A former researcher at the Mount Desert Island Laboratory in Maine who co-founded a lab spinoff faked data in research supported by federal funding, according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.
The researcher, Viravuth Yin, “engaged in research misconduct by knowingly, intentionally, and/or recklessly falsifying and/or fabricating data,” the ORI said in an announcement about the case. The work was published and submitted from 2015 to 2019, and Yin was principal investigator on one of the grants named by the ORI, worth more than $900,000.
A cancer researcher once involved in a federal research integrity probe has repeatedly been denied funding and other sources of income, according to his attorney, who blamed our coverage of the case for the scientist’s continuing woes and asked us to remove a post.
Our coverage of the work of Sam W. Lee goes back to 2013. But it was our reporting in April 2019 that Lee — once a member of the Harvard faculty — was the subject of an investigation by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity that was the subject of the attorney’s letter. ORI has yet to announce a conclusion in its inquiry, which appears to have reached a finding before we posted on the matter. He has at least five retractions — including two that appeared after April 2019 — and two expressions of concern.
One of those expressions of concern was for a 2000 paper in Molecular and Cellular Biology titled“Overexpression of Kinase-Associated Phosphatase (KAP) in Breast and Prostate Cancer and Inhibition of the Transformed Phenotype by Antisense KAP Expression.”
The disposition of that article, published by the American Society for Microbiology, like the ORI inquiry, remains unclear.
In a letter dated August 12, attorney Steven Seinberg, who is based in Los Angeles, claimed that since our April 2019 post, Lee has struggled both personally and professionally:
The U.S. Office of Research Integrity, which oversees investigations into allegations of misconduct in grants from the NIH, is once again without a permanent director.
Elisabeth (Lis) Handley, who became director in 2019, has taken on a new role in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), of which ORI is a part. Wanda Jones, who has served as interim and deputy director of the agency, will serve as acting director, according to an HHS spokesperson.
Handley has become principal deputy assistant secretary for health. In a memo to staff, assistant secretary for health Rachel Levine wrote:
A former postdoc at the University of Texas Health Science Center has been found guilty of misconduct stemming from efforts to rig preprint servers to boost the postdoc’s publication metrics.
The findings about Yibin Lin include the fabrication and falsification of data, as well as plagiarism in six published papers that have since been retracted from the preprint server bioRxiv. On none of those articles does the name “Yibin Lin” appear as an author.
A pharmacologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center who lost a highly cited 2014 paper in Nature for questions about the integrity of her data has been sanctioned by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) — and UT Southwestern has rescinded two professorships she previously held.
An associate dean at the University of Miami stepped down from his post two weeks after agreeing to sanctions stemming from a finding of misconduct by a government watchdog, Retraction Watch has learned.
Yesterday, we reported that the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) found that Charles Downs, “engaged in research misconduct by intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly falsifying and/or fabricating data” in six federal grant applications while on the faculty of the University of Arizona.
Downs was appointed associate dean of Miami’s nursing school in 2018, and stepped down from the position on December 4, according to a university spokesperson. He remains an associate professor at the school.
A former researcher at the University of Arizona who is now was until last week an associate dean at the University of Miami “engaged in research misconduct by intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly falsifying and/or fabricating data” in six federal grant applications, according to a new finding by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI).
Charles A. Downs’ work “focuses on acute lung injury and pulmonary diseases,” according to a 2018 press release from the University of Miami announcing his appointment. He “neither admits nor denies ORI’s findings of research misconduct,” the ORI announced today. The agency said that Downs
A cancer specialist formerly affiliated with Boys Town National Research Hospital in Nebraska who was found to have committed misconduct in nearly 20 grant applications and papers has lost an article in Scientific Reports — a year after his misconduct case became public.
According to the journal, which, to its credit, flagged the paper with an editor’s note last February, the delay stemmed from efforts to verify information that was not part of the official inquiry.
The article, “Type IV collagen α1-chain noncollagenous domain blocks MMP-2 activation both in-vitro and in-vivo,” was written by a group led by Yakkanti Akul Sudhakar, whose name — last, at least — might be familiar to RW readers.
In November 2019, Sudhakar — who also has published as Sudhakar Yakkanti and Akulapalli Sudhakar — was sanctioned by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity for:
A cancer researcher faked a dozen images in three papers and a conference presentation while employed at Harvard teaching hospitals, according to a new report by a federal U.S. watchdog.
At least seven years after questions were first raised about work by a researcher at the University of Maryland Baltimore, School of Medicine, he has agreed to a three-year ban on Federal funding.
intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly: (a) used random blank background sections of film or empty boxes to falsely represent or fabricate western blot analyses; (b) used manipulated images to generate and report falsified data in figures; and (c) used mislabeled images to falsely report data in figures.
