Adam Marcus

Meet the alleged brain surgeon who squats on domains, punks journals and listed Wolf Blitzer as a co-author

Wolf Blitzer, not a cardiology researcher

We have a confession right up front: You won’t meet the man — a man who claims to be a brain surgeon, no less — we refer to in the headline.

That is because, dear reader, we were not able to contact the person who publishes under the name Michael George Zaki Ghali.

What we do know is that someone using Ghali’s name bought two fake web domains for the Karolinska Institutet to make it look as though he was affiliated with the world-famous medical center and published seven dozen papers in peer reviewed journals owned by Elsevier, IMR Press, Taylor & Francis and Wiley. So far, seven those articles have now been retracted, by our count, including recently a 2020 paper in Acta Cardiologica that included CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer as a co-author. [See an update on this post.]

Authors crop estimate that was off by a factor of 60 — or $3 trillion

A paper that tried to estimate the cost of invasive species to farming in Africa has been corrected because the researchers made a pair of errors that dramatically inflated their calculations.

One mistake led the group, from Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Ghana and Kenya, to overstate the cost to African agricultural of invasive vegetation by roughly $3 trillion — yes, that’s trillion with a T. The second error pared their estimate for crop losses due to a single plant species from $11.4 billion to $4.1 billion.

Now, we’re not suggesting that the corrections negate the overall importance of the research. But we do wonder how errors of this magnitude weren’t immediately obvious to not only the peer reviewers and editors of the article, but to the researchers themselves. After all, the gross domestic product of the entire continent of Africa was an estimated $2.6 trillion in 2019.

The journal, CABI Agriculture and Bioscience — the official journal of CABI, a global nonprofit group focused on agriculture and the environment — has both a brief correction and a more detailed notice for the May 2021 paper, “Towards estimating the economic cost of invasive alien species to African crop and livestock production”. The short version reads:

The decade-long saga capped by a $215,000 settlement with the US government

If you need a reminder of how slowly the wheels of justice grind, here’s one.

Earlier this month, Sam W. Lee agreed to pay the U.S. government $215,000 to settle allegations that the former Harvard researcher had made false claims in a grant application.

It turns out that at least one skeptical researcher had notified journals and regulators about his concerns over the veracity of some of Lee’s other published findings back in 2011.

In July of that year, David Vaux, an Australian scientist and research ethicist now at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, wrote to Nature about a new paper by Lee with what he believed were several critical flaws. According to Vaux, multiple colleagues of his had raised questions about the article, “Selective killing of cancer cells by a small molecule targeting the stress response to ROS,” which the journal had published earlier that month.

Among the criticisms, wrote Vaux, a member of the board of directors of our parent non-profit organization, were:

Will the real hottest month on record please stand up?

As anyone who follows the climate news is aware, July 2021 was the hottest month on record for our torrid little orb, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), with a combined temperature 1.67 degrees F higher than the 20th century average of 60.4 F.

NOAA noted in a Friday press release that the previous record was set in July 2016, and tied in 2019 and 2020. But as Bill Frezza, a sharp-eyed reader of Retraction Watch noticed, the agency’s website tells a different story. This press release, dated Aug. 15, 2019, and still live on noaa.gov, proclaims July 2019 to be the hottest month on record for the planet:

False claims allegations cost Mass General, former Harvard researcher more than $1 million

A former Harvard researcher has agreed to pay $215,000 to settle allegations that he used bogus data in a grant application to the National Institutes of Health — and the teaching hospital where he worked has already repaid more than $900,000 in grant funds.

The settlement, of which we were just made aware, was announced on August 6, six days before a lawyer for the researcher, Sam W. Lee, asked us to take down a post about his client’s problematic publications.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts, Lee knowingly made false claims when in June 2014 he submitted the “allegedly inauthentic data” as part of NIH grant R01 CA195534-01, titled “p53 survival target DDR1 kinase in DNA damage response and carcinogenesis”:

Attorney asks Retraction Watch to remove post because client has lost out on opportunities

A cancer researcher once involved in a federal research integrity probe has repeatedly been denied funding and other sources of income, according to his attorney, who blamed our coverage of the case for the scientist’s continuing woes and asked us to remove a post.

