Nearly five months after a graduate student at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine spontaneously confessed to cooking data, the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) said today that she has agreed to exclude herself from receiving government funding for three years.
According to the ORI, Meredyth Forbes: Continue reading Grad student who confessed to falsifying data barred from government funding
Data manipulation in a Cell Reports paper blew the importance of a kind of bacteria out of proportion.
Retracted this month — less than three months after it was published — the paper showed, according to a summary on the cover page:
B. subtilis is a symbiont that resides in the gut of C. elegans and generates nitric oxide that is essential for the host. Xiao et al. demonstrate that nitric oxide promotes defense against pathogenic bacteria by activating p38 MAPK, demonstrating the importance of commensal bacteria in host immunity.
But B. subtilis — a member of the Bacillaceae family — aren’t actually as plentiful as they appeared, explains the retraction notice for “Gut-Colonizing Bacteria Promote C. elegans Innate Immunity by Producing Nitric Oxide:”
Continue reading Data manipulation flushes paper on gut bacteria
One Friday in January, graduate student Meredyth Forbes was reviewing material for her dissertation with her mentor when she decided to make a confession.
She “burst out with a statement that some of the data was fabricated,” said Edward Burns, research integrity officer at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where Forbes worked. It was, Burns told Retraction Watch: Continue reading Einstein grad student admits cooking data, settles with Office of Research Integrity