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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

A researcher and former faculty member at Tufts School of Medicine in Boston has been banned from working with animals for a year following repeated cases of abuse under his supervision, according to documents obtained by an animal-rights group.

In an Oct. 26, 2022, letter to the federal Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare, the university reported “serious and continuing noncompliance with” animal-welfare regulations. These breaches included “injections in mice via an unapproved route/location, failure to provide required analgesia, inadequate supportive care and monitoring, and failure to euthanize mice upon reaching the approved humane endpoints,” Tufts said.

When asked for his comments, the researcher “refuted most of the allegations and took no responsibility for his actions,” the university added.

Continue reading Exclusive: Former Tufts researcher suspended from animal work after abuse

Following an investigation launched by Cornell University, a committee recommended pulling several papers by lung-disease researcher Augustine M. K. Choi, who served as dean of Weill Cornell Medicine until this year, Retraction Watch has learned.

Choi’s latest retraction, which brings him up to three so far,  came on March 15, when The Journal of Clinical Investigation pulled “UCP2-induced fatty acid synthase promotes NLRP3 inflammasome activation during sepsis.” The paper has been cited 178 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. 

The retraction notice reads: 

Continue reading Exclusive: Committee recommended pulling several papers by former Cornell med school dean

Two papers coauthored by a computer scientist whose work on visual effects has been credited in big-name Hollywood movies will soon be retracted after a publisher’s investigation found falsification of data in the articles. 

Retraction Watch has also learned that the University of Southern California (USC) found that Hao Li “falsely presented his research” in the two publications while he was a professor there. The articles, both published in journals of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), describe a system to create a 3D digital avatar head from a person’s photo using artificial intelligence. 

Li co-founded and is CEO of Pinscreen, a startup which is commercializing that technology. On its website, Pinscreen touts its products as “the most advanced AI-driven versatile avatars.” Besides personalized avatars for use in virtual or augmented reality systems, Pinscreen offers the ability to replace a person’s face in videos, creating what’s known as “deepfakes.” 

Continue reading Exclusive: Deepfake pioneer to lose two papers after misconduct finding of faked data

An Ivy League university is blaming an “error” for the brief disappearance of the doctoral dissertation of a former Twitter employee whose writings on gay dating apps drew public scorn from Elon Musk.

As Fox News first reported, on Saturday the PhD thesis by Yoel Roth, who until November had been Twitter’s head of trust and safety, seemed to have been removed from the University of Pennsylvania’s ScholarlyCommons website. 

A Penn official told Fox: 

Continue reading Penn says access to former Twitter employee’s thesis was ‘mistakenly closed off’ following Elon Musk tweets

My laboratory at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School studies genetic diseases that affect the skeletal system.  We became interested in the protein osteocalcin after Gerard Karsenty at Columbia University reported in several papers using knockout mice – mice lacking the genes which produce osteocalcin – that osteocalcin is a bone-derived hormone that affects glucose metabolism, insulin production, male fertility, muscle mass, and cognition.  If osteocalcin functions similarly in humans, then osteocalcin becomes an exciting and clinically important protein. 

To independently confirm these findings, we created our own osteocalcin knockout mouse strain. We examined glucose metabolism and male fertility in our mice and found none of the effects reported by Karsenty and colleagues; we reported our findings in May 2020.  A group in Japan created a third osteocalcin knockout mouse strain which also failed to confirm Karsenty and colleagues’ findings.  

In earlier years my laboratory also could not independently confirm other results reported by the Karsenty group: a paper I co-authored in 2011 found no evidence of the Wnt co-receptor LRP5 affecting blood serotonin levels, contrary to what Karsenty’s lab published.

Continue reading When an independent replication isn’t really independent

This week, Nature reported on two institutional reports that found scientists in Carlo Croce’s cancer research lab at The Ohio State University had committed research misconduct including plagiarism and data falsification. 

Another institutional investigation directed at Croce did not find he committed research misconduct but did identify problems with how he managed his lab, according to Nature. 

It’s the latest chapter in a years-long saga of mounting numbers of corrections and retractions for Croce, a 2017 article in the New York Times that brought him to widespread attention, a scientist sleuth trying to clean up the literature, and lots and lots of lawyers, some of whom may have a claim  on Croce’s house after he didn’t pay his legal bills.

Continue reading Papers in Croce case with “blatantly obvious” problems still aren’t retracted after misconduct investigation: sleuth

A pharmacology researcher with four retractions appears to have left the University of Pennsylvania, where he had worked for at least 30 years and won more than $7 million in NIH grants.

The school’s faculty page for William Armstead, who held ​​a research professorship in Anesthesiology and Critical Care, now bears only the statement that “Dr. Armstead may no longer be affiliated with the Perelman School of Medicine.” Penn Medicine has not responded to our request for comment.  

In May, we reported that Armstead was up to four retractions after the Journal of Neurotrauma had retracted three articles at the researcher’s request. 

Continue reading UPenn prof with four retractions “may no longer be affiliated” with school

A group of cancer researchers at the University of Rochester have now lost three papers over concerns about the data in the articles – issues that evidently did not rise to the level of misconduct, according to the institution.

The work came from the lab of Yuhchyau Chen, of the university’s Wilmot Cancer Institute. A common co-author was Soo Ok Lee, who is no longer affiliated with the University of Rochester. In addition to the three retractions, Lee has several corrections and an expression of concern.

The most recent retraction involves a 2019 article in the Journal of Molecular Medicine titled “Radiation-induced glucocorticoid receptor promotes CD44 + prostate cancer stem cell growth through activation of SGK1-Wnt/β-catenin signaling” for which Chen and Lee were corresponding authors. The paper has been cited nine times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

According to the retraction notice, dated December 10:  

Continue reading University of Rochester cancer researchers included ‘incorrect images’ in 13 papers, committee finds

A paper linking the use of a wildly popular drug for heartburn to cancer has been retracted after the authors concluded that their widely touted finding appears to have resulted from a hiccup in the way they conducted their testing. 

The 2016 article, in Carcinogenesis, has played a minor role in an ongoing class action lawsuit against the makers of ranitidine (sold as Zantac, among other brand names) claiming that use of the medication has caused cancer in more than 100,000 plaintiffs. And it was a key citation in a 2019 petition to the FDA urging that such drugs be recalled.

The FDA has been investigating contamination of ranitidine and a related drug with NDMA, a known human carcinogen at high doses. On April 1, 2020, the agency announced that, although its tests did not find concerning levels of NDMA in “many” of the samples it tested, it was recalling all products that contain ranitidine:

Continue reading Widely covered paper on ranitidine-cancer link retracted