A pharmacy researcher who left the University of Pennsylvania sometime last year has been found guilty of research misconduct in multiple federal grant applications and five published papers, four of which have already been retracted.
As we have reported, William Armstead, who is retired from Penn, was working among other things on the effects of brain injury on piglets – experiments in which the animals were slaughtered. He has had seven papers retracted, and The Philadelphia Inquirer reported in September that he had left the university. Penn did not respond to several requests for comment when we attempted to reach officials there about Armstead’s work.
According to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity, much of that work appears to have been suspect:
ORI found that Respondent engaged in research misconduct by knowingly and intentionally falsifying and/or fabricating fifty-one (51) figures and the methods, data, results, and conclusions reporting on the effects of various vasoactive agents on the neurologic response to traumatic brain injury in piglets of different ages and genders in the following five (5) published papers, one (1) unpublished manuscript, one (1) review article, three (3) posters, three (3) grant applications submitted for PHS funds, and four (4) NIH grant progress reports …
Armstead, who has been part of NIH grants totaling $7.7 million during his career according to NIH records, has agreed to a seven-year ban on U.S. federal funding, as well as from serving as an advisor or consultant to the Public Health Service, which includes NIH peer review committees.
The notice states he also agreed to retraction of a fifth paper, “Translational approach towards determining the role of cerebral autoregulation in outcome after traumatic brain injury,” which appeared in Experimental Neurology in 2019.
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” . . . in piglets of different ages and genders in the following five (5) published papers . . . ”
So how many “genders” do piglets have, exactly. One? Two? 150?
Too bad to see that wokeism has infected even the ORI to the extent that they cannot simply say, “in piglets of different ages and sexes in the following . . .” or better yet, “in male and female piglets of different ages in the following . . . “.
The ORI simply makes a fool of themselves when they play these kind of semantic games.
Looks a lot more like you’re obsessing over this for no reason
Indeed.
“Woke” ??? is “smoke” . . . if only because the content of the Federal Register Notice is always verbatim of what you can easily see on ORI’s website. From my past experience, the details reported there reveal an impressive amount of work!
Male, female, castrated
It is sad that the only concern this person has is whether ORI’s comments are “woke” or not. The important issue is that someone fabricated figures in a study, and that is called “misconduct”.
As long as we focus on what is irrelevant or not even true (“wokeism”) we continue to move backwards.