Retraction Watch

Fake sex researcher loses zoophilia paper over ethical concerns

An alleged sex researcher with a history of making things up has lost a 2019 paper on the habits of people who have sex with animals over concerns about the ethics approval for the research.

The paper, “Digital Ethnography of Zoophilia — A Multinational Mixed-Methods Study,” was written by Damian Jacob Sendler and a co-author, Michal Lew-Starowicz and appeared in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy.

Despite an impressive-looking webpage, Sendler, in the words of Gizmodo reporter Jennings Brown, is a:

serial fabulist. The accomplished doctor character Sendler has created has appeared in numerous media outlets—Vice, Playboy, Savage Lovecast, Huffington Post, Insider, Bustle, Thrive Global, Women’s Health, and Forbes, among others. Many of these platforms have published Sendler’s lies and publicized his bizarre and irresponsible studies on necrophilia, zoophilia, lethal erotic asphyxiation, and sexual assault. And until recently, he was soliciting patients through his website where he offered online psychotherapy and sex therapy.

Sendler, whose affiliation is listed as the Felnett Health Research Foundation, in Staten Island, N.Y., claims to have earned an MD and a PhD from Harvard:

Will the real Tim Chen please stand up? A trip down the rabbit hole of deceit

When Marianne Alunno-Bruscia, the research integrity officer at France’s national oceanographic science institute, uncovered nearly a dozen papers with fraudulent authorship, she thought she’d stumbled on something bizarre.

She didn’t know how right she was.

As we reported in early February, the problems arose during an audit the research activities of the L’Institut Français de Recherche pour l’Exploitation de la Mer (iFREMER), which the organization was conducting to satisfy a request from the French High Council for Evaluation of Research and Higher Education – a bureaucratic headache, to be sure, but one which in this case proved well worthwhile.

The bibliographic deep-dive turned up two curious articles bearing the name of Bertrand Chapron. That part wasn’t unusual. Chapron, a wave researcher, is prolific. Odd was the nature of the two papers. Neither was in Chapron’s fields of interest. Chapron disavowed any involvement in the work, and insisted that he’d never met the two main authors of the articles: Tim Chen and C.Y.J. Chen.

So what happened with that Biogen Aduhelm study, anyway?

Apologies in advance for the fact that this post is really just for the science publishing completists out there. But we know you’re out there.

Last week, Endpoints News, STAT and a few other outlets reported that Biogen had, in Endpoint’s words, “finally” published the key data behind the approval of Aduhelm by the U.S. FDA – a controversial green light, to say the least. The company had previously withdrawn the manuscript from JAMA because the journal had – gasp! – demanded edits, Axios reported last year.

Critics pointed out that the Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease (JPAD) – where the study was eventually published – was a far cry from JAMA, and suggested that the paper was subjected only to peer-review lite.

Then the paper disappeared.

Einstein duo faked data in 16 federal grant applications: ORI

A pair of researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York faked data in 50 figures in 16 NIH grant applications for six years starting in 2013, according to new findings from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI).

According to the ORI, Daniel Leong, a former lab tech at Einstein,

intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly falsified and/or fabricated Western blot and histological image data for chronic deep tissue conditions including osteoarthritis (OA) and tendinopathy in murine models by reusing image data, with or without manipulating them to conceal their similarities, and falsely relabeling them as data representing different experiments in fifty (50) figures included in sixteen (16) PHS grant applications. In the absence of reliable image data, the figures, quantitative data in associated graphs purportedly derived from those images, statistical analyses, and related text also are false.

Harvard eye researchers have eight papers retracted for lack of ethical approval

A group of eye researchers is up to eight retractions for problems with the ethics approval for their studies.

The studies appeared in three journals, although one, Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science (IOVS), is pulling six studies.

The senior author on all eight publications was Jorge G. Arroyo, a former faculty member at Harvard. Arroyo’s LinkedIn page now lists him as being with Boston Vision, a private medical practice.

Here’s the notice for the six retractions in IOVS, which covers abstracts submitted to the annual meeting of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology between 2019 and 2021:

The 21-year-old apology – and retraction from JAMA

Contrary to what Toscanini famously said, it’s never too late to apologize.

Ask Shetal Shah. In 2000, Shah, now a professor of pediatrics at New York Medical College’s Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital, in Valhalla, published an essay in JAMA about a young medic providing care to indigenous people in Alaska.

