angry) interest groups.
I agree that from a purely academic point of view this is nothing big to worry about, but this paper played a completely outsized role. And the authors stood by and let things run their course, without any attempt to reign in or moderate the debate.
http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/worki...
You're not wrong, and it's not limited to bioinformatics; Reinhart-Rogoff's findings were reversed when an additional 5 rows were included in a spreadsheet they used to calculate their correlation between GDP growth and debt ratios. And of course, they insist that despite the actual outcome being twice as strong and in the opposite direction, they still support their original position.
I wonder if one can get a CS PhD by producing enough retractions. Of course, it won't win you many friends in the academy, and would probably lead to less source code made available. But given the Perl code I've seen published who's termination condition is a divide-by-zero exception, one can argue that peer review in the information age has to include code review.