A former graduate student at Georgia Tech who at least until recently worked at Shell confessed last year to misconduct in three published papers.
Michael Casciato, who earned his doctorate from Georgia Tech in 2013, wrote in a June 22, 2020 email to the editor of an American Chemical Society journal as well as the principal investigator of the lab where he completed his PhD, Martha Grover, and a co-author, Dennis Hess:
The University of Glasgow is requesting the retraction of multiple papers by a pharmacology researcher who held various positions there for more than a quarter century.
The story begins in December 2016, when biostatistician Steven McKinney posted on PubPeer about a paper by the researcher, Miles Houslay, in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. That paper was eventually retracted in August 2020, but not before McKinney posted a comment on Retraction Watch that caught the eye of the pseudonymous Clare Francis.
Francis pointed us to comments about a total of eight of Houslay’s papers at that time. And in August 2020, when the JBC retraction appeared, Francis forwarded those to the King’s College, London, where Houslay is listed as having a faculty position, and the University of Glasgow, which he left in 2011.
A urology researcher at Louisiana State University lost his post as department chair after a misconduct investigation, Retraction Watch has learned. But he eventually moved on to be department chair at a different LSU campus — where he remains today.
In June, we reported that the work of urology researcher Hari Koul had been investigated by his former employer, the University of Colorado, following a recommendation by LSU. But between the time the misconduct investigation concluded in 2014 and the publication of our story, only three of nine papers by Koul that Colorado recommended for corrections or retractions had been amended in any way. More of those publications have been retractedfollowing our story, the reporting of which was how some editors learned of the issues.
Now, via a public records request, we’ve gained access to the inquiry at LSU which led to the investigation at CU Denver and includes notes from interviews with Koul and his postdoc. The Denver investigation didn’t find Koul guilty of misconduct, but it found many errors in his published work, leading LSU’s Health Science Center in Shreveport to demote him in 2016. After several years of apparently unrelated legal battles with LSU’s Health Science Center in Shreveport, Koul moved to a different LSU institution, LSU Health Sciences Center in New Orleans, last year.
When the University of Colorado at Denver completed an investigation in 2015 into the work of a former faculty member, the school recommended that nine papers be corrected or retracted.
But six years after the close of that investigation, the researcher, urologist Hari Koul, has had just two papers retracted and one corrected.
Multiple journal editors told Retraction Watch they had not been informed that papers published in their journals were recommended for retraction or correction, according to documents obtained by Retraction Watch via a public records request. And emails show Koul was still negotiating the retraction of at least one of the papers last year.
In 2016, Mingjun Zhang, a biomedical engineering researcher at The Ohio State University, along with collaborators, published a paper that explored the mechanism behind ivy’s impressive adhesive strength. In it, the authors claimed to report the genetic sequences of the proteins making up the adhesive.
But shortly after publication, an anonymous whistleblower sent a letter to OSU and PNAS simultaneously: “The authors have knowlingly [sic], intentionally, repeatedly, and substantially misrepresented data in order to publish the manuscript.”
King’s College London (KCL) found evidence of poor research practices by three of its faculty, but “no intention to deceive” and no misconduct, according to documents obtained by Retraction Watch.
One case involves work by cancer biologists Farzin Farzaneh and Ghulam Mufti, while the other involves work by Mahvash Tavassoli, also a cancer researcher. Both involve problems with images and were brought to the attention of KCL in January of this year by pseudonymous whistleblower Claire Francis.
In the Farzaneh and Mufti case, writes Tim Newton, KCL’s dean of research governance, ethics and integrity in an October 31 letter:
Want to be a first author on a scholarly paper? A Russian company has you covered — starting at about $500. The company claims to have added the names of more than 10,000 researchers to more than 2,000 published articles in scholarly journals over the past three years. Think eBay — or perhaps StubHub — for unscrupulous scientists.
Although we can’t verify the numbers, at least one major journal indexer, from whom we recently learned of the scheme, is concerned enough about the site that it has demanded that it stop doing business.
According to the Russian outfit’s site (through Google Translate):
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis has temporarily halted enrollment in six bone marrow transplant trials due to concerns over how side effects were being identified in medical records, Retraction Watch has learned.
According to a source familiar with the trials, five of the six being suspended were all enrolling children with blood cancers who lacked a matching donor. During the trials, doctors took bone marrow from a parent — not a perfect match — and manipulated the cells before transplant to make them more capable of killing cancer, and less likely to be rejected.
Four trials, a few of which were scheduled to enroll more than 100 children, are being led by Brandon Triplett. Two are led by Mari Dallas, according to the source. Genzyme and the U.S. National Cancer Institute are listed as collaborators. Both Dallas and Triplett work under bone marrow transplant department chair Wing Leung.
