Scientific Frauds

[ramonmercado]

Scientific fraud: Is prosecution the answer?
Despite a handful of recent criminal charges against researchers, experts say more legal action could hurt science


[Published 10th February 2006 04:54 PM GMT]


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Now-disgraced stem cell researcher Woo-Suk Hwang is facing criminal charges from the Korean government after fabricating data, and another American researcher, Eric Poehlman, could receive jail time for fabricating data in 17 applications for US federal grants. Still, experts say that criminal charges against scientists have likely not increased. And if fraud prosecution increases, it could cause more harm than good.

It remains unclear how authorities will handle the case of Jon Sudbo, a Norwegian cancer researcher who recently admitted to fabricating data from 900 patients in an NIH-funded 2005 Lancet paper linking use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) with a lower risk of oral cancer. Alan Price, associate director for investigative oversight at the US Office of Research Integrity (ORI) in Rockville, Md., told The Scientist that the ORI cannot comment on the Sudbo case, or whether he will face criminal charges.

Price noted that criminal charges are filed in only "a couple tenths of a percent" of cases of scientific fraud, and this rate does not appear to be increasing. However, criminal charges "are so rare, that it's really hard to make a pattern," he said.

He noted that the U.S. attorney decided to pursue Poehlman after he sued to block the University of Vermont from providing the federal government with information, a requirement of investigations into scientific misconduct. In general, U.S. attorneys "don't pursue" criminal charges against scientists, Price noted, because the investigations are very expensive, and prosecutors interested in healthcare have the potential to bring in significantly more money pursuing Medicare and Medicaid fraud, since those cases often end with large awards to the government.

The Scientist contacted the offices of the state attorney generals in Maryland, New York and Pennsylvania, all of whom said they do not pursue criminal charges in cases of scientific misconduct.

"People who perpetrate scientific fraud generally believe they're going to get away with it, just the way people who rob banks think they're going to get away with it," said Jerome Kassirer of Tufts University in Boston, Ma., and former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. Being ostracized by the scientific community once the fraud is discovered is a "bad enough" punishment, Kassirer told The Scientist.

Scott Burris, a Temple University law professor who's studied public health, noted that prosecuting fraud could have a "chilling effect" on science. The vast majority of scientists are law-abiding, but seeing their colleagues facing criminal charges may cause some honest researchers to shy away from studying unpopular or controversial areas, fearing a mistake could land them in jail, Burris told The Scientist. "We shouldn't just assume that there's no cost to getting tough on research."

However, Kassirer noted that criminal charges are warranted in many cases of scientific fraud-charges related to the misuse of federal funds, or endangering public health by influencing physicians' practices with their patients.

Temple's Burris agreed that it's important to prosecute "bad actors"-meaning, people who commit repeated, and egregious, acts of misconduct. But given that most researchers are honest, it's unnecessary to slap every investigator accused of fraud with criminal charges, he said. "I don't think that's good for science, it's not good for justice, and it's not that great for the public purse."

Editor's Note: What are journals doing to prevent fraud? See a related story.

Alison McCook
[email protected]

http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/23105/

Links within this article

I. Oransky, "All Hwang human cloning work fraudulent," The Scientist, January 10, 2006.
http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/22933/

D. Payne, "Researcher's faked data leads to lifetime ban on US grants," The Scientist, April 11, 2005.
http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/15409/

S. Pincock, "Lancet study faked," The Scientist, January 16, 2006.
http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/22952/

A.McCook, "Research's scarlet list," The Scientist, April 25, 2005.
http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/15418/

PHS Administrative Actions Listing
http://silk.nih.gov/public/[email protected]

Jerome Kassirer
http://www.utmb.edu/healthpolicy/kassirer.htm

Scott Burris
http://www.law.temple.edu/servlet/Retri ... lty_Burris

D. Monroe, "Detecting fraud at journals," The Scientist, February 10, 2005.
http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/23107

 

[ramonmercado]

By Don Monroe

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

NEWS
Detecting fraud at journals
Many editors are considering measures to check for signs of misconduct in submissions


[Published 10th February 2006 04:54 PM GMT]


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Last year's discredited Science article on cloned stem cell lines presented now-obvious signs of fraud, such as claims that images of the same cells came from different patients -- raising many questions about what journals can do to find fraud before it's published. Although editors maintain that no practical procedures will find all instances of scientific fraud, many journals are nevertheless investigating ways to screen submissions for signs of misconduct.

There is little doubt who will win this "arms race," said computer scientist Hany Farid, of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, who has helped journals detect image tampering. "It's much easier to manipulate technology than to detect it." Still, with appropriate screening, "we can take it out of the hands of the novice," he told The Scientist.

One practical step journals are taking involves looking for modification of individual images. The Journal of Cell Biology, for one, has pioneered the use of simple, routine checks since September 2002. "We check every image of every accepted manuscript for signs of manipulation," said managing editor Mike Rossner - a step that has uncovered some alterations that caused editors to withdraw acceptance of papers and in some cases to notify relevant institutions. The Office of Research Integrity of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recommends such notification whenever fraud is suspected in a manuscript.

Several journals are following JCB's lead. For instance, Nature executive editor Linda Miller and Cell editor Emilie Marcus said the journals are meeting with JCB about checking images. "We've been looking at software that various companies make," Miller told The Scientist. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) editor Nick Cozzarelli, meanwhile, said that the journal plans to do "some image screening," but nothing too extensive. "We don't have plans to make a big deal out of it," he said.

But it's relatively easy to find tampering in images, since alterations such as changing size or contrast, or masking with pixels from another region, leave telltale fingerprints. In contrast, the diversity of non-image data makes it difficult to devise standardized procedures for checking for fraud, experts say. A possible exception concerns the statistical properties of large data sets such as those used in clinical trials. In the now-discredited Lancet paper headed by Jon Sudbø at Oslo's Norwegian Radium Hospital, nearly one third of the study participants were listed in the underlying database as sharing the same birthday.

The data that results from fraud often includes red flags that reviewers can spot. For example, last summer BMJ published a statistical analysis of a study submitted to the journal in 1993 but never published, for which reviewers had questioned anomalies such as the strong effect of dietary intervention in cardiovascular disease. The data revealed other problems, including large differences in the variability between two randomly selected groups. Because no change in the underlying science could explain this difference, the report concluded that "the data from the … trial were either fabricated or falsified."

The senior author of the analysis, Stephen Evans of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said that journals have to ask for raw data to do such detailed analyses. "You can often find something [suspicious] very quickly," but proving misconduct takes much more effort, he cautioned. Evans noted that routine statistical analyses of raw data are not practical, but journals could consider doing "random checks." Indeed, former BMJ editor Richard Smith who requested the analysis by Evans and his colleagues, said that journals are "not well set up" to do routine analyses, and looking at data is "very expensive, difficult, complicated."

Editors at top-tier journals said they typically request raw supporting data only in response to specific criticisms. The journals also require authors to place large, standard data types, such as protein structures or expression data, in public repositories, but they do not generally inspect them.

The Lancet, which published Sudbø's fraudulent study, declined to comment for this story.

