A cancer researcher faked data in a grant application, her PhD thesis, and seven published papers, according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.
Toni Brand, who earned her PhD from the University of Wisconsin and served as a postdoc at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), “engaged in research misconduct by knowingly or recklessly falsifying or fabricating western blot data, by reusing and relabeling data to represent expression of proteins in control experiments measuring the purity of cytoplasmic and nuclear cell fractionation, measurements of proteins of interest, and measurements of the same protein under different experimental conditions or loading controls,” the ORI said in a report published today.
One of Brand’s papers, published in Science Signaling, was retracted in November 2021. The notice said that the Wisconsin committee found that 11 images in the paper were “duplicated, mislabeled, or had other anomalies” but “found that these issues were due to carelessness and lack of attention to detail rather than through any intent to deceive, and thus concluded that no research misconduct was committed.”
The ORI, however, included that paper among those in which Brand “engaged in research misconduct.”
It is unclear when UCSF’s investigation wrapped up. [See update at the end of this post.] We know following a public records request that the University of Wisconsin notified Science Signaling of its findings of misconduct in August 2018 but that the journal – in what the editor called his “egregious delay” – took more than three years to retract the paper.
Brand, who “neither admits nor denies ORI’s findings of research misconduct,” agreed to have any research of hers funded by the Public Health Service – the parent agency of the NIH – supervised for four years. She also agreed to retract three additional papers:
- Mapping C-Terminal Transactivation Domains of the Nuclear HER Family Receptor Tyrosine Kinase HER3 (PLOS ONE, 2013)
- AXL Mediates Resistance to Cetuximab Therapy (Cancer Research, 2014)
- Cross-talk Signaling between HER3 and HPV16 E6 and E7 Mediates Resistance to PI3K Inhibitors in Head and Neck Cancer (Cancer Research, 2018)
The three papers have been cited more than 150 times in total.
Brand, now a science teacher at the Mount Tamalpais School in Mill Valley, California, did not respond to a request for comment. Paul Thaler, her attorney, declined to comment.
The finding of misconduct is the sixth of 2022 for the ORI, twice as many findings as it made all of last year.
Update, 4/5/22, 2200 UTC: ORI tells us that UCSF did not submit its investigation report until last year:
This case was atypical in that it involved two investigations of allegations that were conducted independently at two separate institutions – UWM (where the respondent completed her Ph.D.) and UCSF (where the respondent completed her post-doc). ORI’s oversight review initiates at the conclusion of an institution’s research misconduct proceedings – which in this case started when ORI received the second investigation report in 2021. ORI’s oversight review included the reports, research records, evidence, and the institutional findings from both institutions, as well as ORI’s additional analysis which required the examination of records from two separate institutional investigations. ORI recognizes that institutional proceedings take time, and ORI’s oversight review also take time, to ensure that the respective processes are thorough.
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It seems that faking data for grants is becoming an important tenet to get a PHD. What a shame? Just wondering… where are the real sactions? Only wrist slaps?
How is it possible that this person is still teaching? Or that is allowed to publish under supervision?
This is fraud, as simple as it is. And it is quite big, since it involved multiple accounts of utilization of false data on several grants.
She should be banned from academia for life and prevented from teaching at any level. And be brought to court as fraud is a crime.
However, it will never change until the legislative power (aka the scientists) and the executive power (aka the publishers) hold also the judicial power (aka the ability to scrutinize, decide, and retract papers).
A third power is needed, the ORI should be independent and its outcomes legally binding, i.e., decide on retraction independently from universities (which shalle be prevented to do so due to COI), and the retraction be automatic (no need for publishers to acknoledge them, as soon as the sentence of retraction is given, is definitive).
I’m fine with lifetime bans, provided it is not limited to scientists. Why should plumbers be allowed to continue in their profession if they have, for example, billed for too many hours of work?
This!
I guess you don’t know much about scientific integrity or the scientific process. Widely disseminated papers like this, that later turn out to be fraud, have a huge impact on both other scientists and on the public understanding of science. Millions of dollars can and probably have been wasted as well hundreds of hours of scientists’ time. Comparing with an overcharging plumber is just stupid.
Well, it depends on the field of course, but I’d say the work of plumbers is more important than a lot of scientific research.
You are not thinking straight. But, I understand your frustration.
The Mount Tamalpais School is a private primary school, K-8, so I doubt that it would be considered “academia.” Whether she should be subject to other sanctions is not for me to say, but I suspect that she will never have a position in academia.
She’s teaching science at a private K–8 school. That’s pretty far from academic research.
Psychologists need to do the “hard” sciences a favor and study the personality types or childhood trauma or whatever gives rise to this kind of cheating.
I’m just a schmuck with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and I would never ever consider fabricating data or misrepresenting it. Nobody had to teach me this, it just wasn’t in my nature to cheat. How could someone disrespect us scientific method oh, which has brought us so far, in this way? Simple greed, rationalized corner-cutting, or some kind of mental pathology? Let’s find out.
“She should be banned from academia for life and prevented from teaching at any level. And be brought to court as fraud is a crime.”
