Category: united states

“These findings are unjustified.”

That’s how a biologist at the Jesse Brown Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Chicago described the conclusions of a federal investigation that found she had faked images and inflated sample sizes in published papers and a grant application. The biologist, Hee-Jeong Im Sampen, has been banned from conducting VA research. 

Sampen, also a research professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, said that “any errors that occurred involved discrete erroneously-placed figures or images” that “in no way undermine our basic conclusions and findings.”

Calling the episode a “long and hard battle for me,” Sampen sent us these comments:

Continue reading ‘A travesty’: A researcher found guilty of misconduct by federal U.S. government responds

A research biologist at the Jesse Brown Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Chicago faked images and inflated sample sizes in published papers and a grant application, the federal agency has determined. 

Hee-Jeong Im Sampen, also a research professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Illinois, Chicago, “engaged in research misconduct by intentionally, knowingly and/or recklessly falsifying/fabricating data” in three published papers, an unpublished manuscript, a poster presentation, and a grant application for VA funding, according to a Federal Register notice. 

Sampen, who publishes under the name Hee-Jeong Im, is corresponding author on all of the published papers the VA identified. The articles, which also list an affiliation with Rush University Medical Center, are: 

Continue reading US VA scientist banned from agency research for faking data

It’s Nobel Prize week, and the work behind mRNA COVID-19 vaccines has just earned the physiology or medicine prize. But this is Retraction Watch, so that’s not what this post is about.

A Nobel prize-winning researcher whose publications have come under scrutiny has retracted his 10th paper for issues with the data and images. 

Gregg Semenza, a professor of genetic medicine and director of the vascular program at Johns Hopkins’ Institute for Cell Engineering in Baltimore, shared the 2019 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for “discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability.” 

The pseudonymous sleuth Claire Francis had flagged possibly duplicated or manipulated images in Semenza’s publications on PubPeer before 2019, and other sleuths posted more beginning in October 2020. 

Continue reading Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza tallies tenth retraction

Marc Tessier-Lavigne, the former president of Stanford University who resigned following scrutiny of his published papers and an institutional research misconduct investigation, has retracted a third paper, this one from Cell. 

Last week, Tessier-Lavigne retracted two articles from Science that had been published in 2001. 

The Cell paper, A Ligand-Gated Association between Cytoplasmic Domains of UNC5 and DCC Family Receptors Converts Netrin-Induced Growth Cone Attraction to Repulsion, was published in 1999. It has been cited 577 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. 

The retraction notice was posted Monday. It states:

Continue reading Former Stanford president retracts 1999 Cell paper

Two institutional investigations that concluded in 2016 and 2019 found scientific misconduct in multiple publications from the lab of a leading urologist at the University of California, San Francisco, Retraction Watch has learned. 

The investigations could not determine who had manipulated the published images of experimental data, but the 2019 report concluded that Rajvir Dahiya, also director of the urology research center at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, “was senior/last author on all these publications and therefore responsible for the results.” Dahiya retired in 2020. 

The two investigation reports, which we obtained through a public records request, along with the reports from the preliminary inquiries preceding the investigations, recommend notifying the journals that published eight papers of the issues identified. Four have so far been retracted, one corrected, and two marked with expressions of concern. One of those expressions of concern was published last month. 

In comments to Retraction Watch, Dahiya blamed the findings that research misconduct occurred in his lab on the age of the papers. He said the VA destroyed notebooks with original data that had been stored in a central facility after the required data retention period had lapsed: 

Continue reading Exclusive: UCSF and VA found “pervasive” manipulation in lab of former center director

One of the world’s foremost conservation biologists is being accused of plagiarism and bullying by a former PhD student, Retraction Watch has learned.  

The biologist, Stuart Pimm of Duke University, strongly denies the charges, but he and his colleagues have acknowledged the existence of “closely related” work following an internal investigation by Duke.

The allegations surfaced late last month on X, formerly known as Twitter, in a thread that quickly went viral, garnering hundreds of thousands of views and drawing comments from a broad swath of scientists. 

In the thread, Ruben Dario Palacio claimed his former academic advisor “threatened to kick me out of Duke” to make him work faster. Palacio decided to change labs due to the alleged “bullying and harassment,” he said, and three months later, in April 2020, published his research as a preprint. The article appeared in the journal Diversity and Distributions in October 2021.

Continue reading Exclusive: World-renowned biologist accused of bullying student, stealing his work

Florida State University last week terminated a criminology professor accused of research misconduct, Retraction Watch has learned, capping a years-long, highly publicized saga the school says has caused almost “catastrophic” damage to its standing.

In a termination letter obtained by Retraction Watch, the university accused the former professor, Eric A. Stewart, of “extreme negligence and incompetence.” It also asserted that, due to Stewart’s actions, “decades of research” once believed “to be at the forefront of” criminology has “been shown to contain numerous erroneous and false narratives.”

“The details of problematic data management, false results, and the numerous publication retractions have negatively affected the discipline on a national level,” FSU Provost James J. Clark wrote in the letter, dated July 13. 

Clark added that the debacle had also affected recruitment of faculty and students and caused the university’s researchers to worry about their chances of getting papers into top journals.

Continue reading Florida university fires criminology professor blemished by retractions

Ten years after a neuroscientist was fired from his job at a Veterans Administration Medical Center, he has won a challenge of the decision.

Wayne State University, where the researcher, Christian Kreipke, was studying traumatic brain injury, fired him in February 2012 following a research misconduct investigation that found he had faked data. At the time Kreipke had a dual appointment at the John D. Dingell Veterans Administration Medical Center in Detroit.

Kreipke maintains that Wayne State investigated him in retaliation for asking questions about how the university administered grant funding. He filed a whistleblower lawsuit after he was fired alleging that the university had committed grant fraud against the federal government, to the tune of $169 million. In 2014, a judge dismissed the case. 

Continue reading Scientist with six retractions wins challenge of firing, funding ban

In my prior career as an investigative science journalist and now as a whistleblower lawyer, I’ve seen institutions react to allegations of scientific fraud in two ways. 

The first could be called “Investigate and Disclose.” This strategy was exemplified by Bell Laboratories’ 2002 investigation of allegations that Jan Hendrik Schön, a member of the technical staff, mishandled data. The allegations were published in The New York Times in May. In September, Bell Labs released a thorough report on its inquiry revealing fabrications in multiple Nature and Science papers, which were promptly retracted. The report made possible a 2009 book I wrote about the scandal, because once a proper investigation began (and it took a while to get going), the company clarified within months that Schön had faked his data. 

The second, more common response is “Delay and Deny” or “Delay and Downplay,” which is a more common – but insidious – strategy. A Delay and Deny response is not helpful to anyone outside a tiny inner circle of administrators, irrespective of the merit of the allegations.

Continue reading Guest post: When whistleblowers need lawyers