Category: by institution

The Harvard Kennedy School’s Misinformation Review has retracted an article which claimed – or misclaimed, as the case may be – that an African American advocacy movement discouraged Blacks from voting for Democratic politicians and suppressed news about the Covid-19 pandemic.

The article, “Disinformation creep: ADOS and the strategic weaponization of breaking news,” appeared in the Special Issue on Disinformation in the 2020 Elections published in January by the Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy.

ADOS is short for American Descendants of Slavery, an online movement that calls for reparations for slavery in the United States. The movement – which uses the hashtag #ADOS on social media – was founded by Yvette Carnell and Antonio Moore.

The article was written by Mutale Nkonde, the founding CEO of AI For the People, and co-authors including several affiliated with MoveOn, a progressive  political organization. 

According to the abstract of the paper, which is no longer available online: 

Continue reading Harvard journal retracts paper on Black advocacy in elections

If you need a reminder of how slowly the wheels of justice grind, here’s one.

Earlier this month,  Sam W. Lee agreed to pay the U.S. government $215,000 to settle allegations that the former Harvard researcher had made false claims in a grant application.

It turns out that at least one skeptical researcher had notified journals and regulators about his concerns over the veracity of some of Lee’s other published findings back in 2011. 

In July of that year, David Vaux, an Australian scientist and research ethicist now at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, wrote to Nature about a new paper by Lee with what he believed were several critical flaws. According to Vaux, multiple colleagues of his had raised questions about the article, “Selective killing of cancer cells by a small molecule targeting the stress response to ROS,” which the journal had published earlier that month. 

Among the criticisms, wrote Vaux, a member of the board of directors of our parent non-profit organization, were: 

Continue reading The decade-long saga capped by a $215,000 settlement with the US government

A former Harvard researcher has agreed to pay $215,000 to settle allegations that he used bogus data in a grant application to the National Institutes of Health — and the teaching hospital where he worked has already repaid more than $900,000 in grant funds.

The settlement, of which we were just made aware, was announced on August 6,  six days before a lawyer for the researcher, Sam W. Lee, asked us to take down a post about his client’s problematic publications.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts, Lee knowingly made false claims when in June 2014 he submitted the “allegedly inauthentic data” as part of NIH grant R01 CA195534-01, titled “p53 survival target DDR1 kinase in DNA damage response and carcinogenesis”:

Continue reading False claims allegations cost Mass General, former Harvard researcher more than $1 million

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