Carlo Croce, a cancer researcher at The Ohio State University who has had 10 papers retracted and at least as many subject to corrections or expressions of concern, has lost another court appeal.
Croce brought the case against Purdue University professor David Sanders in 2017 for statements that Sanders had made in stories in The New York Times and Lafayette Journal Courier. Judge James Graham, of the Southern District of Ohio Eastern Division, ruled against Croce in the case last year. Croce filed an appeal, and yesterday three judges in the Sixth Circuit of Appeals upheld the earlier ruling.
The judges note:
Journals have found research problems and plagiarism in articles coming from Croce’s lab. Sometimes, the problems were severe enough for the journals to publish corrections or expressions of concern (and sometimes to withdraw the paper). However you define “scientific norms,” we know that academic journals felt some responsibility to alert the scientific community about problems in some of Croce’s papers. That suggests the papers contained problems outside the range of acceptable research and publishing practices.
They conclude:
In short, because none of the six statements Croce identified can support a defamation action, the district court correctly granted summary judgment to Sanders.
In 2019, Croce lost an appeal of a related case against the New York Times. Two sets of attorneys who represented him in those cases are now suing him for unpaid legal bills totaling more than $1.7 million. At one point, one firm agreed to represent him only if he signed a lien on his house over to them.
He is also suing Ohio State to be reinstated as chair of his department.
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A guy who has more dollars than sense.
Let’s hope not for long.
If he had dollars, he would pay his bills.
Wow! What an incredible waste of time & university resources because of someone’s big ego… Not to even mention the extramural funds that could have gone to a lab that could use the $$$ wisely & produce studies that would not evoked expressions or concern or produce retractions by journals. How many more ppl are there out there who are like this one wonders?
Unfortunately, I don’t think this will stop him from showing pictures of his “masterpieces” (that is what he calls them) at his scientific presentations. After I saw this, I came to appreciate just how wealthy you could be in the USA “running” a lab. No wonder failed scientists might vote for Trump, in hopes of a revolution.
Please just go away. You have had your fun in the sun for way too long.
He was an accomplished scientist unbound by ego or sense of humility. First Jefferson built a program for him, then Ohio wooed him like some sort of prized free agent. My theory is he picked up a sense of entitlement from Koprowski–there must have been a bug in the air at Wistar.
There is a personality type–brilliant but driven by a relentless sense of self-promotion to the point where actual accomplishment is secondary. It is the kind of thing you see in certain pundits, orange presidents, and other iterations of shameless huckster. It is also a thread common in academic research and medicine.
Hopefully he’s paying the fees for Sanders’ lawyers as well (or at least Purdue is paying and not Sanders personally).