"Expired Curcumin Retraction" is my new band-name

We can blame Robert Louis Stevenson for the idea that ebullient concoctions only work if one of the ingredients is contaminated.

My provision of the salt, which had never been renewed since the date of the first experiment, began to run low. I sent out for a fresh supply, and mixed the draught; the ebullition followed, and the first change of colour, not the second; I drank it and it was without efficiency. You will learn from Poole how I have had London ransacked; it was in vain; and I am now persuaded that my first supply was impure, and that it was that unknown impurity which lent efficacy to the draught.
About a week has passed, and I am now finishing this statement under the influence of the last of the old powders.

When the passage of time and long alternations of temperature have wrought unknown and irreproducible mutations of molecular structure, then a repeat preparation may follow the exact recipe -- but if it uses fresh, untransformed ingredients then the outcome does not assuage the cravings for the original batch, nor reverse the degenerative bodymelt caused by withdrawal.

Arthur Machen reinforced the precedent and embedded it in the fabric of reality (for such are the workings of Narrativium and the morphogenic field).

So much for my personal explanation. You sent me, Haberden, a phial, stoppered and sealed, containing a small quantity of flaky white powder, obtained from a chemist who has been dispensing it to one of your patients. I am not surprised to hear that this powder refused to yield any results to your analysis. It is a substance which was known to a few many hundred years ago, but which I never expected to have submitted to me from the shop of a modern apothecary.
There seems no reason to doubt the truth of the man's tale; he no doubt got, as he says, the rather uncommon salt you prescribed from the wholesale chemist's, and it has probably remained on his shelf for twenty years, or perhaps longer. Here what we call chance and coincidence begin to work; during all these years the salt in the bottle was exposed to certain recurring variations of temperature, variations probably ranging from 40° to 80°. And, as it happens, such changes, recurring year after year at irregular intervals, and with varying degrees of intensity and duration, have constituted a process, and a process so complicated and so delicate, that I question whether modern scientific apparatus directed with the utmost precision could produce the same result.

Tainted Past-use-by-date Utopium

As the morphogenic field intensifies, the phenomenon finds its way into mainstream science... which was bad luck for Jiao et al. (2017).

the corresponding author ... notified the editorial office that the curcumin used in this study was expired at the time of use. The authors expressed concern that this may have affected the results of the MTT assays and microarray expression experiments reported in the article; they are unable to repeat the experiments at this time. Due to concerns about the validity of the data and results reported in this work, the authors and the PLOS ONE Editors retract this article.

In other news, I would pay many quatloos for a Stevenson / Poe mash-up novel, "The Strange Method of Dr Jeckyll and Professor Fether".