Editor's Note: Is prosecution the answer? See a related story.

Don Monroe
[email protected]

http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/23107/

Links within this article

I. Oransky, "All Hwang human cloning work fraudulent," The Scientist, January 10, 2006
http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/22933/

G. Vogel, "Landmark paper has image problem," Science Now, December 6, 2005.
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/co ... 005/1206/1

Hany Farid
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~farid/

Mike Rossner and Kenneth M. Yamada, "What's in a picture? The temptation of image manipulation," Journal of Cell Biology, July 5, 2004
PM_ID: 15240566.

Office of Research Integrity, "Managing Allegations of Scientific Misconduct: A Guidance Document for Editros," January, 2000
http://ori.dhhs.gov/documents/masm_2000.pdf

S. Pincock, "Lancet study faked," The Scientist, January 16, 2006.
http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/22952/

S. Al-Marzouki, S. Evans, T. Marshall, and I.Roberts, "Are these data real? Statistical methods for the detection of data fabrication in clinical trials," BMJ July 30, 2005.
PM_ID: 16052019.

Stephen Evans
http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/msu/staff/sevans.html

A.McCook, "Scientific fraud: Is prosecution the answer?" The Scientist, February 10, 2006.
http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/23105/

 

[ramonmercado]

Chinese science

Faking it
May 18th 2006
From The Economist print edition

China is developing new rules to prevent scientific fraud


WHEN taking the fast train to technical prowess, it pays to check that the drivers are competent, the engine is running smoothly and the tracks are clear. Unfortunately, China's hunger for success in the sciences is such that some have been tempted to cut corners. Some independent researchers are sufficiently alarmed to have started the unofficial monitoring of possible frauds. The need for official reform is pressing.

AP

The chips are downScience is important to China. The country recently unveiled plans to increase its spending on research and development to 900 billion yuan ($112 billion) by 2020. By that time, it wants 60% of economic growth to come from science and technology.

The latest blow to the country's image came on May 5th, when Jiaotong University uncovered a fraud committed by one of its top microelectronics researchers, Chen Jin. Dr Chen claimed to have developed the country's first home-grown microchip, capable of processing 200m instructions a second. It looked set to save China billions of dollars in imports and advance the country's own high-tech industries. But an investigation by the university found that Dr Chen had simply removed the marking from chips made by Motorola and replaced them with the logo of his company. No wonder the announcements were never followed by the sales they seemed to deserve.

Dr Chen is not alone; others have been accused of committing scientific fraud. On April 14th Sichuan University announced that it would investigate claims that its vice-president, Yuquan Wei, fabricated data in two publications on immunology. However, the following day the university cleared another senior researcher of any wrongdoing following claims that he, too, had faked data.

The researchers are the highest-profile additions to a growing list of scientists whose work has been questioned by China's unofficial science police. The most prolific of these watchdogs is Fang Zhouzi, a former biochemist who runs the New Threads website that has published hundreds of allegations of academic fraud. Although many of the claims are unsubstantiated, Dr Fang argues that the website will remain necessary until there is an official system for reporting, investigating and punishing academic misconduct.

Last week 120 Chinese scientists, mostly from American universities, called for just such a system in an open letter sent to officials, including China's science minister and the president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. They fear that without a fair process that treats people as innocent until they are proven guilty, the reputation of Chinese scientists and Chinese science risks being damaged.

Dr Chen's fall from grace resembles that of South Korea's Hwang Woo-suk, the cloning researcher who turned from national hero to a pariah when his research was shown to be fraudulent. Like South Korea, China has feted its scientific stars, not just for their supposed laboratory achievements but also for the lustre they gave national pride. Both countries need to learn that, to prevent the fast train derailing, research standards are as essential as research know-how.


http://www.economist.com/science/displa ... id=6941786

 

[ramonmercado]

The pressure to hoax

A POINT OF VIEW
By Lisa Jardine



Piltdown is perhaps the most infamous scientific fraud
The nature of funding is encouraging scientists to play fast and loose with the truth.

One of the biggest responses to my pieces I've received so far came when I wrote about experimental science - about the way science tries to arrive at the best fit between a general principle and the experimental evidence.

A number of listeners wrote reminding me that my description of scientists as men and women of integrity, painstakingly in pursuit of truth, did not quite tell the whole story. The pressure to be first to reach a particular scientific goal has always been intense. The rewards in terms of personal fame and financial profit can be considerable.

Consequently, some scientists have not been above falsifying the evidence in order to claim an important scientific "breakthrough". There are several notorious hoaxes in the history of science.

In 1912, at a meeting of the Geological Society in London, Charles Dawson and Arthur Smith Woodward produced fragments of the skull of so-called Piltdown Man, allegedly discovered by workmen in gravel pits in Sussex.

They proposed that Piltdown man represented an evolutionary missing link between ape and man, and that it confirmed the current cutting-edge theory that a recognisably human brain developed early on in mankind's evolution.

Consensus tends to cohere around 'safe' projects, pushing just a little bit further the boundaries of already well-tried methods


Over 40 years later, Piltdown Man was shown to be a composite forgery, put together out of a medieval human skull, the 500-year-old lower jaw of an orangutan, and chimpanzee fossil teeth.

The deception went undetected for so long because it offered the experts of the day exactly what they wanted - convincing evidence that human evolution was brain-led.

Several of those who wrote to me, however, chose an example of a deception with graver consequences - that of Hwang Woo-suk, a pioneer of stem-cell research, once one of the world's most celebrated specialists in therapeutic cloning.

Until recently he enjoyed celebrity status beyond that of any pop-star in his native South Korea - his public appearances had all the razzmatazz of Hollywood, even a postage stamp was issued in his honour.

Fabrication claim

This month, 53-year-old Hwang has gone on trial, charged with deliberately falsifying his laboratory results and embezzling millions of pounds worth of state funding. If found guilty, he can expect a jail term of up to 10 years.

Last summer Hwang and his team announced that they had created patient-specific stem cell-derived tissue, based on cells taken from 11 separate people.

Stem cells are cells with the ability to develop into any type of tissue - say, tissue to replace a specific damaged organ. By inserting genetic material taken from a number of individual donors, Hwang's lab had for the first time used stem-cells to grow tissue which would match the exact genetic make-up of each one of them.


BBC NEWS: AUDIO
Hear A Point of View in the BBC Radio Player
But six months later, an academic panel found that the results used to support Hwang's dramatic claim, published in the prestigious journal Science, had been "intentionally fabricated". Photographs associated with the experiments had been doctored.

Material from a single source had been adulterated so that it appeared to have come from separate donors. Here was something more serious than experimental error. Here was a "hoax" or "fraud" designed to take in the scientific establishment at the highest level.

Stem cells could potentially be used to repair damaged or defective tissue anywhere in the body, such as the cells in the pancreas that stop producing insulin in diabetics, or the degenerating brain-cells in diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's - research like Hwang's could help millions of people worldwide.

