Nitin Aggarwal, formerly of the Medical College of Wisconsin, faked data in his PhD thesis, grant applications to the NIH and American Heart Association, and in two papers, according to new findings by the Office of Research Integrity.
(The case would have apparently first been published in the Federal Register on October 2, except for the government shutdown.)
On Wednesday, we brought you the story of a retraction by Gerold Feuer, a State University of New York (SUNY) Upstate Medical Center stem cell scientist whom the university had found to have misused grants. He was suspended, but successfully fought that action. We had asked Feuer for comment at that time, and he has now responded:
SUNY Upstate Medical University’s decision to widely publicize the recent decision by the journal Stem Cells to retract an article from my laboratory is a vindictive and retaliatory campaign to defame my scientific credentials in the press and to my scientific colleagues.
I unequivocally state that the data in all published manuscripts is valid and sound and is not falsified or fabricated. SUNY UMU unilaterally requested a retraction from Stem Cells, despite the fact that the federal Office of Research Integrity (ORI) has not yet ruled on these allegations. It is not surprising that UMU has decided to publicize this retraction in a public forum as a second attempt to force me from my tenured faculty position and circumvent decision of the employment arbitrator and the New York Supreme Court.
Stem Cells and Development has retracted a paper it published earlier this year after the leader of the study reported that the data were unreliable.
The paper, “Derivation and Genetic Modification of Embryonic Stem Cells from Disease-Model Inbred Rat Strains,” came from the lab of Aron Geurts, of the Medical College of Wisconsin.
A stem cell journal is retracting a paper by Gerold Feuer, a researcher at the State University of New York (SUNY) Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse who was also found to have misused grants.
The Feuer story is complicated. Heralded in 2008 for landing $6.2 million in grants from the New York Stem Cell Board, Feuer was suspended in October 2010 while the university investigated allegations he had misused funds, specifically to funnel state dollars to HuMurine, a company he founded in 2008. In December 2010, Upstate said they had found evidence he had committed 53 acts of financial misconduct, and dismissed him.
At team of researchers at MD Anderson Cancer Center has retracted a paper after realizing that the cell lines they were using weren’t what they thought they were.
Communications in Nonlinear Science and Numerical Simulation has retracted a pair of articles by a group of chemists from Iran and the United States after finding evidence of plagiarism in the papers.
The researcher team included authors from Islamic Azad University, Ferdowski University of Mashhad and, perhaps somewhat incongruously, Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana.