Category: robert schwarzenbacher

A partial retraction appears for former Salzburg crystallographer who admitted misconduct

j imm april 2013A paper by a crystallographer fired from his university for misconduct has been partially retracted.

Last year, we covered the case of Robert Schwarzenbacher, formerly of Salzburg University. Schwarzenbacher had provided the crystallographic data for a paper in the Journal of Immunology, but those results raised questions with another crystallographer and prompted an investigation by the university.  Schwarzenbacher admitted he’d committed misconduct, although he recanted at one point, and was eventually fired.

Now, the authors have retracted the crystallographic data from the Journal of Immunology paper. Here’s the partial retraction, which is listed as a correction:
Continue reading A partial retraction appears for former Salzburg crystallographer who admitted misconduct

Salzburg University fires crystallographer Robert Schwarzenbacher for faking data in Journal of Immunology paper

Robert Schwarzenbacher

The crystallographer who confessed to data fabrication that has forced the retraction of a structure in a Journal of Immunology paper on birch pollen allergen — but later recanted — has been fired by the University of Salzburg.

Robert Schwarzenbacher, 39, was awarded a 1.7 million-euro Marie Curie fellowship, the highest individual European research award, six years ago. According to Salzburg’s ORF.at: Continue reading Salzburg University fires crystallographer Robert Schwarzenbacher for faking data in Journal of Immunology paper

Protein structure retracted after investigation into “highly improbable features,” journal calls it fraud

In 2010, a group of crystallographers immunologists and allergy researchers at the University of Salzburg published a paper in the Journal of Immunology claiming to have derived the structure of a birch pollen allergen.

That structure, however, caught the attention of Bernhard Rupp, an eminent crystallographer. In January of this year, Rupp submitted a paper to Acta Crystallographica Section F pointing out problems with it, which prompted the editors of the crystallography journal to contact the authors of the original paper a month later. Those authors, it turns out, agreed with Rupp, they write in a response to his paper published in the April 2012 issue of Acta Crystallographica Section F: Continue reading Protein structure retracted after investigation into “highly improbable features,” journal calls it fraud