Category: harvard

Last year, JAMA Ophthalmology published a study that claimed to find a link between using cholesterol-lowering drugs known as statins and a reduced risk of glaucoma. In a New York Times story on the paper, lead author

Jae H. Kang, an assistant professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, suggested that statins reduce pressure in the eye, help maintain good blood flow and may help protect the optic nerve.

But Kang came to realize, while reviewing the results for another study, that her research had a major error, as she writes in a letter accompanying the retraction and replacement of the study. Kang tells Retraction Watch:

Continue reading “Statins May Cut Glaucoma Risk,” said a New York Times headline. But is that true?

A group of researchers based at Harvard University have retracted an influential 2017 letter in Nature after a change in lab personnel led to the discovery of errors in the analysis. 

The article, “Microglia-dependent synapse loss in type I interferon-mediated lupus,” emerged from a collaboration including scientists at Harvard Medical School, the Rockefeller University in New York City, the University of Magdeburg, in Germany. 

The senior author of the research letter — which has been cited 75 times, earning it a highly cited designation from Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science — was Michael C. Carroll, a prominent immunology researcher. [See disclosure at the end of this post.] Also on the list was Ronald Herbst, who at the time was vice president of research at MedImmune but has since left that company for another biotech firm. The first author was Allison Bialas, at the time a post-doc at Harvard. 

According to the abstract: 

Continue reading Harvard group retracts Nature paper

Harvard has investigated work from the lab of a cancer researcher at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center that has been under scrutiny on PubPeer for more than five years.

Questions about the output of the lab, run by James W. Mier, began appearing on PubPeer in 2014, with comments about images that looked manipulated. The pseudonymous whistleblower Clare Francis sent Gretchen Brodnicki, Harvard Medical School’s dean for faculty and research integrity, an email about those comments on Sept. 27, 2014, and on July 24 of this year, Brodnicki asked Francis to resend that email.

Also that month, the journal Clinical Cancer Research issued an expression of concern for a 2006 paper by Mier and colleagues, which stated:

Continue reading Cancer lab at Harvard subject of inquiry

Piero Anversa, a former star researcher at Harvard Medical School who left the institution under a cloud, is up to 18 retractions. But that’s barely half of the 31 papers by Anversa’s group that Harvard has requested journals pull over concerns about the integrity of the findings. 

The two articles, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, appeared in 2008 and 2009. Anversa and a frequent co-author, Annarosa Leri, are among the authors on each. 

Anversa ran a richly-funded lab at Brigham and Women’s Hospital studying cardiac stem cells. But in 2014, critics began publicly questioning the output from the lab — questions that led to the departure of Anversa and Leri and a $10 million payout from the Brigham and Partners Healthcare to settle allegations of fraud involving the work. Anversa and Leri also sued Harvard — unsuccessfully — for alerting journals to the investigation and allegedly costing them job offers.

The retraction notice for the 2008 paper, “Notch1 regulates the fate of cardiac progenitor cells,” reads: 

Continue reading Drip, drip: Former Harvard stem cell researcher up to 18 retractions

“Uh, hypothetical situation: you see a paper published that is based on a premise which is clearly flawed, proven by existing literature.” So began an exasperated Twitter thread by Andrew Althouse, a statistician at University of Pittsburgh, in which he debated whether a study using what he calls a “nonsense statistic” should be addressed by letters to the editor or swiftly retracted.

The thread was the latest development in an ongoing disagreement over research in surgery. In one corner, a group of Harvard researchers claim they’re improving how surgeons interpret underpowered or negative studies. In the other corner, statisticians suggest the authors are making things worse by repeatedly misusing a statistical technique called post-hoc power. The authors are giving weak surgical studies an unwarranted pass, according to critics.

Continue reading Statisticians clamor for retraction of paper by Harvard researchers they say uses a “nonsense statistic”