Promising results

So the expectations on the part of doctors and patients, and the government and commercial pressures on scientists working in this field are enormous. The pressure from the South Korean government - determined to be right at the forefront of technological and scientific innovation - for some dramatic pay-off, was extreme.

After promising initial experimental results, Hwang Woo-suk and his researchers succumbed to the temptation to fake key data to make the research outcomes appear more impressive than the results justified.

One of the questions members of the scientific community are asking, is whether Hwang's deception could, or should, have been discovered earlier. That question, inevitably, has been directed at Science magazine, which published the two papers announcing Hwang's supposedly landmark findings.


Hwang Woo-suk was a hero and a celebrity in Korea

It has brought into the public domain the process of "peer review" - the method of assessment used within the academy to regulate and control research activity. In scientific research, that process is supposed to ensure that the methodology is sound, and that interpretation of data does not lead to misleading or unreasonable claims.

As one senior scientist comments: "It is good at calming down over-optimistic claims". But peer review is time-consuming - it involves reading the paper, producing detailed comments, evaluating its importance, and ranking it against others in the field. It is often inclined to err on the side of caution.

Consensus tends to cohere around "safe" projects, pushing just a little bit further the boundaries of already well-tried methods and outcomes, rather than supporting those which look more "risky".

No wonder work in new, sensitive fields like stem-cell research is increasingly being carried out in countries like China, where there is little or no regulation. In our world of instant communication and 24-hour news, a deliberative process like peer review can seem frustratingly slow.

Pasteur shortcut

At the outer envelope of current laboratory research, perhaps the great leap forward might be in the direction indicated by the ambitious investigator, whose impatience to arrive first at the next great scientific milestone overcomes his or her proper experimental caution.

In 1885, Louis Pasteur demonstrated the effectiveness of his vaccine against rabies by inoculating a boy badly bitten by a rabid dog. It now emerges that Pasteur's public account of that experiment was carefully drafted to obscure the fact that it violated prevailing ethical standards for the conduct of human experiments - standards that Pasteur had himself just endorsed.

Pasteur suggested that he had previously tested his vaccine on a "large number" of dogs. In fact, his laboratory notebooks reveal the patient was treated using a method that Pasteur had only recently decided to try, and that was entirely untested on animals.


Hwang was honoured by a rather unfortunate stamp

Had the truth come out at the time, Pasteur would probably have been disgraced. As it was, the vaccine's success was such that no doubts were ever raised. Pasteur was a scientific gambler, whose bet paid off. Gamblers try to force the pace of research, wagering that the experimental results they are currently fudging will come good.

By the time the breakthrough has been properly made - a rabies vaccine, a cure for Parkinson's disease - they hope to have successfully produced the genuine evidence, achieved properly verifiable outcomes.

On the other hand, the scientific community pursues a policy of systematic self-regulating - making sure that the procedures followed are sound, and the data have not been exaggerated or manipulated. False claims, strenuously checked and tested, will eventually fail and be rejected.

Sooner or later, Hwang's bogus stem-cell results would have come to light, when they could not be replicated. But financial incentives in the form of massive amounts of government funding are another matter. Political pressure from governments, pouring money directly into work in research areas they have set their hearts on leading, surely does have the capacity to distort even the best-established procedures.

What we must be watchful for are situations were the funding of science demands a rate of return on research investment that increases intolerably the temptation to gamble. Might the blame for Hwang's deception lie, ultimately, at the feet of those who financed him so lavishly, and the state machine that over-inflated his reputation?



http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/5181008.stm

 

[almond13]

THE sound of swallowed pride is rare but welcome. Bell Laboratories, one of the most venerable names in science, the home of the transistor and currently the research arm of Lucent Technologies, is prouder than many. But it has been taken for an enormous ride, and on September 25th it had the grace to admit it.

That's Not A Transistor on Shockley's bench!!!" http://www.fortunecity.com/greenfield/s ... sistor.htm

I’m surprised that no one spotted this at the time of writing.
The transistor picture of textbook fame was not a transistor at all, but a microwave device.

 

[almond13]

Hasn't Sir Arthur Eddington been implicated in some 'fraud' regarding the measuring of the curvature of light?

Has he?
Yes he has. He took a portable telescope into the jungle to measure the stars that bent away from the sun during an eclipse. Even though there was more that disproved the theory than did not, he took the best ones as evidence, called a press conference and the rest is history.
One of the reporters at the time asked if it was true that only he and two others understood relativity and he replied, “Who is the third”. Such was the whit of the day.
Although relativity has gone from strength to strength in the days since, the proofs have not done so well. The next one was the perihelion advance of Mercury that was debunked and now we have the GPS that also seems not to need Albert. I’m told that the Americans are spending a few million on a new proof or not.

 

[lopaka]

This thread reminds me...the 29 May 2006 issue of The New Yorker ran a fascinating article on bird researcher Pamela Rasmussen's new book, "Birds of South Asia." A large portion of the story is her exposure of massive fraud committed by famed British ornithologist Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen. Meinertzhagen, who died in 1967, did most of his collecting from 1920 to 1950 and provided 'skins' of his supposed collecting to many museums .

Rasmussen discovered in her research that many of his remarkable finds were actually stolen from other museums, the tags changed and claimed by Meinertzhagen as his discovery, often in locations far afield from the original discovery. What was especially eye-opening was that apparently this was a bit of an open secret in certain circles but nobody had the guts to 'pull the trigger', so to speak, even after he had died. Very interesting read.

 

[Greenglow]

almond13,

I recommend you have a look at the following of Clifford Will's:

The confrontation between relativity and experiment: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/gr-qc/pdf/0103/0103036.pdf

Was Einstein Right? Testing Relativity at the Centenary
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/gr-qc/pdf/0504/0504086.pdf

Will co-developed the PPN (Post Newtonian Parameterization) Formalism
which has been used in conjunction with increasingly precise data
to exclude a number of theories of gravity, all while General Relativity
has done very well indeed. He is definitely one of the world's experts
on experimental relativity.

 

[almond13]

Was Einstein Right? Testing Relativity at the Centenary

The binary pulsar and general relativity Clifford M Will.
I havn’t done much on astronomy for a while, but the last I heard, pulsars are what SETI found and thought they were intelligent signals. Since then they have been the object of much toing and frowing by the physics community. My last memory on the subject was that they had never been observed optically and their distribution in the galaxy was a bit odd (nonuniform distribution). These measurements are taken on the assumtion that they stick to the theory and that the theory requires them to slow down over a long period. There are some, however, that don’t exactly play the game. Some actually speed up and some glitch in the wrong direction? I’m sure that Mr Will only uses the ones that behave. What we have here is a mathematical construct that is used to prove another theory that is also a mathematical construct. If the results from the former don’t mach the second you can always fudge the theory. Decidedly dodgy.

 

[Timble2]

I havn’t done much on astronomy for a while, but the last I heard, pulsars are what SETI found and thought they were intelligent signals.

That would be about 1967, when Jocylen Bell and Anthony Hewish discovered th first pulsar and called it 'LGM-1' (LGM being 'Little Green Men' - as semi-joke, since they had no idea what it was at the time.)