And, importantly, required to pay back all task payer money she wasted.
I think the real penalty and strength of ORI investigations is that they name names. NSF and other US government science misconduct investigations withhold names. Teaching science at a middle school probably means a complete departure from academia.
Hopefully she can find redemption through that work and be a productive member of society.
Such case studies should be a part of the curriculum during UG/PG degree. Schools make sure when they assigned essay writing to the students to prepare clear instructions, and sensitize the outcomes of such acts done either intentionally/unintentionally or due to lack of awareness or habits.
Yes, absolutely. You should teach them at primary school not to copy! What to do – it is not that easy. These days it is easy to get materials online so just copy and do away with your essay. Not everyone as iThenticate or Turnitin to check – i request these software should be made free to all schools and universities at least.
Any other consequences apart from retraction of papers in this case? As long as the PhD is intact, she is ok.
If you want to talk about ‘wrist slaps’ you’re going to want to look further than the first author PhD student, booted from academia after investing years in her degree. Where were the supervisors? Co-authors? None of these works are sole authorship, yet no others are named and shamed quite the same way.
Furthermore, few engage in this type of behaviour without the support (or lack of support) from the people around them. As this dates back to PhD work, what kind of cultural environment was she in that this is either deemed acceptable or the only option?
Don’t let the headlines distract you – the Brands of research are the symptoms of an unhealthy system. We’re going to have to do much more than showcasing the poor decisions of a few if we want our research, and our workplaces, to rise above these issues.
LIke what? Telling people that they should not have any ambition other than being a miserable post-doc the rest of their lives? Make post-doc positions something that has good pay and job security and the problem will go away. That wont happen.
Jen is quite right.. Retraction of falsified images can be easily stopped if the scientific community, in particular coauthors, simply looked critically at the data before they rushed to publish. After all, the success of PubPeer … or a journal’s so-called ‘Critical Reader’ … (neither being an expert in the specific research!) establish that inconvenient fact about today’s research practices.
Co-authors (the international ones, at least) often do not get access to anything but a draft of the paper.
of course, co-authors can request for the data if they find any discrepancy? Most of them do not do – it is just trust, benefit and risk…
I have seen some of the corresponding authors do not even bother to send communications periodically throughout the process to other distant co-authors.
OK, co-authors aside, think of the effect of a journal requiring a pre-nuptual agreement saying we are going to immediately retract if there is a credible concern about an image and there is no primary data to support the image? That protects journal’s investment and credits their standards. It also gets the coauthors attention and their institutions interest in data retention. All of these are such simple ideas to protect against image falsification, fully within community prerogatives. Yet the community would rather blame government response or craft detailed academic studies on how to prevent!
It is good to name and shame misconducts such as those of Brand and co-authors. However, being condemned and damned for the rest of her life time is unfair. Given a second chance she could flourish thanks to the tough lessons learnt from her previous mistakes or whatever you may call it.
Why has she not also been charged by DOJ for fraud?
Look up the 3 or 4 elements that collectively are required to define criminal fraud in Black’s legal dictionary, and you will find it may be very difficult to apply all to research misconduct. That is why ORI does not use that term (fraud). Moreover, the standard of proof is much greater for fraud.
“…agreed to have any research of hers funded by the Public Health Service – the parent agency of the NIH – supervised for four years.”
So, once again, there are no real sanctions for committing systematic fraud.
This reminds me of McCarthyism. It’s disgusting. Posting photos and current workplaces of some people from your moral superiority may be legal but it is obscene, especially considering that there are more than 120.000 entries in pubpeer.
I think she got off very easy with this modest public humiliation. I have previously stated that I think those convicted of scientific fraud should be caned.
So naive. Wake up.
I noticed in the ORI statement that she committed this fraud, in part, using K99 funds (CA160639). At first I thought this was maybe her K award, but it turned out to be a supervisor (I assume) named Randall Kimple, according to the NIH Reporter. However, her dissertation deposited in ProQuest* neither lists him as a committee member nor even offers an acknowledgment. This makes me curious along several lines.
*title: Investigations of nuclear HER family receptors in cancer and resistance to cetuximab therapy
At least one more retraction: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267745
PubPeer coverage: https://pubpeer.com/publications/8C6592882A6647FBB4E82C664EBE76#3
Of note almost all the authors agree with the retraction, apart from Dr. Brand, who “stands by the article’s findings.”
It is wrong to assign sole blame to the student. These issues start with the lab head, who was either complicit, willfully ignorant, or hopelessly obtuse about the data. Where was the supervision? Where was the thesis committee? What does it say about a peer review system that allows such obviously flawed work to be published in the first place? Academic research, as its currently constructed, selects for many bad actors.
I think that she shouldn’t be soley blamed for what happened. People make mistakes, and they shouldn’t be blamed for it their whole life. She is human just like the rest of us. She might have just been disorganized, which would cause this. I doubt she meant it, as in this feild she must be very passonite about what she is doing since she has started teaching. Give her a break. I bet that she is teaching her students well and making sure that they don’t make the same mistakes she did.
I suggest you read the Bible. It will give you the answers you are asking for.