A gastroenterology journal has issued expressions of concern for forty articles about a probiotic formulation that has been at the center of a long-running legal saga in the United States and Europe.
The articles appeared in the Journal of Crohn’s and Colitis, the official journal of the European Crohn’s and Colitis Organisation (ECCO) and date back to 2007. All mention a proprietary formulation of probiotics – and therein lies the tale.
Stolen data, “gross” misconduct, a strange game of scientific telephone, and accusations of intimidation – Santa came late to Retraction Watch but he delivered the goods in style.
I did accidentally run in the Cureus paper while I was looking for my original publication on JID and I did report it immediately to Cureus and JID editorial offices.
The journal acted with what we’d consider to be remarkable haste. Within a few weeks came the following retraction notice:
A neuroscientist once called the “prince of panspermia” has lost a lawsuit against Springer Nature stemming from a 2019 paper of his that a journal retracted.
Here’s the summary from United States District Judge John P. Cronan, who heard the original case:
A Stanford University professor who tried to sue a critic and the journal that published an unfavorable view of his work is opposing a judge’s order that he pay $75,000 in legal fees generated in the case.
In 2017, Mark Jacobson, an engineer who studies energy at the California institution, sued Christopher Clack and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) after the journal published an article which cast doubt on some of the conclusions in a 2015 paper Jacobson had written in PNAS. The amount of the defamation claim? $10 million from each of the two parties, plus punitive damages and “any and all relief.”
Jacobson withdrew his lawsuit, which also demanded a retraction, in 2018, at which point Clack and the journal fired back. They filed their own suit grounded in the anti-SLAPP — short for “Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation” — statute, in which they asked for Jacobson to pay their legal fees.
A former veterinary student at Tufts University has settled a $1 million lawsuit alleging that she was punished for claiming that her mentor at the school falsified data in a 2014 article.
More than three and a half years after being alerted to concerns about the data in a 2015 article, an obstetrics journal has finally retracted the paper, citing a lack of ethics approval for the work. Meanwhile, the co-author of a meta-analysis that relies heavily on the paper has suggested that some critics of the underlying work risk legal action for their efforts.
As we reported last October, data sleuths have accused Badawy and some of his colleagues at Mansoura of having fabricated data and other misconduct in some 250 clinical trials — charges which were (and may still be) apparently convincing enough to warrant a university inquiry.
Retraction Watch readers may be familiar with the name David Sanders. Sanders, a biologist at Purdue University, has become a scientific sleuth, ferreting out problems in numerous papers. In one of those cases, that of Ohio State University professor Carlo Croce, Sanders ended up being sued — before an article in which he was quoted even came out. He eventually prevailed, but the episode left a mark, as readers will learn in this Q&A. (It has left a mark on Croce, too, in the form of 10 retractions and two suits brought by teams of lawyers for unpaid bills.)
A drug company that manufactures a painkiller used for surgery patients has sued an anesthesiology journal along with its editor and publisher and the authors of articles that it says denigrated its product unfairly.
In a complaint filed yesterday in U.S. District Court in New Jersey, Pacira Biosciences claims that “In the February 2021 issue of Anesthesiology, the ASA, reflecting a bias against EXPAREL amongst the editorial staff at Anesthesiology, published three articles, and other related content, that seriously disparage Pacira’s product EXPAREL,” an FDA-approved drug which they say is “a non-opioid pain medication proven to prolong post-surgery pain relief.”
In seeking retractions, compensatory and punitive damages exceeding $75,000 — the threshold for U.S. federal court — and lawyers’ fees, the company’s attorneys at Latham & Watkins write:
Bowing to legal pressure from the supplement maker Herbalife, Elsevier earlier this year retracted — and then removed — a paper which claimed that a young woman in India died of liver failure after using the company’s products. The move has led to more legal threats.
The group, led by Cyriac Abby Philips, of Cochin Gastroenterology, in Kerala, India, asserted that tests of Herbalife products similar to those the woman had been taking revealed the presence of heavy metals, bacteria and, in most samples, “undisclosed toxic compounds including traces of psychotropic recreational agent.”
