A former postdoc at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) committed misconduct in a study of hepatitis by falsely claiming that data from a single trial subject were actually from more than a dozen different people, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) has found.
The investigation was prompted by allegations made by readers of the paper. Baoyan Xu made what the ORI called “a limited admission” that “some better looking strips were repeatedly used as representatives for several times [sic].”
According to a report of the ORI’s findings to be published in the Federal Register tomorrow, the paper, “Hybrid DNA virus in Chinese patients with seronegative hepatitis discovered by deep sequencing, published earlier this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS):
involves a Western blot analysis of IgM and IgG antibodies from Chinese subjects in patients with non-A-E hepatitis and control subjects to test reactivity towards a newly discovered virus. Analysis of Figure 6 of the published paper and Figure S4 of the online supplemental information identified thirteen pairs of Western blot bands which had a common origin yet were labeled as from different subjects and usually as detecting a different class of immunoglobulin.
The paper has been cited twice, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. It was a direct submission with a prearranged editor.
Xu, now at the Institute of Infectious Diseases, Southwest Hospital, Third Military Medical University, Chonqing, China, worked in Neal Young‘s lab. She agreed to supervision of any NIH-funded research for three years, and to not serve on any peer review committees for the same period of time.
Of potential interest to Retraction Watch readers: Young was the corresponding author of a 2008 paper with John Ioannidis and Omar Al-Ubaydli, “Why Current Publication Practices May Distort Science.”
Update, 4 p.m. Eastern, 12/31/13: Young forwarded our questions about why the paper was being corrected, rather than retracted, and whether any other papers would be affected, to the NIH, which tells us:
While the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) take issues of data falsification very seriously, following a review by the NIH and ORI, it was determined that Dr. Xu’s contribution to the paper did not in any way effect the overall findings of the research. Since the findings still stand, only a correction is necessary and other papers should not be affected.
Finding new virus sequence using Next Gen sequencing = not difficult (mail it in).
Proving new virus causes disease = hard work. Requires real science skills, like western blots (current example), epi, etc. Not to mention fulfilling Koch’s Postulates.
It does get worse:
http://jvi.asm.org/content/87/22/11966.short
“The finding of laboratory contamination as the origin of PHV suggests that NIH-CQV, which shares 100% amino acid identity with PHV, is most likely also a laboratory contaminant.”
“Xu, now at the Institute of Infectious Diseases, Southwest Hospital, Third Military Medical University, Chonqing, China” . Look at where she is now! Why would she care about not being able to apply for NIH funding anyway??? Plus, the penalty of not being allowed to sit on highly rewarding peer-review panels must be really unbearable for her.
If you look at the “prearranged editor” for this PNAS paper, you will see that he is also an investigator at the NIH. Makes me wonder whether there is also some “conflict of interest” issue here … and may be a little bit too “generous reviewing” from the side of the journal. The “prearranged editor” submissions to PNAS are unfortunately still not real “direct submissions” and are frequently prone to less critical reviews …
The Supporting Information for the Xu et al. paper is helpful enough to specify which kit was used for their viral DNA preps. Surprise, surprise…it was the same QIAamp MinElute kit that was found to be contaminated…