They weren't actually looking for artificial signals so it wasn't a SETI program.

So you haven't heard anything about astronomy since 1967...

I don't understand your optical objection, they're visible in the X-ray part of the spectrum and they often tie up with structures that are visible e.g. the Crab Nebula, which is supernova debris.

 

[almond13]

Hi Timble2. I’ve had messages about identifying.
Thanks for the update.
I’ve just sorted out Stars, Galaxies, and Cosmos by Corliss and there are quite a few misbehaving pulsars in there.
All this, buy the way is because I said there were no proofs of relativity and this is just another non-proof. :lol:

 

[ramonmercado]

By Kerry Grens

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

NEWS
University of Missouri probes possible fraud
Images in Science paper may have been faked


[Published 14th November 2006 03:10 PM GMT]


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The University of Missouri has opened an inquiry into whether researchers in the biochemistry department there manipulated images published in a February 2006 article in Science. The data, which were produced by postdocs in R. Michael Roberts' laboratory, challenged the conventional theory that individual blastomeres in early embryos are identical.

The inquiry centers around whether two images in the paper were altered to misrepresent the data, Roberts told The Scientist. "It's been a nightmare," he said. "This is a very difficult and painful time for people in the lab."

Roberts said that the paper may ultimately have to be withdrawn. Last month, Science editor-in-chief Donald Kennedy issued an editorial expression of concern cautioning readers that the results reported in the paper "may not be reliable."

"We're anxious to bring this to an end as soon as possible," Robert Hall, associate vice chancellor for research at the University of Missouri, told The Scientist. The investigation is in the first stage, which consists of an inquiry by three senior university scientists to determine whether fraud has occurred. Hall expects a finding in the next several weeks. If the panel determines that there has been wrongdoing, the investigation will move into the second phase, which determines penalties.

The study, conducted by Kaushik Deb, Mayandi Sivaguru and Hwan Yul Yong, who were postdocs in Roberts' lab at the time, examined whether blastomeres from early-stage embryos expressed the transcription factor Cdx2 equally. "[C]onsiderable debate rages about whether the mature mouse oocyte contains factors localized in such a manner that they direct future cell differentiation," the authors wrote.

Their findings stoked that debate. In opposition to the long-held view that blastomeres in early-stage embryos are equivalent, they found Cdx2 expression at the two-cell stage was localized to blastomeres at the vegetal pole of oocytes, and that these differences lead to distinct cell lineages.

Richard Schultz, a biology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told The Scientist that some researchers studying embryonic development were suspicious early on. "Whenever there's a result that goes against the dogma, it always raises eyebrows, but that doesn't mean the dogma's correct." He said skepticism over the findings escalated when other labs, his own included, failed to replicate the result.

Schultz's laboratory wanted to use Cdx2 expression as a marker for investigating the consequences of preimplantation genetic diagnosis, a procedure that removes a blastomere for genetic testing after in vitro fertilization. But he was unsuccessful at reproducing the asymmetrical allocation of Cdx2. "We had difficulty getting it, and dropped the project," he said.

Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz at the University of Cambridge in the UK said the observations in the original study surprised her. "Neither ourselves or other laboratories…have ever seen completely independent lineages for completely different cell types arising at the two-cell stage," she told The Scientist in an email. "Everyone studying the mouse embryo has found that each of the two-cell blastomeres gives rise to both cell types."

Roberts is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has led research at the University of Missouri for over 20 years. Schultz told The Scientist that Roberts has a "pristine reputation" and that he believes it's highly unlikely that he would have been involved in manipulating the data. "He's an absolutely straight-shooter," he said. "If there was any wrongdoing, it was done without his knowledge."

The last time the University of Missouri conducted a formal inquiry and found wrongdoing was in 2000. According to Hall, a postdoc plagiarized an image in a funding proposal to the National Institutes of Health and ultimately resigned.

Kerry Grens
[email protected]

Links within this article:

K. Deb et al., "Cdx2 gene expression and trophectoderm lineage specification in mouse embryos," Science, 311:992-996, 2006.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol31 ... /index.dtl

R. Michael Roberts
http://www.biochem.missouri.edu/mroberts.php

M. Rossner, "How to guard against image fraud," The Scientist, March 2006.
http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/23156

D. Kennedy, "Editorial expression of concern," Science, October 27, 2006.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/f ... /5799/592b

Rob Hall
http://research.missouri.edu/division/hall.htm

N. Wade, "Fraud happens: What to Do About It," The Scientist, Jan. 27, 2003
http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/13512

Richard Schultz
http://www.bio.upenn.edu/faculty/schultz

R. Lewis, "Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis: The Next Big Thing?" The Scientist, Nov. 13, 2000
http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/12126

Magdalena Zernick-Goetz
http://www.gurdon.cam.ac.uk/~zernickago ... index.html



By Kerry Grens

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

NEWS
University of Missouri probes possible fraud
Images in Science paper may have been faked


[Published 14th November 2006 03:10 PM GMT]


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The University of Missouri has opened an inquiry into whether researchers in the biochemistry department there manipulated images published in a February 2006 article in Science. The data, which were produced by postdocs in R. Michael Roberts' laboratory, challenged the conventional theory that individual blastomeres in early embryos are identical.

The inquiry centers around whether two images in the paper were altered to misrepresent the data, Roberts told The Scientist. "It's been a nightmare," he said. "This is a very difficult and painful time for people in the lab."

Roberts said that the paper may ultimately have to be withdrawn. Last month, Science editor-in-chief Donald Kennedy issued an editorial expression of concern cautioning readers that the results reported in the paper "may not be reliable."

"We're anxious to bring this to an end as soon as possible," Robert Hall, associate vice chancellor for research at the University of Missouri, told The Scientist. The investigation is in the first stage, which consists of an inquiry by three senior university scientists to determine whether fraud has occurred. Hall expects a finding in the next several weeks. If the panel determines that there has been wrongdoing, the investigation will move into the second phase, which determines penalties.

The study, conducted by Kaushik Deb, Mayandi Sivaguru and Hwan Yul Yong, who were postdocs in Roberts' lab at the time, examined whether blastomeres from early-stage embryos expressed the transcription factor Cdx2 equally. "[C]onsiderable debate rages about whether the mature mouse oocyte contains factors localized in such a manner that they direct future cell differentiation," the authors wrote.

Their findings stoked that debate. In opposition to the long-held view that blastomeres in early-stage embryos are equivalent, they found Cdx2 expression at the two-cell stage was localized to blastomeres at the vegetal pole of oocytes, and that these differences lead to distinct cell lineages.

Richard Schultz, a biology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told The Scientist that some researchers studying embryonic development were suspicious early on. "Whenever there's a result that goes against the dogma, it always raises eyebrows, but that doesn't mean the dogma's correct." He said skepticism over the findings escalated when other labs, his own included, failed to replicate the result.

Schultz's laboratory wanted to use Cdx2 expression as a marker for investigating the consequences of preimplantation genetic diagnosis, a procedure that removes a blastomere for genetic testing after in vitro fertilization. But he was unsuccessful at reproducing the asymmetrical allocation of Cdx2. "We had difficulty getting it, and dropped the project," he said.

Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz at the University of Cambridge in the UK said the observations in the original study surprised her. "Neither ourselves or other laboratories…have ever seen completely independent lineages for completely different cell types arising at the two-cell stage," she told The Scientist in an email. "Everyone studying the mouse embryo has found that each of the two-cell blastomeres gives rise to both cell types."

Roberts is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has led research at the University of Missouri for over 20 years. Schultz told The Scientist that Roberts has a "pristine reputation" and that he believes it's highly unlikely that he would have been involved in manipulating the data. "He's an absolutely straight-shooter," he said. "If there was any wrongdoing, it was done without his knowledge."

The last time the University of Missouri conducted a formal inquiry and found wrongdoing was in 2000. According to Hall, a postdoc plagiarized an image in a funding proposal to the National Institutes of Health and ultimately resigned.

Kerry Grens
[email protected]

Links within this article:

K. Deb et al., "Cdx2 gene expression and trophectoderm lineage specification in mouse embryos," Science, 311:992-996, 2006.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol31 ... /index.dtl

R. Michael Roberts
http://www.biochem.missouri.edu/mroberts.php

M. Rossner, "How to guard against image fraud," The Scientist, March 2006.
http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/23156

D. Kennedy, "Editorial expression of concern," Science, October 27, 2006.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/f ... /5799/592b

Rob Hall
http://research.missouri.edu/division/hall.htm

N. Wade, "Fraud happens: What to Do About It," The Scientist, Jan. 27, 2003
http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/13512

Richard Schultz
http://www.bio.upenn.edu/faculty/schultz

R. Lewis, "Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis: The Next Big Thing?" The Scientist, Nov. 13, 2000
http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/12126

Magdalena Zernick-Goetz
http://www.gurdon.cam.ac.uk/~zernickago ... index.html



By Kerry Grens

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

NEWS
University of Missouri probes possible fraud
Images in Science paper may have been faked


[Published 14th November 2006 03:10 PM GMT]


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The University of Missouri has opened an inquiry into whether researchers in the biochemistry department there manipulated images published in a February 2006 article in Science. The data, which were produced by postdocs in R. Michael Roberts' laboratory, challenged the conventional theory that individual blastomeres in early embryos are identical.

The inquiry centers around whether two images in the paper were altered to misrepresent the data, Roberts told The Scientist. "It's been a nightmare," he said. "This is a very difficult and painful time for people in the lab."

Roberts said that the paper may ultimately have to be withdrawn. Last month, Science editor-in-chief Donald Kennedy issued an editorial expression of concern cautioning readers that the results reported in the paper "may not be reliable."

"We're anxious to bring this to an end as soon as possible," Robert Hall, associate vice chancellor for research at the University of Missouri, told The Scientist. The investigation is in the first stage, which consists of an inquiry by three senior university scientists to determine whether fraud has occurred. Hall expects a finding in the next several weeks. If the panel determines that there has been wrongdoing, the investigation will move into the second phase, which determines penalties.

The study, conducted by Kaushik Deb, Mayandi Sivaguru and Hwan Yul Yong, who were postdocs in Roberts' lab at the time, examined whether blastomeres from early-stage embryos expressed the transcription factor Cdx2 equally. "[C]onsiderable debate rages about whether the mature mouse oocyte contains factors localized in such a manner that they direct future cell differentiation," the authors wrote.

Their findings stoked that debate. In opposition to the long-held view that blastomeres in early-stage embryos are equivalent, they found Cdx2 expression at the two-cell stage was localized to blastomeres at the vegetal pole of oocytes, and that these differences lead to distinct cell lineages.

Richard Schultz, a biology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told The Scientist that some researchers studying embryonic development were suspicious early on. "Whenever there's a result that goes against the dogma, it always raises eyebrows, but that doesn't mean the dogma's correct." He said skepticism over the findings escalated when other labs, his own included, failed to replicate the result.

Schultz's laboratory wanted to use Cdx2 expression as a marker for investigating the consequences of preimplantation genetic diagnosis, a procedure that removes a blastomere for genetic testing after in vitro fertilization. But he was unsuccessful at reproducing the asymmetrical allocation of Cdx2. "We had difficulty getting it, and dropped the project," he said.

Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz at the University of Cambridge in the UK said the observations in the original study surprised her. "Neither ourselves or other laboratories…have ever seen completely independent lineages for completely different cell types arising at the two-cell stage," she told The Scientist in an email. "Everyone studying the mouse embryo has found that each of the two-cell blastomeres gives rise to both cell types."

Roberts is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has led research at the University of Missouri for over 20 years. Schultz told The Scientist that Roberts has a "pristine reputation" and that he believes it's highly unlikely that he would have been involved in manipulating the data. "He's an absolutely straight-shooter," he said. "If there was any wrongdoing, it was done without his knowledge."

The last time the University of Missouri conducted a formal inquiry and found wrongdoing was in 2000. According to Hall, a postdoc plagiarized an image in a funding proposal to the National Institutes of Health and ultimately resigned.

Kerry Grens
[email protected]

Links within this article:

K. Deb et al., "Cdx2 gene expression and trophectoderm lineage specification in mouse embryos," Science, 311:992-996, 2006.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol31 ... /index.dtl

R. Michael Roberts
http://www.biochem.missouri.edu/mroberts.php

M. Rossner, "How to guard against image fraud," The Scientist, March 2006.
http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/23156

D. Kennedy, "Editorial expression of concern," Science, October 27, 2006.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/f ... /5799/592b

Rob Hall
http://research.missouri.edu/division/hall.htm

N. Wade, "Fraud happens: What to Do About It," The Scientist, Jan. 27, 2003
http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/13512

Richard Schultz
http://www.bio.upenn.edu/faculty/schultz

R. Lewis, "Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis: The Next Big Thing?" The Scientist, Nov. 13, 2000
http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/12126

Magdalena Zernick-Goetz
http://www.gurdon.cam.ac.uk/~zernickago ... index.html



http://www.the-scientist.com/news/home/36408/

 

[almond13]

Science is Broken
Science is in a state of collapse due to corruption. Science sets the standards of rationality for society. What happens to science will happen to all of society. http://nov55.com/ovr.html

Science Errors
In terms the public can understand.
Creating accountability to the public is the purpose.
http://nov55.com/index.html

 

[ramonmercado]

Science Committee Issues Hwang Report
By Jennifer Couzin
ScienceNOW Daily News
28 November 2006

WASHINGTON, D.C.--Simply trusting that scientists are telling the truth is not enough when it comes to vetting blockbuster research. That appears to be the bottom line of an independent committee that reported today that Science could have more aggressively examined two papers on stem cells that turned out to be fake. Although the committee found that editors followed established procedures in reviewing the papers, it concluded that additional procedures would have made the fraud easier to detect. The committee, appointed by Science's top editors to review the journal's handling of papers from Woo Suk Hwang and his colleagues in South Korea and the United States, combed through reviewers' comments, editors' notes, and other documents to assess how Science handled the high-profile--and, as it turned out, largely fabricated--submissions.
In a telephone press conference held in conjunction with the report's release, Science Editor-in-Chief Donald Kennedy pledged to implement the report's recommendations, although he did not specify a timeline. "Part of me is relieved" by the report's conclusions that Science followed its procedures, Kennedy said. But he also called the report "challenging" and said it offers "tough advice" to the journal. That includes new guidance on preparing images, which were manipulated by Hwang's team and have been in other fraud cases, clarifying roles of individual authors, and performing "risk assessments" on high-impact papers to determine how likely they are to be faked.

