False claims allegations cost Mass General, former Harvard researcher more than $1 million

A former Harvard researcher has agreed to pay $215,000 to settle allegations that he used bogus data in a grant application to the National Institutes of Health — and the teaching hospital where he worked has already repaid more than $900,000 in grant funds.

The settlement, of which we were just made aware, was announced on August 6,  six days before a lawyer for the researcher, Sam W. Lee, asked us to take down a post about his client’s problematic publications.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts, Lee knowingly made false claims when in June 2014 he submitted the “allegedly inauthentic data” as part of NIH grant R01 CA195534-01, titled “p53 survival target DDR1 kinase in DNA damage response and carcinogenesis”:

Continue reading False claims allegations cost Mass General, former Harvard researcher more than $1 million

Attorney asks Retraction Watch to remove post because client has lost out on opportunities

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.  

[Please see an update on this 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:

Continue reading Attorney asks Retraction Watch to remove post because client has lost out on opportunities

Authors admit they “published the paper without completely studying their work.”

As readers of this blog know, we’re fond of highlighting euphemisms, particularly for plagiarism: “inadvertently copied text,” “a significant originality issue” and and “inclusion of significant passages of unattributed material from other authors” come to mind.

But here’s a euphemism for “bullshit” that’s new to us.

Continue reading Authors admit they “published the paper without completely studying their work.”

Authors — except one — retract 2014 Nature paper on genetics

This post was updated at 1145 UTC on August 13, 2021. In the original post, we noted that Joseph Powell and Gibran Hemani had not responded to our request for comment, which we sent shortly after learning under embargo from Nature that this retraction would be published. However, Powell did respond, copying Hemani, as Powell noted in a Twitter thread, and the email never reached us. We have added Powell’s comments, and updated the first sentence of the post to reflect them. We are also investigating why Powell’s email never arrived. We apologize for the errors regardless of the cause, and appreciate the opportunity to update.

The authors of a 2014 research letter in Nature have retracted their article, with near but not entire unanimity, after “new work led to interpretation of the original results being no longer fully valid,” according to the senior author. 

Titled “Detection and replication of epistasis influencing transcription in humans,” the letter was written by a group from Australia, Europe and the United States led by Gibran Hemani, then of the University of Queensland, in Brisbane, and now of the University of Bristol, in the United Kingdom. The senior author on the paper was Joseph Powell, also then of Queensland but now at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, in Darlinghurst, Australia. The paper has been cited 114 times, per Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. 

According to the abstract of the article:

Continue reading Authors — except one — retract 2014 Nature paper on genetics

Authors blame a “ghoul” for retraction of paper claiming vaccines lead to health and behavioral issues

A ghoul (source)

A pair of authors have lost a 2020 paper claiming to link children’s vaccines to health and behavior problems after the journal concluded the data didn’t support the conclusions of the study. 

The authors of the paper, “Relative Incidence of Office Visits and Cumulative Rates of Billed Diagnoses along the Axis of Vaccination,” were James Lyons-Weiler, the president and CEO of the Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge, in Pittsburgh, and Paul Thomas, a pediatrician in Portland, Ore. 

The pair have published at least one other paper on vaccines, in the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research, a periodical that seems dedicated to the proposition that immunizations, and not the diseases they prevent, are a scourge. (Check out the journal’s special edition on Covid-19, for example.)

Continue reading Authors blame a “ghoul” for retraction of paper claiming vaccines lead to health and behavioral issues

Ivermectin meta-analysis to be retracted, revised, say authors

Less than a month after the withdrawal of a widely touted preprint claiming that ivermectin could treat COVID-19, the authors of a meta-analysis that relied heavily on the preprint say they will retract their paper.

According to an expression of concern posted yesterday and announced by Paul Sax, the editor of the journal that published the paper:

Continue reading Ivermectin meta-analysis to be retracted, revised, say authors

Critics face legal threats as journal takes more than three years to act

Ben Mol

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.

The study, “Vaginal progesterone for prevention of preterm labor in asymptomatic twin pregnancies with sonographic short cervix: a randomized clinical trial of efficacy and safety,” appeared in Archives of Gynecology and Obstetrics (AGO) and was conducted by Waleed El-refaie, Mohamed S. Abdelhafez and Ahmed Badawy, of the University of Mansoura in Egypt. The article has been cited 29 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

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. 

Continue reading Critics face legal threats as journal takes more than three years to act

Researcher in Japan suspended, demoted for plagiarism

Atomi University

A tourism researcher in Japan has been suspended and demoted after university officials found that they had committed plagiarism in at least three papers in school publications. 

In an August 4 statement, Atomi Gakuen Women’s University said Masami Murakami, formerly an associate professor, had been suspended from July 15 to September 14, and would now hold the rank of “full-time lecturer” at the school. 

According to the statement, signed by university president Kiyoshi Kasahara, the punishment was “Based on the recognition of specific fraudulent activity (plagiarism) in the written paper.”

Continue reading Researcher in Japan suspended, demoted for plagiarism

Weekend reads: The ethics committee member who sold grades for cash; how to spot misconduct in clinical trials; biotech cited allegedly altered data in grant application

Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 147.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Continue reading Weekend reads: The ethics committee member who sold grades for cash; how to spot misconduct in clinical trials; biotech cited allegedly altered data in grant application

Neuroscientist’s work earns three expressions of concern

A journal has issued expressions of concern for three papers from 2014 and 2015 by a group at Stony Brook University in New York whose work has come under scrutiny on PubPeer for suspect images. 

The articles, which appeared in the Journal of Neuroscience, were written by Adan Aguirre, a pharmacological scientist at Stony Brook, and his colleagues. Several other papers by Aguirre’s group — in various iterations of co-authors — have been flagged on PubPeer over the years. 

The articles, “TACE/ADAM17 is Essential for Oligodendrocyte Development and CNS Myelination,” “TGFβ Signaling Regulates the Timing of CNS Myelination by Modulating Oligodendrocyte Progenitor Cell Cycle Exit through SMAD3/4/FoxO1/Sp1,” and “Oligodendrocyte Regeneration and CNS Remyelination Require TACE/ADAM17,” carry similar notices about the reliability of data in select figures, and note that the journal: 

Continue reading Neuroscientist’s work earns three expressions of concern