Former postdoc who admitted to faking data pleads guilty to attempted forgery

A cancer researcher who admitted to faking data has pleaded guilty to attempted forgery in a case involving letters of recommendation he passed off as coming from his former supervisor. 

Last year, Georgios Laliotis, a former postdoc at The Ohio State University, was charged with forgery for allegedly creating a fake email address with the name of his PI, Philip Tsichlis, and using it to send two letters of recommendation to prospective employers. 

Laliotis was later indicted for identity fraud, forgery, and telecommunications fraud, and pleaded not guilty to each count. 

On June 27, Laliotis pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of attempted forgery, and prosecutors dropped the other charges. In lieu of six months of jail time, a judge sentenced Laliotis to one year of non-reporting probation, on the condition that Laliotis not contact Tsichlis and “not apply to take medical exams” for the next four years, or until the conviction is sealed.  

Don Olsen, Laliotis’ lawyer, has not responded to our request for comment, nor has Laliotis.

Also in late June, the U.S. Office of Research Integrity announced findings that Laliotis fabricated “data, methods, results, and conclusions” in three published papers and two applications for grant funding from the National Institutes of Health. The findings were based in part on Laliotis’ admissions. 

Tsichlis had discovered the data manipulation and asked journal editors to retract two papers after another scientist contacted him about being unable to replicate some of the results. He also alerted Ohio State’s research compliance office, which initiated an inquiry. 

According to the preliminary inquiry report, which we obtained through a public records request, the panel “​​determined that the allegation does have sufficient substance to warrant investigation.” 

However, an investigation did not proceed, a university spokesperson told us, because “an admission from the Respondent closed the matter prior to a final inquiry report being generated.” 

The inquiry examined one allegation: Laliotis falsified an image in a Nature Communications paper “by splicing two sequencing chromatograms together to generate a false U2AF2 RNA transcript lacking Exon 2.” 

The panel could not find sequencing data to match the falsified RNA transcript. Rather, an image showing the purported transcript “appeared to be manipulated in several ways.” The report concluded: 

Such falsification could not occur by honest error as it was created by combining two separate chromatograms for it to appear as a single contiguous chromatogram.

The report states that Laliotis did not provide a written response to the report, and canceled a scheduled interview “due to his military service in Greece.” The report’s timeline indicates that a research integrity officer at Ohio State sent him a retraction form for the paper in Nature Communications on April 7, 2022. His sister returned the signed form a week later. 

The paper was retracted last June, two weeks after we published our initial story about Tsichlis’ discovery and retraction requests, which he had sent the previous November. 

The inquiry report also indicates that Laliotis’ postdoc position in Tsichlis’ lab ended on Feb. 28, 2021, contradicting the information in a complaint filed by an OSU police detective, which stated the university had terminated Laliotis “on or around November 30, 2021.”

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