When two recent retraction notices mentioned data were “destroyed in a flood,” we were skeptical. We’ve seen water take the blame for missing data before.
In 2019, we wrote about a chemical engineer who said his suspicious data were lost in a laboratory flooding accident. The researcher lost nine papers as a result, as we previously covered. Three years earlier in 2016, researchers in Sri Lanka lost a paper after claiming they, too, had lost their data in a flood. We couldn’t verify the researchers’ claims.
But this time, thanks to a public records request, we’ve confirmed there was in fact a deluge at the researcher’s lab.
The most recent papers, published in the American Journal of Physiology: Gastrointestinal and Liver Physiology, had been flagged on PubPeer for image similarities in several figures, eventually leading the corresponding author to seek out the lost data. A subsequent university investigation found the data were destroyed in a flood, according to the retraction notices published in August.
The investigation took place at the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, where Shrikant Anant, the corresponding author of both papers, is currently associate research director and a professor. He was formerly the associate dean for research at the institution.
Both notices state the articles were retracted at Anant’s request. We submitted a public records request to learn more about what happened.
Our request for the university investigation was denied. But documents we did obtain confirm Anant’s lab at KU requested replacement equipment following a flood on October 27, 2012. The deluge originated from a broken eyewash station on the sixth floor of the building. The fifth floor had the most water damage, and the fourth floor — where Anant’s lab was located — “was not as bad as the fifth but still had heavy flows of water coming down,” according to a university report.
At the time of the first retracted study, published in 2008, Anant was a professor at the University of Oklahoma. He had moved to KU by the time the second paper was published in 2011. Both articles describe potential treatments for colon cancer and have been cited 29 and 27 times respectively, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
Anant told us he was first alerted to issues with the papers via PubPeer, where each garnered attention in 2018 when two different users highlighted image issues in the works. In 2021, sleuth Kevin Patrick commented that an image in the 2008 paper “seems to make an appearance” three times in two different figures, and all three iterations “seem to appear with different brightness,” he wrote under his known pseudonym “Actinopolyspora biskrensis.”
Patrick also wrote in March 2025 that a gel strip in the 2008 paper was “uncomfortably similar” to a strip in a third paper Anant coauthored and published in Gastrointestinal and Liver Physiology, which has been cited 23 times.
Anant did not respond to our questions regarding whether the university investigated this paper as well. The ethics office at the American Physiological Society, which publishes the journal, did not respond when we asked if the journal planned to look into the third paper.
An August 2018 PubPeer comment on the 2011 paper highlighted an image in two figures, noting an apparent “vertical stretch” in one of the bands. In March 2025, Patrick wrote that in two figures showing arrays of lab dishes, a dish from one set seemed to appear in the other.
When we asked for more information on the 2012 flood, including which labs were affected and how much damage was caused, the university’s press office did not respond.
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