Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa — known for his tough questions for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — wants to know why a former researcher at Iowa State University wasn’t prosecuted more vigorously after he was found to have deliberately spiked rabbit blood samples in a federally-funded HIV vaccine study.
As Tony Leys of the Des Moines Register reports: Continue reading Should scientific fraud be treated as a crime?
In December, we reported on the case of Dong-Pyou Han, who was found by the Office of Research Integrity to have spiked rabbit blood samples to make it look as though a vaccine for HIV was working.
At the time, Han’s former institution, Iowa State, told us that “one oral presentation and some abstracts will be removed from the web.”
One of those retractions has occurred, in Retrovirology, of “Eliciting broadly neutralizing antibodies against HIV-1 that target gp41 MPER.” Here’s the notice: Continue reading Faked HIV vaccine research presentation retracted
A former postdoc at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) committed misconduct in a study of hepatitis by falsely claiming that data from a single trial subject were actually from more than a dozen different people, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) has found.
The investigation was prompted by allegations made by readers of the paper. Baoyan Xu made what the ORI called “a limited admission” that “some better looking strips were repeatedly used as representatives for several times [sic].”
According to a report of the ORI’s findings to be published in the Federal Register tomorrow, the paper, “Hybrid DNA virus in Chinese patients with seronegative hepatitis discovered by deep sequencing, published earlier this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS): Continue reading Former NIH scientist falsified images in hepatitis study: ORI
The Office of Research Integrity has found that Timothy Sheehy, formerly a scientist at a contractor for the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research, committed misconduct in work paid for by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and a contract to his former company, SAIC-Frederick, Inc.
According to a notice in the Federal Register today, ORI found faked data in a 2010 paper, “Simultaneous Recovery of DNA and RNA from Formalin-Fixed Paraffin-Embedded Tissue and Application in Epidemiologic Studies,” that Sheehy and colleagues published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers, & Prevention: Continue reading Former federal contractor faked data, says ORI
The Office of Research Integrity has concluded that Hao Wang, a Canadian pathologist, falsified data in a 2011 poster presentation supported by money from the National Institutes of Health.
For his part Wang, a former faculty member at Western University in Ontario (his website is still active but his email bounces back), has said there were undisclosed “extenuating circumstances” in the matter but that he could not afford to fight the case. Wang also seems to be making the “no harm, no foul” defense, as you’ll see from the notice: Continue reading ORI sanctions pathologist in Canada for bogus monkey data
Last month, we reported on the case of Nitin Aggarwal, who earned his PhD at the Medical College of Wisconsin, and who, according to the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), faked data in his graduate thesis, in applications for National Institutes of Health and American Heart Association grant, and in two published papers.
Given the findings about his PhD thesis — and the fact that he had won a $1,000 award for his dissertation — we were curious whether he would lose his degree. Ravi Misra, dean of the Medical College of Wisconsin’s Graduate School of Biomedical Science, tells Retraction Watch he won’t: Continue reading Scientist who faked data in his thesis will keep his PhD
A group of authors from Emory University, has lost another paper for image manipulation, bringing their total to at least four. What makes this particularly interesting is that the main actor in the figure fakery, Lian Zuo, does not appear to have been involved this time.
Zuo, you may recall, was cited in multiple retraction notices back in 2011 after Emory investigators concluded that he appeared to have been fabricating figures. But, one of the notices, from Circulation Research, raised the possibility that someone else was implicated, too: Continue reading Another image falsification retraction for Emory heart researchers
A complicated case involving two microbiology researchers at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) appears to have come to some conclusion.
In November of last year, we reported that Continue reading “Not exoneration”: University reverses sanctions on husband-wife team found to have manipulated images
Nitin Aggarwal, formerly of the Medical College of Wisconsin, faked data in his PhD thesis, grant applications to the NIH and American Heart Association, and in two papers, according to new findings by the Office of Research Integrity.
(The case would have apparently first been published in the Federal Register on October 2, except for the government shutdown.)
Here were their findings: Continue reading Cardiology researcher faked data in his prizewinning PhD thesis — and NIH, AHA grants: ORI
In a finding that’s unlikely to surprise too many people, but which is interesting work nonetheless, researchers have found that trainees whom the U.S. Office of Research Integrity finds to have committed misconduct rarely publish much again. According to the paper, only 11% of trainees who committed misconduct published more than one article a year.
That’s not quite the case for more seasoned scientists who show up in ORI reports, as the researchers — Barbara Redman and Jon Merz — had discovered in previous work. Here’s the abstract of the new paper, “Effects of Findings of Scientific Misconduct on Postdoctoral Trainees,” which appeared in August in the American Journal of Bioethics — Primary Research (not the AJOB, as we’d first reported): Continue reading What happens to postdocs sanctioned by the ORI?