More than a month after a federal watchdog announced that a UCLA scientist had included fake data in a grant application worth more than $50 million, the university says the application didn’t have issues, after all.
In early August, the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) said that Janina Jiang faked data in eleven grant applications from UCLA. At the time, based on what was available in the ORI’s report, we noted:
Three of the eleven grant applications were funded for a total $58.7 million. Steven M. Dubinett – now the interim dean at UCLA – is listed as principal investigator on one of the grants, which helped fund the UCLA Clinical and Translational Science Institute and comprised the vast majority of the $58.7 million. The extent of Jiang’s part in that application and the extent to which they led to the success of the grant is unclear, but it seems likely they were a minor contribution.
But in a correction to the Federal Register posted last week, ORI said:
Due to additional information provided by the institution to the Office of Research Integrity, it was determined that NIH grant application UL1 TR000124 did not fund or contain falsified/fabricated data; therefore, this grant application has been removed from the findings of research misconduct reported in FR Doc. 2022-16867.
That made it just 10 grant applications that included fake data. What remains unclear is how the error happened. How, we asked both UCLA and ORI, did a report that would have had to be reviewed by multiple officials – and lawyers – at both institutions include such a mistake?
Neither would say. An ORI spokesperson said:
We have no further comment beyond that we were notified by the institution that a grant had been included erroneously.
And a UCLA spokesperson referred us to the ORI correction:
As indicated in the Federal Register here, “Due to additional information provided by the institution to the Office of Research Integrity, it was determined that NIH grant application UL1 TR000124 did not fund or contain falsified/fabricated data; therefore, this grant application has been removed from the findings of research misconduct reported in FR Doc. 2022–16867.”
We’ll continue to pursue answers.
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It’s not at all uncommon to include the names and biosketches of dozens and dozens of investigators/potential users on a center grant that funds something like a CTSI. At the same time, it would be unusual to include data from the “average” end-user in the application. While i lack knowledge of any of the details of this particular case, nothing in institution’s claims seem remarkable to me.