These recommendations stem from one of the most audacious frauds in scientific publishing history. The Hwang team's papers, published in 2004 and 2005, posited spectacular achievements in stem cell biology; the second paper described the first-ever human embryonic stem cell lines that were genetically matched to patients, a key step required before embryonic stem cells can be used in medical treatment. Then last December, after an anonymous allegation in South Korea, doubts surfaced about the veracity of the publications. It turned out that images purported to represent cloned stem cells from patients were actually cells from a fertility clinic's fertilized embryos (ScienceNOW, 30 October).

About 6 months after the fraud came to light early this year, Science asked six individuals to collectively examine how the faked data made it past peer review, whether the journal had followed its own procedures for vetting papers, and whether it might have done anything differently. The committee included three members of Science's external Senior Editorial Board, two prominent stem cell biologists, and a top editor at Nature who used to work at Science. It was chaired by John Brauman, a chemist at Stanford University and one of the board members.

In a succinct four pages, the committee agreed that Science had followed its procedures for reviewing papers. "The editors made a serious effort--substantially greater than for most papers published in Science--to ensure that the science was sound," the report states. This included an unusual number of questions for the papers' authors from editors and reviewers and extensive revisions of the 2004 paper. Still, "the existing procedures led to an unfortunate outcome, and have done so on several previous occasions," the report reads. Those include eight papers by Jan Hendrik Schön, a physicist formerly at Bell Labs who was found to have committed widespread scientific fraud. And although the committee acknowledges that no antifraud strategy is airtight, it notes that Science could have taken additional steps to vet the Hwang papers.

For example, reviewers of the 2004 paper were concerned about a central claim of that paper, that a human stem cell line had been generated by cloning a blastocyst, a very early embryo. Although the reviewers initially asked Hwang's group for raw data to back up the claim, they later accepted the written explanations the South Koreans offered. Science's editors were, at the time, aware of this back-and-forth. Kennedy disputes this point, arguing that the data were provided as the reviewers requested.

The committee makes four recommendations. First, it suggests requiring a "risk assessment" for certain papers accepted for publication, by asking questions about the likelihood that the work may be faked or simply incorrect, and how that would affect the journal, academic credit, intellectual property, and other issues. Second, the committee urges Science to clarify the responsibilities of authors. (In the Hwang case, an American senior author was found not to have actively contributed to the experiments.) Third, it recommends requiring additional data, particularly primary data, in the published supporting material accompanying a paper. And fourth, it calls for high-profile journals including Science and Nature to come together and establish common standards.

"We at Nature welcome the external review conducted by Science and are considering its recommendations," wrote Nature's Editor-in-Chief Philip Campbell in an e-mail. His journal, he says, is also planning to publish a response to the report.

The review committee concludes that "Science must institutionalize a healthy level of concern in dealing with papers that it considers for publication." Kennedy agreed that "we have to abandon the hope that collective trust will keep on working." Still, one issue Science will weigh as it examines how to implement the recommendations is "whether this loss of trust might not be costing the system more than the occasional retraction."

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/co ... 006/1128/1

 

[ramonmercado]

Cyber-Detectives Deep Six Cell Paper
By Xao Hin
ScienceNOW Daily News
13 December 2006

A microbiology paper by an all-Taiwan group that made a media splash in Taiwan when it was published in the 20 October Cell is being retracted after anonymous online sleuths charged that images in the paper had been manipulated.
On Tuesday, Ban-Yang Chang of National Chung Hsing University in Taichung, the corresponding author, confirmed in an e-mail that he had written Cell asking the journal to retract his team's paper. The study questioned prevailing views of how transcription of a gene's DNA begins in bacteria. The move came after an investigating committee convened on Friday by the university recommended the retraction. In an e-mail to Science, Yu-Chan Chao, dean of the College of Life Sciences at the university, called the episode an "unfortunate case" and added that "the university will take this as a serious lesson for ethics education at all the colleges in the future."

Chang maintains that the paper's conclusions are correct. "We want to stress again that the results reported in the Cell paper are real and reproducible,"he wrote. Cell so far has not published a retraction notice.

For a more detailed story on how the anonymous Internet postings challenged the Cell paper, see this Friday's issue of Science.

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/co ... 006/1213/1

 

[ramonmercado]

Another one. The study was regarding opiate addicts so this was quite serious.

UCLA researcher found guilty of misconduct
Scientist sanctioned for faking data and stealing money intended for subjects


[Published 25th July 2007 11:06 AM GMT]


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles' Semel Institute for Neurosciences and Human Behavior faked interviews, tampered with data and urine samples, and stole money intended for study, according to a notice published this week in the Federal Register.



According to the notice, James Lieber, "knowingly and intentionally falsified" data over six months during a 2005 study, which was funded in part with National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants.



The study tracked female opiate addicts who had visited methadone clinics in Southern California during the late 1970s.





Lieber, 46, fabricated 20 face-to-face interviews with study subjects, and provided false urine samples for those subjects, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Research Integrity (ORI), which investigated the events. Lieber, who was hired at UCLA in June 2005, also stole $5,180 in cash that was supposed to go to the study's participants as incentives and to cover travel expenses.



John Dahlberg, director of ORI's Division of Investigative Oversight, told The Scientist that Lieber's misconduct was brought to light on January 12, 2006, when he was reported to the University of California Police Department for stealing money intended for study participants and that "there were concerns that he had walked off with a laptop computer and other equipment." Later in the year, Dahlberg said, it became clear that Lieber had faked interviews because UCLA sent Christmas cards out to study participants that were returned as undeliverable. Five of the people Lieber claimed to have interviewed were dead at the time he claimed to have spoken with them.



Dahlberg said that the ORI learned of the case that June. "It took a number of months before we were able to bring it to a point to where we could deal with it," he said. "It was handled awkwardly by UCLA." Dahlberg said that action in the case was delayed by UCLA's policy of dealing with instances of research misconduct at the level of dean, who initially decided that the case did not warrant an investigation. Eventually, the case was reconsidered and an internal research integrity officer alerted ORI in June. "There's no question it was a very serious matter," Dahleberg told The Scientist.



According to Dahlberg, Lieber was uncooperative with investigators. "He, in fact, sort of disappeared" after the UC police were alerted in January. "We don't know where he is," said Dahlberg.



"The scope of what he did was probably larger than what UCLA was able to prove," said Dahlberg. "The concern is that almost everything [Lieber] had to do" with the study subjects he was assigned to interview was "unreliable."



