Jasti Rao, who once earned $700,000 a year at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria and was named the first “Peorian of the Year” before a misconduct investigation put an end to his time there, has now lost eight papers.
Rao’s case is among the more colorful that we’ve covered. A highly-regarded cancer specialist, Rao was caught up in a morass of misdeeds, including not only plagiarism and manipulation of data but gambling and behavior tantamount to extortion of his employees. As we reported in 2018:
in 2012 an outside attorney hired by the university concluded that Rao had asked at least one employee to pay back more than $15,000 of his salary — based, in part, on video secretly shot by the employee in 2010, showing him paying Rao. (According to a 2014 article in the Peoria Journal Star, Rao accused the employee of eavesdropping on him “illegally in a misguided effort to show Rao took bribes and kickbacks from employees.”)
Rao ran up tens of thousands of dollars in gambling debts, much of which he accrued on the university’s time, and even had his credit cut off by the Par-A-Dice Casino in Peoria.
Rao sued the University of Illinois, accusing them of discrimination and violation of due process, but lost.
Rao has had six papers retracted from PLOS ONE this year. The most recent retraction involves a 2010 article in titled “Upregulation of PTEN in glioma cells by cord blood mesenchymal stem cells inhibits migration via downregulation of the PI3K/Akt pathway.” The paper has been cited 87 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, with 18 of those citations coming in 2019 and 2020.
According to the retraction notice:
After this article [1] was published, concerns were raised about results reported in Figures 1, 2, and 5.
Specifically:
PTEN and pAktSer473 blots appear the same in the left and right panels of Figure 1B, where the data are reported as representing different experiments.
β-actin data look similar in lanes 1–5 of Figure 1C and in Figure 1E; the data are reported as representing different experiments.
GAPDH panels appear similar in Figure 2C (left panel), Figure 5A, and Figure 5B. Figures 5A and 5B represent the same experimental conditions but Figure 2C represents a different experiment.
XIAP and PDGFR panels appear similar in Figure 5C.
The first author provided electronic image data that are available to support the figures mentioned above, but these data did not clarify the issues outlined.
In addition, the article reports a cDNA microarray experiment but does not mention deposition of the microarray data in a public repository as required by the PLOS Data Policy that was in effect when the article was submitted.
The above concerns call into question the reliability of the reported results and whether the article complied with the journal’s editorial policies. In light of these issues, the PLOS ONE Editors retract this article.
VRD did not agree with retraction. The other authors either could not be reached or did not respond directly.
Although Rao lost his lawsuits, he was able to scratch out a victory of sorts in the affair. The final investigation into his research reached an ambiguous conclusion. According to court documents that cited the report:
The Investigation Panel, however, concluded that it “could not reach the level of confidence as indicated by the term ‘preponderance’” to find that Plaintiff was directly responsible for the issues with the papers under review, finding instead, that he acted recklessly…
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