Piero Anversa, a former star researcher at Harvard Medical School who left the institution under a cloud, is up to 18 retractions. But that’s barely half of the 31 papers by Anversa’s group that Harvard has requested journals pull over concerns about the integrity of the findings.
The two articles, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, appeared in 2008 and 2009. Anversa and a frequent co-author, Annarosa Leri, are among the authors on each.
Anversa ran a richly-funded lab at Brigham and Women’s Hospital studying cardiac stem cells. But in 2014, critics began publicly questioning the output from the lab — questions that led to the departure of Anversa and Leri and a $10 million payout from the Brigham and Partners Healthcare to settle allegations of fraud involving the work. Anversa and Leri also sued Harvard — unsuccessfully — for alerting journals to the investigation and allegedly costing them job offers.
The retraction notice for the 2008 paper, “Notch1 regulates the fate of cardiac progenitor cells,” reads:
The editors wish to note that, based on the recommendation of Harvard Medical School (HMS) and Brigham and Woman’s Hospital (BWH), we are retracting this paper. The HMS and BWH review of images contained in publications from the P.A. laboratory found that Fig. 1H appears to have examples of minor adjustments in cell location, and Fig. 3H appears to include examples of different layers added to the final image.
The paper has been cited 147 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
The notice for the 2009 paper, “Identification of a coronary vascular progenitor cell in the human heart,” is similar:
The editors wish to note that, based on the recommendation of Harvard Medical School (HMS) and Brigham and Woman’s Hospital (BWH), we are retracting this paper. The HMS and BWH review of images contained in publications from the P.A. laboratory suggests that image data appeared to be modified in ways determined to fall outside acceptable image adjustment practices. The HMS/BWH found instances of the following: Fig. 1A (Top Left) appears to have areas of c-kit-positive staining selectively inserted into the image plane; Fig. 1A (Bottom Left) appears to have areas of c-kit-positive staining selectively added, as well as the translocation of cells within the image.
The paper has been cited 143 times.
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It is not hard to imagine that the inspection of the huge trove of image-evidence in this large case would have required a herculean effort. I recall that HMS people had published something about their own new software for looking at large collections images, as have others elsewhere in the US and Europe. ORI’s website has recently announced funding for a conference on computer methods for examining questioned data; hopefully that might be an ideal forum for discussing the application of these search routines. Dissemination of the investigations methods would be a great service to research.