In a statement e-mailed to The Scientist, vice chancellor of research at UCLA Roberto Peccei wrote that he learned of the misconduct in early 2006, convened a panel to conduct an internal review, and forwarded the results of that review to the ORI. Peccei also wrote that Lieber is no longer a UCLA employee.



Lieber could not be reached for comment.



The UCLA statement also says that, "none of the compromised or false data was published," and that the study continues with that data having been purged from the database.



The head researcher on the study was Christine Grella, a psychologist at UCLA's Integrated Substance Abuse Programs. Grille's research addresses mental health issues and substance abuse. Her most recent paper, published in July, described a study of the treatment needs of female prison inmates with substance abuse problems. Grella could not be reached for comment.



According to the notice in the Federal Register, ORI has implemented sanctions against Lieber, including a three year ban on working with any agency of the U.S. government and a prohibition on functioning in any advisory role to the U.S. Public Health Service.



Bob Grant

[email protected]



Links within this article:



Semel Institute for Neurosciences and Human Behavior

http://www.npi.ucla.edu



Federal Register Notice

http://a257.g.akamaitech.net



Christine Grella

http://www.uclaisap.org/profiles/grella.html



CE Gella et al., "Treatment needs and completion of community-based aftercare among substance-abusing women offenders," Women's Health Issues, July -August 2007.

http://www.the-scientist.com/pubmed/17544296


This article:
http://www.the-scientist.com/news/home/53390/

 

[ramonmercado]

This one looks serious, a senior academic alleges he was sacked for exposing a cover up.

The Scientist: NewsBlog:
Head of Austrian med school canned

The rector of a prominent Austrian medical university has been fired in the midst of a scientific misconduct investigation that has plagued the institution for months.

The Medical University of Innsbruck's seven-person council unceremoniously dumped Clemens Sorg, an immunologist and the rector of the university, from his position on August 21, according to a report in Nature.

Last November, Sorg raised the alarm on university urologists who were testing a stem cell therapy that used patients' own cells to treat urinary incontinence. Earlier this month, those researchers - who included Hannes Strasser, the study's lead author - were accused, in a report from Austria's Agency for Health and Food Safety, of failing to randomize study participants adequately, designing the trial poorly, proceeding with the study despite a lack of appropriate ethical clearance, and inadequately informing study participants of the nature of the experiment.

The study was published last year in The Lancet.

The university has barred Strasser, who has denied any wrongdoing, from seeing patients.

Sorg, in a letter sent to colleagues in Austria and his native Germany and leaked to Austrian newspaper Tiroler Tageszeitung, wrote that high level Austrian officials were trying to squelch a "medical scandal of unprecedented scale". According to Nature, the university council contends that Sorg is guilty of a "serious breech of duties" because he criticized the handling of the misconduct and violated official secrecy. The ex-rector now plans to sue the institution.

http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/print/54978/

 

[ramonmercado]

Four comments at link so far.

Misconduct from NIH postdoc
http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/print/55429/
Posted by Elie Dolgin

A Japanese researcher falsified figures in three published papers while working as a visiting postdoc at the NIH's National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR), the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) reported last week.

Kazuhiro Tanaka, a cancer researcher formerly at Kyushu University in Japan, fidgeted with Western blots, Northern blots, and gel shift assay images by duplicating bands in the results of three papers published from 2000 to 2002.

The dodgy studies stem from work done from 1996 to 1998 when Tanaka was a visiting postdoc in Yoshihiko Yamada's lab at the NIDCR investigating transcriptional regulation of type II and type XI collagen genes in mouse and rat cells.

The fudged figures were included in one paper in the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) in 2000 (with Tanaka as a middle author), which identified a cartilage-specific enhancer in the first intron of the collagen gene, Col11a2, and has been cited 43 times according to ISI, and two papers in Molecular and Cellular Biology (MCB) in 2000 and 2002 (with Tanaka as the first author), which characterized zinc finger factors that negatively regulate cartilage-specific expression of Col11a2 and another collagen gene, Col2a1, and have been cited 39 and 18 times, respectively.

In 2006, the papers' authors issued a correction for the problematic figure in the JBC study and retracted figures in both MCB papers, although the authors maintain that they stand by the basic results of the papers. "Some figures needed to be corrected, but overall the conclusions I still feel are correct," Yamada told The Scientist.

Yamada learned of the image manipulations after someone in his lab noticed that some of the figures looked "very strange," he said. When Yamada questioned Tanaka about the figures, he was told that a "personal friend" in Japan carried out the experiments. Although Yamada was given the friend's name, neither he nor the NIH investigators could locate her.

The NIH's Office of Intramural Research conducted an inquiry from January to June 2005 in which a committee interviewed Tanaka in person in the US with the help of a translator. "[Tanaka] claimed that somebody else had done all the fabrication," Joan Schwartz, the NIH's intramural research integrity officer, told The Scientist. "To be honest, we don't know that there ever was such a person." The inquiry committee tentatively concluded that Tanaka was guilty of misconduct, although they couldn't prove it, Schwartz said. "We ended the case at the point thinking we couldn't go any further."

The committee sent its findings to the ORI, which probed the datasets and concluded that the image manipulations were carried out during Tanaka's time at the NIDCR, not in Japan. The NIH then established a formal investigation from January to August 2007, at which time Tanaka returned to the US with a lawyer for another interview. "We finally concluded that, yes, it had been he who had committed most of the misconduct," said Schwartz.

Although certain figures have already been corrected or retracted, Schwartz said she is now working with Yamada to completely retract the two MCB papers, and to correct one more figure in the JBC paper. "Now that we have the [ORI's] final findings, I'm working with [Yamada] to sort out the final wording to send to the journals to say that the [MCB] papers should be retracted," she said.

Tanaka, who holds both a PhD and an MD, was working at Kyushu University together with Yukihide Iwamoto, and published papers as recently as January, but according to Yamada he has since moved to a private clinic in the Kumamoto Prefecture of Kyushu Island and is no longer conducting research. Tanaka and Iwamoto did not respond to email requests for interviews from The Scientist.

According to the ORI report, Tanaka acknowledged that original data relating to the falsified figures were missing, though he did not admit misconduct. As part of the settlement agreement, Tanaka is barred from performing research funded by US taxpayers until 2012.

 

[ramonmercado]

Publisher retracts paper by Iran's science minister

Iranian scientists press for plagiarism inquiry.
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090923/ ... 9.945.html
Declan Butler


Kamran Daneshjou.Raheb Homavandi / ReutersIranian researchers say they are dismayed and angered that a 2009 paper1 coauthored by Kamran Daneshjou, Iran's science minister, appears to have plagiarized a 2002 paper2 published by South Korean researchers. The similarities between the articles were revealed yesterday by Nature (see 'Paper co-authored by Iran's science minister duplicates earlier paper'). Iranian scientists say they intend to press for an examination of the allegations, and for the minister's resignation — should wrongdoing be established.

Anthony Doyle, publishing editor for the Springer journal Engineering with Computers, in which the paper was published, also told Nature that the journal will label it as "retracted" online, and include an erratum in the next issue drawing attention to the matter. "Springer takes plagiarism very seriously."