[Please see an update on this post.]

Our coverage of the work of Sam W. Lee goes back to 2013. But it was our reporting in April 2019 that Lee — once a member of the Harvard faculty — was the subject of an investigation by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity that was the subject of the attorney’s letter. ORI has yet to announce a conclusion in its inquiry, which appears to have reached a finding before we posted on the matter. He has at least five retractions — including two that appeared after April 2019 — and two expressions of concern.

One of those expressions of concern was for a 2000 paper in Molecular and Cellular Biology titled “Overexpression of Kinase-Associated Phosphatase (KAP) in Breast and Prostate Cancer and Inhibition of the Transformed Phenotype by Antisense KAP Expression.”

The disposition of that article, published by the American Society for Microbiology, like the ORI inquiry, remains unclear.

In a letter dated August 12, attorney Steven Seinberg, who is based in Los Angeles, claimed that since our April 2019 post, Lee has struggled both personally and professionally:

Authors admit they “published the paper without completely studying their work.”

As readers of this blog know, we’re fond of highlighting euphemisms, particularly for plagiarism: “inadvertently copied text,” “a significant originality issue” and and “inclusion of significant passages of unattributed material from other authors” come to mind.

But here’s a euphemism for “bullshit” that’s new to us.

Authors — except one — retract 2014 Nature paper on genetics

This post was updated at 1145 UTC on August 13, 2021. In the original post, we noted that Joseph Powell and Gibran Hemani had not responded to our request for comment, which we sent shortly after learning under embargo from Nature that this retraction would be published. However, Powell did respond, copying Hemani, as Powell noted in a Twitter thread, and the email never reached us. We have added Powell’s comments, and updated the first sentence of the post to reflect them. We are also investigating why Powell’s email never arrived. We apologize for the errors regardless of the cause, and appreciate the opportunity to update.

The authors of a 2014 research letter in Nature have retracted their article, with near but not entire unanimity, after “new work led to interpretation of the original results being no longer fully valid,” according to the senior author.

Titled “Detection and replication of epistasis influencing transcription in humans,” the letter was written by a group from Australia, Europe and the United States led by Gibran Hemani, then of the University of Queensland, in Brisbane, and now of the University of Bristol, in the United Kingdom. The senior author on the paper was Joseph Powell, also then of Queensland but now at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, in Darlinghurst, Australia. The paper has been cited 114 times, per Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

According to the abstract of the article:

Authors blame a “ghoul” for retraction of paper claiming vaccines lead to health and behavioral issues

A pair of authors have lost a 2020 paper claiming to link children’s vaccines to health and behavior problems after the journal concluded the data didn’t support the conclusions of the study.

The authors of the paper, “Relative Incidence of Office Visits and Cumulative Rates of Billed Diagnoses along the Axis of Vaccination,” were James Lyons-Weiler, the president and CEO of the Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge, in Pittsburgh, and Paul Thomas, a pediatrician in Portland, Ore.

The pair have published at least one other paper on vaccines, in the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research, a periodical that seems dedicated to the proposition that immunizations, and not the diseases they prevent, are a scourge. (Check out the journal’s special edition on Covid-19, for example.)

Critics face legal threats as journal takes more than three years to act

More than three and a half years after being alerted to concerns about the data in a 2015 article, an obstetrics journal has finally retracted the paper, citing a lack of ethics approval for the work. Meanwhile, the co-author of a meta-analysis that relies heavily on the paper has suggested that some critics of the underlying work risk legal action for their efforts.

The study, “Vaginal progesterone for prevention of preterm labor in asymptomatic twin pregnancies with sonographic short cervix: a randomized clinical trial of efficacy and safety,” appeared in Archives of Gynecology and Obstetrics (AGO) and was conducted by Waleed El-refaie, Mohamed S. Abdelhafez and Ahmed Badawy, of the University of Mansoura in Egypt. The article has been cited 29 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

As we reported last October, data sleuths have accused Badawy and some of his colleagues at Mansoura of having fabricated data and other misconduct in some 250 clinical trials — charges which were (and may still be) apparently convincing enough to warrant a university inquiry.

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