R. Wayne Alexander, a cardiology researcher at Emory whose lab has retracted four papers following university investigations, has notched retractions five and six.
A Harvard student publication has retracted an article arguing that Jews deserved the persecution they’ve received for 2,000 years because they “killed Jesus.”
(We’ll do a few conflict of interest disclosures, if just for the hell — oops — of it: Harvard is Ivan’s alma mater, and both of us are well, Jews. We note, however, that the Ichthus was not around in Ivan’s Harvard days, and neither of us was around when the events involving Jesus described in this post occurred.)
A group of authors from Emory University, has lost another paper for image manipulation, bringing their total to at least four. What makes this particularly interesting is that the main actor in the figure fakery, Lian Zuo, does not appear to have been involved this time.
Sam Lee, a Harvard biologist who had two mega-corrections published last year, has retracted a paper in Molecular Cell because some of the figures were “inappropriately assembled.”
The Journal of Neuroscience has retracted a 2012 paper by a group from Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet for what appears to be research misconduct. But more on that in a moment.
The article, “The Existence of FGFR1-5-HT1A Receptor Heterocomplexes in Midbrain 5-HT Neurons of the Rat: Relevance for Neuroplasticity,” came from the lab of Kjell Fuxe, whose interests include Parkinson’s disease, addiction and depression. The first and second authors, Dasiel Oscar Borroto-Escuela and Wilber Romero-Fernandez, are listed as being post-docs in the lab.
A new retraction notice in the Journal of Applied Physiology gives only a hint at the problems in the paper, but what it does say has led us to a story about one of its co-authors.
Dongqing Li, a nanotechnology expert at the University of Waterloo in Canada, has been suspended without pay for four months resulting from an investigation into a paper he published that contained rampant plagiarism.
Oh, and the offending article appeared in a journal Li founded — and of which he was the top editor.
Last week was a busy one at the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI), at least judging by how many cases they posted. There were sanctions against researchers at Ohio State, Texas Tech, and the Gladstone Institutes, as we reported. And it turns out there was another case closed, of a former Harvard dental school research fellow, The Scientist reports.
According to the ORI, Martin Biosse-Duplan “engaged in research misconduct in research supported by National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS), National Institutes of Health (NIH), grant R01 AR054450.”