A former research center director and professor emeritus of urology has lost a fourth paper after a joint investigation by the University of California San Francisco and the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center found faked data in several of his articles.
The other three retractions for Rajvir Dahiya, who directed the UCSF/VAMC Urology Research Center from 1991 until his retirement in 2020, date from 2017. In addition, a paper of his in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was corrected in 2018, and one in Clinical Cancer Research received an expression of concern last year.
The latest retraction is for “Knockdown of astrocyte-elevated gene-1 inhibits prostate cancer progression through upregulation of FOXO3a activity,” published in Oncogene in 2007. It has been cited 191 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
The retraction note, like some of the other editorial notes for Dahiya’s papers, cites the findings of a joint investigation by UCSF and the VA Medical Center:
The Editors-in-Chief have retracted this article following an investigation by the Investigation Committee on Scientific Misconduct of the Veterans Affair Medical Center, San Francisco, and the University of California San Francisco. The committee concluded that Figures 2b, 4b, 4c, 5a and 5c are the results of fabrication or falsification of data. The Committee could not determine who was responsible for the fabrication or falsification. Y Tanaka agrees with this retraction. R Dahiya disagrees with this retraction. N Kikuno, H Shiina, H Hirata, R F Place, D Pookot, S Majid and M Igawa have not responded to correspondence regarding this retraction. The Publisher has not been able to obtain a current email address for S Urakami and K Kawamoto.
Dahiya’s UCSF email no longer works. We tried a couple other alternative addresses and haven’t heard back. We also reached out to his co-author Yuichiro Tanaka, a UCSF urology professor, who has not responded.
A few of Dahiya’s papers, including the one just retracted from Oncogene, have comments on PubPeer pointing out similarities in the images that date back to 2013.
A UCSF-VA investigation followed, and in 2017, the institutions sent letters to journals that had published papers found to contain fake data. According to letters sent to editors of the International Journal of Cancer and the American Association of Cancer Research, which publishes Clinical Cancer Research and Cancer Research, the investigation committee found “fabrication or falsification of data that constitutes Research Misconduct” in articles published by each journal. Those three papers have been retracted.
The letters, which we obtained through a public records request, detailed the committee’s findings for each paper, but also stated that the committee “could not determine who was responsible” for the fake data. The co-authors had apparently blamed the first authors of the papers, but those two scientists had both left the country and were unreachable.
The 2018 correction to a PNAS paper also mentioned that a UCSF-VA investigation committee “concluded that the manipulation of the images in Fig. 2D could only have occurred intentionally, representing instances of scientific misconduct,” but the committee couldn’t determine who was responsible.
Last year, Clinical Cancer Research published an expression of concern for another paper, “Epigenetic Modifications of RASSF1A Gene through Chromatin Remodeling in Prostate Cancer,” which was not mentioned in the 2017 UCSF-VA letter. The notice also referenced a “review” by UCSF and the VA, which it said “determined that blank panels were used to represent negative results” in two figures.
We asked George Miller and Justin Stebbing, Oncogene’s editors-in-chief, whether the UCSF-VA investigation mentioned in the recent retraction notice was the same one that led to the 2017 retractions, and, if so, what the reason was for Oncogene’s action coming five years later. We haven’t heard back from Miller.
Stebbing did not respond directly to our questions, but instead noted our previous story about an Oncogene retraction in which we mentioned he had been suspended from practicing medicine for nine months last year – which he called “my previous regulatory issues” – and that he’d had a paper retracted after readers raised questions about the data.
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I am surprised that UCSF didn’t fire Dahiya from his position as director in 2017 after 3 retractions that year, but allowed him to continue as director until 2020.