Daniel Vasgird was a well-known figure in research integrity circles. He died in late January at the age of 74. We’re honored to present a remembrance that Michael Kalichman put together to honor Vasgird’s memory at the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE) meeting next week in Atlanta.
Just a few weeks ago, the research integrity community lost a dear friend and leader. For those who did not know Dan well, it might help to describe his particular role in creating the still evolving domain of “research ethics.”
Dan trained in social sciences, beginning with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in California at UC Riverside, followed by a move to New York, where he earned his Ph.D. in Social Psychology at Syracuse University. After completing his Ph.D., Dan accepted an NIMH post-doctoral research fellowship at Berkeley and worked in Asia as a human services educator and consultant for the federal government.
His career in research ethics began in 1988 with the New York City Department of Health. Dan both chaired the Institutional Review Board and became director of a Health Research Training Program. His career trajectory continued with City University of New York (2000-2002) where he was responsible for overseeing human research protections through 19 Institutional Research Boards, worked on developing a conflict of interest policy, and taught courses in research ethics.
Facing a social media storm, a biology journal has temporarily removed a paper arguing that the proliferation of feral cats around university campuses in China is directly related to the proportion of female students — who evidently are more welcoming than men of the wild felines.
The article, “Where there are girls, there are cats,” appeared in Biological Conservation, launching a withering Tweet storm with, at last count, more than 275 replies. The comments ranged from incredulous to outraged, with at least one user noting that the paper was submitted, revised and accepted within a period of about 10 days.
More than five years after Natureretracted two highly suspect papers about what had been described as a major breakthrough in stem cell research, another journal has pulled a paper about the work.
The scandal over so-called STAP stem cells took down more than just a few articles. The case centered on Haruko Obokata, a Japanese researcher who conducted the studies as a post-doc in the Harvard lab of Charles Vacanti. Obokata lost her doctoral thesis from Waseda University in 2015 because it plagiarized from the U.S. National Institutes of Health. She also retracted a paper in Nature Protocols.
Two journals have retracted 13 papers co-authored by the late — and controversial — psychologist Hans Eysenck, following a university investigation that found dozens of his papers to be “unsafe.”
A May 2019 report by King’s College London into the work of Eysenck and Ronald Grossarth-Maticek, apparently of the University Heidelberg, that more than two dozen papers be retracted. Among other issues, the report cited
A group of researchers based at Harvard University have retracted an influential 2017 letter in Nature after a change in lab personnel led to the discovery of errors in the analysis.
The senior author of the research letter — which has been cited 75 times, earning it a highly cited designation from Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science — was Michael C. Carroll, a prominent immunology researcher. [See disclosure at the end of this post.] Also on the list was Ronald Herbst, who at the time was vice president of research at MedImmune but has since left that company for another biotech firm. The first author was Allison Bialas, at the time a post-doc at Harvard.
Citing a misconduct investigation, the journal Stem Cells has retracted a 2009 article coauthored by a researcher whose work has been under suspicion for roughly five years.
The paper was titled “Cell adhesion and spreading affect adipogenesis from embryonic stem cells: the role of calreticulin.” The retraction notice, which is behind a paywall, states:
Nearly two years after a University of Liverpool investigation determined that a former researcher there fabricated his data, the journal Molecular Medicine has issued expressions of concern about four papers by that researcher.
As we reported in 2018, Daniel J. Antoine — once a promising young liver specialist — was found to have made up much of his spectroscopic findings. According to the university:
The entire editorial board of the European Law Journal, along with its two top editors, has quit over a dispute about contract terms and the behavior of its publisher, Wiley.
In a statement posted on the blog of the European Law Blog, editors-in-chief Joana Mendes, of the University of Luxembourg, and Harm Schepel, of the University of Kent, in England, wrote:
