Category: united states

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.

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. 

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.

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: 

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.

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.