Harvard has investigated work from the lab of a cancer researcher at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center that has been under scrutiny on PubPeer for more than five years.
Questions about the output of the lab, run by James W. Mier, began appearing on PubPeer in 2014, with comments about images that looked manipulated. The pseudonymous whistleblower Clare Francis sent Gretchen Brodnicki, Harvard Medical School’s dean for faculty and research integrity, an email about those comments on Sept. 27, 2014, and on July 24 of this year, Brodnicki asked Francis to resend that email.
Also that month, the journal Clinical Cancer Research issued an expression of concern for a 2006 paper by Mier and colleagues, which stated:
The editors are publishing this note to alert readers to a concern about this article (1): Western blot similarities exist in Fig. 4A (C-Myc and Vinculin). The original gels are not available for review.
Earlier this month, Cancer Research retracted a paper from the lab for image manipulation. Per the notice for the article, titled “The Raf Inhibitor BAY 43-9006 (Sorafenib) Induces Caspase-Independent Apoptosis in Melanoma Cells:”
This article (1) has been retracted at the request of the authors. Following an institutional review by Harvard Medical School and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the primary affiliation for several of the authors, it was determined that some of the Western blot data depicted in Figs. 1A, 2C, 3A, 4, and 6A contained images that had been inappropriately reused and/or mislabeled. Original data establishing the veracity of certain of the published images were not available. As a result of these findings and upon internal review, the editors agreed with this recommendation.
D.J. Panka, W. Wang, M.B. Atkins, and J.W. Mier concur with the decision to retract the article.
The paper has received 134 citations, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
Harvard did not respond directly to our questions about the outcome of the investigation and whether other papers were slated for retraction. Instead, it sent us the following statement:
We are fully committed to upholding the highest standards of ethics and to rigorously maintaining the integrity of our research. Any concerns brought to our attention are thoroughly reviewed in accordance with institutional policies and applicable regulations.
Mier, who has not responded to a request for comment, in 2013 received a $250,000 award from the American Association for Cancer Research for his work on kidney cancer. He has also been principal investigator or co-principal investigator on several NIH grants.
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