Charles Vacanti, a Harvard anesthesiologist and stem cell pioneer whose name appeared on both retracted STAP stem cell papers, is giving up his post as chair of anesthesiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and taking a year-long sabbatical.
Although most of what Alanis Morissette sang about in her hit song “Ironic” wasn’t irony at all, had she included a line or two about Angela Adrian she would have nailed it.
Adrian is an expert in intellectual property law, a former editor of the International Journal of Intellectual Property Management, a legal scholar whose resume boasts more degrees than a protractor. According to this bio:
Dr Angela Adrian is a dual qualified lawyer in Louisiana and the UK. Her specialisms include Intellectual Property, Information Technology, International Trade, and Criminal Law. She has two Masters degrees with distinction in Business & Management (Schiller International University) as well as in Commercial Law (University of Aberdeen). She obtained her Juris Doctorate at Loyola University, New Orleans. Dr Adrian published her PhD from Queen Mary, University of London as a monograph entitled “Law and Order in Virtual Worlds: Exploring Avatars, their Ownership and Rights”. Currently, she is Chief Knowledge Officer of Icondia Ltd, an images rights company, co-author of the 4th edition of “Intellectual Property: Text and Essential Cases” (Australia), and Editor of the International Journal of Intellectual Property Management.
The paper, titled “Hydrogen production by an anaerobic photocatalytic reforming using palladium nanoparticle on boron and nitrogen doped TiO2 catalysts,” was written by researchers from the Veltech Dr RR & Dr SR Technical University, in Chennai, India, and Arizona State University.
Pro tip: If you’re going to write a paper on giving voice to hidden words, PLEASE try not to plagiarize!
Esther Sánchez-Pardo, of Complutense University in Madrid, was the author of a 2010 article in the European Journal of English Studies titled “Who will carry the word? The threshold between unspeakability and silence in the Holocaust narratives of Charlotte Delbo and Jorge Semprun.”
The problem, it turns out, is that a couple of other authors had their words carried, but Sánchez-Pardo didn’t bother to speak their names.
The Japanese endocrinology researcher Shigeaki Kato, with at least 25 retractions to his name, is alleged to have been the ringleader of a scheme to cover up other research misconduct at the University of Tokyo, his former employer, which investigated the activity.
It’s not uncommon for scientists accused of wrongdoing — especially if they’re fired for it — to attempt to muddy the waters by claiming that they are being framed because they had threatened to blow the whistle on others. Some of those stories have more than a grain of truth to them.
Here’s one that doesn’t.
Paul Barach, an anesthesiologist who accused his former employer, the University of New South Wales, of a massive cover-up — and in turn accused by his employer of being an academic grifter — has admitted making up the affair.
The Australian, which broke the story, says Barach — a U.S.-born physician — has apologized for making the claims. According to an earlier article in the paper:
A panel reviewing The BMJ‘s handling of two controversial statin papers said the journal didn’t err when it corrected, rather than retracted, the articles.
The articles — a research paper and a commentary — suggested that use of statins in people at low risk for cardiovascular disease could be doing far more harm than good. Both articles inaccurately cited a study that provided data important to their conclusions — an error pointed out vigorously by a British researcher, Rory Collins, who demanded that the journal pull the pieces.
Fred Walumbwa, the leadership researcher at Florida International University who has retracted six papers for what appear to be problematic data, now has an impressive mega-correction in the form of an “addendum.”
The Office of Research Integrity has sanctioned a former researcher in the lab of Linda Buck, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for falsifying data in two papers written with the support of grants from the National Institutes of Health.
The researcher, Zou Zhihua, worked with Buck as a post-doc at Harvard and then at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, in Seattle, Buck’s current home. After leaving there in 2005, he spent three years at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, and now appears to be a faculty member at Jilin University in China.
A group of researchers in China has lost their paper on liver cancer after the first author admitted to duplication, also known, inelegantly, as self-plagiarism.
The paper, “Glycyrrhetinic acid-modified chitosan nanoparticles enhanced the effect of 5-fluorouracil in murine liver cancer model via regulatory T-cells,” appeared in the July 2013 issue of the Journal of Drug Design, Development and Therapy, a Dove Press title.
