A former Harvard researcher has agreed to pay $215,000 to settle allegations that he used bogus data in a grant application to the National Institutes of Health — and the teaching hospital where he worked has already repaid more than $900,000 in grant funds.
The settlement, of which we were just made aware, was announced on August 6, six days before a lawyer for the researcher, Sam W. Lee, asked us to take down a post about his client’s problematic publications.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts, Lee knowingly made false claims when in June 2014 he submitted the “allegedly inauthentic data” as part of NIH grant R01 CA195534-01, titled “p53 survival target DDR1 kinase in DNA damage response and carcinogenesis”:
The United States contends that Dr. Lee knowingly included inauthentic data in his DDR1 grant application to NIH, including figures 6, 7, and 11. Dr. Lee did not conduct the underlying experiments for figures 6, 7, and 11. A fellow in his laboratory conducted the experiments, but no longer worked for Dr. Lee at the time that Dr. Lee submitted the DDR1 grant application. The United States contends that Dr. Lee later altered the experiment descriptions in figure 6 and figure 7, falsifying the results of the experiments, and that Dr. Lee falsified figure 11 by horizontally flipping the image, resulting in the mislabeling of the tissue.
Massachusetts General Hospital, where Lee worked, received $939,495.27 through the NIH grant, a sum it has repaid in full, according to the DOJ.
We first reported on Lee’s work in 2013, when he had a paper retracted because some of the figures were “inappropriately assembled.” Our April 2019 post reported that Lee was the subject of an investigation by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity. It is unclear whether the DOJ investigation resulted from a referral from the ORI. In the meantime, Lee has at least five retractions — including two that appeared after April 2019 — and two expressions of concern.
Lee, who now lives in Bellevue, Wash., signed the settlement agreement on July 31. His first payment of $100,000 plus interest was due today.
In 2017, another Harvard teaching hospital, Brigham and Women’s, agreed to pay the U.S. government $10 million to resolve allegations that it had fraudulently obtained federal funding on behalf of three now-former researchers led by Piero Anversa, a specialist in cardiac stem cells. Although the Anversa and Lee cases are unrelated, both men were represented by Tracy Miner, a prominent criminal defense attorney in Boston. Ms. Miner was not the lawyer who approached us about taking down our coverage of Lee.
For more on the False Claims Act, see these two posts.
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a one-time tax-deductible contribution or a monthly tax-deductible donation to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].
Funny thing is that I’d completely forgotten about Sam Lee until I read my daily retraction watch email this morning. I think this is generally what is known on the interwebs as a “Full Streisand”.
That’s a significant penalty but perhaps not when you consider the sort of largely grant supported salary that he was pulling in during his time at Harvard. Also, universities have pretty generous retirement benefits that (you guessed it) are also funded by grants and presumably he was accumulating a decent sized nest egg.
“We commend MGH for disclosing the alleged false statements, for repaying funds and for taking meaningful steps to prevent future recurrences.”
Meh.
As a tax-payer, ex-cancer patient & also scientist, I would suggest that returning the funds is the minimal thing that should occur here. One can only think of the wasted time & money these false claims have done to the field in question e.g. sending other investigators up false leads & blind alleys…
I have suggested that rogue faculty such as Lee be caned, and his boss administrators be penalized with crushing debt. As I am an unemployed former post-doc, I will happily do the caning for a nominal fee.
“his boss administrators be penalized with crushing debt”
https://www.massgeneral.org/dermatology/research/cutaneous-biology-research-center/
2020 retraction from Nature.
http://retractionwatch.com/2020/06/18/harvard-group-retracts-nature-paper-2/
The paper, “Fatty acids and cancer-amplified ZDHHC19 promote STAT3 activation through S-palmitoylation,” came from the lab of Xu Wu, of the Cutaneous Biology Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, and his colleagues. It appeared last August — and immediately caught the attention of Rune Linding, who flagged it for Bik, who in turn noticed several regions of concerning duplications in a few of the Western blots that appeared in the paper.
Not to speak of the time and money that government staff and experts spent investigating the case, which may well be worth more than the reimbursed funds… I agree that this should come with a punitive multiplying factor
Interesting. A reasonable consequence for those who receive federal funding and commit serious scientific misconduct. But how come the infamous Sarkar, from Wayne State, who committed misconduct at the same level or even worse, still has not even been mentioned by ORI or requested to payback the millions of dollars he got from NIH, DOD, and private foundations. This is still a mystery.
ORI had to have reviewed it because RW recently covered a PHS finding involving those papers, but that finding involved another person. Perversely, the PubPeer defamation lawsuit -as revealed by the subsequent release of the institution’s report- may have been another example of what you call the ‘Streisand effect’ for the plaintiff but a positive result for others by codifying the right to make anonymous informed criticism in scientific results. (Disclaimer: participant in that case)
PS, NIH makes decisions about recovery, not ORI.
Why hasn’t Mol Cell . 2009 Nov 13;36(3):351-2 been retracted?
Mol Cell . 2009 Nov 13;36(3):351-2. doi: 10.1016/j.molcel.2009.10.026.
p53 and Metabolism: The GAMT Connection
Yan Zhu 1, Carol Prives
Affiliation
1Department of Biological Sciences, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA.
PMID: 19917243 DOI: 10.1016/j.molcel.2009.10.026
Comment on
GAMT, a p53-inducible modulator of apoptosis, is critical for the adaptive response to nutrient stress.
Ide T, Brown-Endres L, Chu K, Ongusaha PP, Ohtsuka T, El-Deiry WS, Aaronson SA, Lee SW.
Mol Cell. 2009 Nov 13;36(3):379-92. doi: 10.1016/j.molcel.2009.09.031.
PMID: 19917247 Free PMC article. Retracted.
2013 Retraction notice. (Molecular Cell 36, 379–392; November 13, 2009)
https://www.cell.com/molecular-cell/fulltext/S1097-2765(13)00578-9?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS1097276513005789%3Fshowall%3Dtrue
We were made aware that Western blot data in some of the figures for the above referenced paper were inappropriately assembled resulting in duplications of bands. Because we believe that the presentation issues are beyond the limits of acceptable scientific standards, we wish to retract this paper and regret any inconvenience to the scientific community this may have caused.
Re: “a lawyer for the researcher, Sam W. Lee, asked us to take down a post about his client’s problematic publications.”
This case is a corruption of public funds, lawyer cannot threaten and censor you.
Sam W. Lee threatened to sue me in 2012 for what I wrote about him. He used Normand Smith of Burns & Levinson, i.e., the same lawyer who represented David Baltimore back in the day.
Lee engaged in an astroturfing campaign, with sites such as…
https://samleeharvard.wordpress.com/
https://about.me/samwleeus
https://soundcloud.com/sam-w-lee
https://www.authorstream.com/samwleeus/
https://issuu.com/samwlee
https://samwlee.mystrikingly.com/
https://medium.com/@Sam_WLee
…and many other sites that have since gone dormant. It appears to have been wasted money, based on these new events.