Titled “Five Miles From Tomorrow,” the piece focused on the narrator’s encounter with a wizened 97-year-old Yupik man

Weekend reads: False data in Columbia rankings?; data service accused of intimidating researchers; preprint server removes ‘inflammatory’ papers

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Study of cryotherapy for COVID-19 anosmia fails the sniff test
Psych journal in revolt as it publishes paper saying masturbation and gay sex are harmful
Award-winning Berkeley postdoc faked data, says federal watchdog
Murder by Theory: Tales from the Ivory Tower’s Dark Side
Nanotech researchers cleared of fraud but failed to supervise cheating grad student: University

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 214. There are nearly 33,000 retractions in our database — which now powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers?

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

Nanotech researchers cleared of fraud but failed to supervise cheating grad student: University

An institutional investigation of a group of nanotechnology researchers in Japan has concluded that a former graduate student in the lab began his cheating ways “on a daily basis from a very early stage” after joining the team in 2015.

According to a Google translation of the report, Yuuta Yano – whom the document identifies as “former graduate student A” and with other oblique references, committed sweeping fabrication of data and other misdeeds:

over a period of four years or more, the number of forged data is extremely large, and even concealment work is performed, so it is evaluated that the maliciousness of the act is high. … The impact is great. In addition, it was published in a wide range of academic journals and has a large social impact.

Yano also was found to have thrown away lab notebooks in order to hide his culpability.

Murder by Theory: Tales from the Ivory Tower’s Dark Side

Retraction Watch readers may recall Eve Armstrong’s April Fool’s preprints modeling a potential prom date and proving that it was, indeed, Colonel Mustard with a candlestick. We’re pleased — no fooling, and a few weeks early — to present an excerpt from Armstrong’s new work of fiction, Murder by Theory: Two Tales from the Ivory Tower’s Dark Side.

FACULTY MEETING MINUTES

Department of Physics

Arlington University

Date: 2023 September 5, Tuesday

Time: 11:00 am

Location: 329 Hieronymus B. Cottonfield Hall of Physical Sciences, 4th-floor conference room

Present:

Ezekiel Gold (Zeek): distinguished professor and department chair
Simone Amiri: tenured associate professor (19 minutes late)
Hakim Abargil: associate professor, soon to be tenured ~~if he doesn’t torpedo his own review~~ (17 minutes late)
Harvey Gadsby: distinguished professor ~~but you’d never know based on appearance~~ (25 minutes late)
Leon Scharf: postdoctoral fellow ~~who’s not supposed to attend faculty meetings~~
Alice Jackson: new assistant professor (25 minutes late)
Louis Janvier: assistant professor.

Absent:

Agenda:

Determine whether instructors for Physics 109 should agree to normalize the choice of textbook across all sections taught, beginning in the spring semester.

Summary:

I, Louis Janvier (pronounced jan vyé with the stress placed on the second syllable), first-year assistant professor, will record the faculty meeting minutes in the Department of Physics this semester. I am happy to do it. ~~In fact, I volunteered to do it, in order to receive the one credit of teaching release that accompanies the position.~~ Further, my expansive vocabulary, nimble and dexterous fingers, and outstanding aptitude for creative writing instills in me a sense of responsibility to perform the role, as these skills render me more fit for it than any of my colleagues. To be clear, nobody forced me to take this on. Taking these minutes was entirely my choice, ~~as I do not take orders and am not a trained monkey. My colleagues respect me.~~ I have been making unique and creative contributions to this department for nearly one full year.

Award-winning Berkeley postdoc faked data, says federal watchdog

A former University of California, Berkeley postdoc in physics “engaged in research misconduct in research reported in a grant application” submitted to the NIH, according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.

The postdoc, Shuo Chen, “reused an image of visual cortex neurons to represent fluorescence calcium imaging of hippocampal neurons,” the ORI said. Chen, who was awarded the 2019 Science & PINS Prize for Neuromodulation for this essay published in Science, also used data from a 2018 Nature Neuroscience paper he co-authored while at the RIKEN Institute in Japan “to represent several sessions of two-photon hippocampal calcium imaging of progressive place fields, obtained from multiple mice running on a treadmill in a head-fixed VR set up.”

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