"This is a bitter blow to Iranian academic society, it's a scandal," says Ali Gorji, an Iranian neuroscientist based at the University of Münster in Germany, "I'd like to assure the international scientific community that Iranian scientists are honest and ethical, and that they are offended by this stupid act."

The affair has been widely picked up among Iranian researchers' email networks, blogs and some political news websites in Iran. Researchers inside Iran say that the minister has not yet publicly responded to the allegations, but that they expect him to. "There is a paradoxical situation between Iran's determination to boost science and technology, as stated by the Supreme Leader and the alleged non-ethical action by a science minister of the country," asserts one scientist in Iran, who wanted to remain anonymous.

Striking similarities
The 2009 paper by Daneshjou and Majid Shahravi, from the department of mechanical engineering at the Iran University of Science and Technology in Tehran, in many places duplicates verbatim the text of the 2002 paper published by South Korean scientists in Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics. A smaller number of sentences are identical to those in a paper given at a 2003 conference by other researchers.

"The introduction is copied practically word-for-word," comments Muhammad Sahimi, an Iranian materials scientist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, adding that so too are large parts of the methods, results and discussion section. "The English of the paper is not uniform," he notes, "Where they have copied from other papers, it reads smoothly. Where they have tried to add things themselves, it does not read as smoothly."

Similarly, almost all the figures, and their captions, are copied from the South Korean paper, although their order is sometimes different, he notes, adding that some are mirror images of those in the earlier paper.

Nature has since discovered that another 2009 article3 by the same authors, published in the Taiwan-based Journal of Mechanics, contains large chunks identical to a 2006 article published by a US scientist in Elsevier's International Journal of Impact Engineering4, as well as material from the paper by South Korean scientists.

Nature has made repeated efforts to contact Daneshjou and Shahravi for comment without success.

Controversial appointment
Many Iranian researchers have disputed Daneshjou's nomination as science minister. "The man's appointment was a political action by the government. He was not selected, nor is he supported, by Iranian scientists," says Gorji.

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Daneshjou served as the head of the interior ministry's office that oversaw the conduct of the contested presidential elections last June, which returned President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power. He was also Tehran's governor general from 2005-2008, and is described by scientists as a hardliner with ties to the revolutionary guards — most Iranian scientists, inside and outside the country, support the reformist movement.

Many researchers fled Iran during the cultural revolution in the early 1980s. The regime closed universities for three years, and violently purged them of any Western or non-Islamic influences.

Some now worry that a new purge of the universities is on the way, following Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's denouncing in early September of the humanities and social sciences taught in universities as a corrupting influence causing students to doubt and question Islamic values, and called for a revision of what was taught. Such alleged influences have also been a recurring theme in the recent public confessions and show trials of protestors.

References
Daneshjou, K. & Shahravi, M. Eng. Comput. 25, 177-667 (2008).
Lee, W., Lee, H-J. & Shin, H. J. Phys. D: Appl. Phys. 35, 2676–2686 (2002). | Article | ChemPort |
Daneshjou, K. & Shahravi, M. J. Mech. 25, 117–128 (2009).
Segletes, S. Int. J. Impact Eng. 32, 1403-1439 (2006). | Article

 

[KarlD]

It odd that in mainsteam science you sometimes get fraud like this and it usualy gets found out eventualy, but when you are dealing with new age science and someone says well where are the results of the double blind tests for your miraculous magic magnetic water all we get is 'oh well double blind testing does not work'

 

[ramonmercado]

Now the transport minister has been caught at it!

Iranian ministers in plagiarism row
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090930/ ... 1578a.html
Nature investigation reveals duplications in papers by science and transport chiefs.

Declan Butler

EXCLUSIVE


Kamran Daneshjou faces plagiarism questions.A. TAHERKENAREH/EPA/CORBIS

Two Iranian government ministers have co-authored peer-reviewed papers that duplicate substantial amounts of text from previously published articles, according to an investigation by Nature.

Three journals have already confirmed that they will retract papers co-authored by Iran's science and education minister Kamran Daneshjou, a professor in the school of mechanical engineering at the Iran University of Science & Technology (IUST) in Tehran. Before being appointed science minister in early September, Daneshjou was also head of the interior ministry office overseeing the disputed presidential elections in June that kept Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in power. A further publication by Iran's transport minister and his deputy has also been called into question.

In an online story last week (see Nature doi:10.1038/news.2009.945; 2009), Nature revealed that substantial sections of text in a 2009 paper in the journal Engineering with Computers1 by Daneshjou and IUST colleague Majid Shahravi were identical to a 2002 paper2 by South Korean scientists in the Journal of Physics D. New York-based Springer, which publishes Engineering with Computers, has told Nature that it will retract the paper. The work also duplicates smaller amounts of material from papers given by other researchers at conferences3,4,5,6, as well as a 2006 article7 in the International Journal of Impact Engineering.

Similar duplications also appear in other papers by the same co-authors in Springer's Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology (JMST)8, the Taiwanese Journal of Mechanics9 and the Iranian journal Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Journal10 — the text of which is almost identical to that in their paper in Engineering with Computers1.

“This is a bitter blow to Iranian academic society, it's a scandal.”


Mark de Jongh, publishing editor of the JMST, says that the journal intends to retract the second Springer article8. "I conclude that the paper in question contains about 50% identical content as the formerly published article" in the Journal of Physics D2, he says.

The Journal of Mechanics intends to take similar action. "We have just finished the investigation of this serious case and the result showed that the paper by K. Daneshjou and M. Shahravi indeed plagiarized other works," says Yi-Chung Shu, executive editor of the journal and a researcher in mechanical engineering at the National Taiwan University in Taipei. "This paper will be definitely retracted."

Senior Iranian scientists have called for an inquiry into the affair, and an Iranian parliamentary commission is considering an investigation.

"This is a bitter blow to Iranian academic society, it's a scandal," says Ali Gorji, an Iranian neuroscientist based at the University of Münster in Germany.

Transport dispute

Nature's investigation has also revealed that a paper11 co-authored by Hamid Behbahani, Iran's minister of roads and transportation, also contains large amounts of text from earlier articles by other researchers. The paper was co-authored by Hassan Ziari, Behbahani's deputy minister, and president of the national rail company, the Islamic Republic of Iran Railways. Both authors hold positions at the IUST, while the third author, Mohammed Khabiri, was a PhD student at the time. Behbahani was also the supervisor of Ahmadinejad's PhD in transportation engineering and planning.

Much of the text and the results of their 2006 article11, in the journal Transport, is identical to sections from three earlier publications12,13,14.

"Two of my papers were copied-and-pasted by the plagiarizing paper," says Bin Jiang, a researcher at the University of Gävle in Sweden. "This is outrageous."

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"The plagiarism is obvious," concurs Jiang's co-author, Christophe Claramunt, a scientist at the Naval Academy Research Institute in Brest, France. "We look forward to appropriate action from the editor of Transport."

Nature has attempted, without success, to contact each of the Iranian authors of all the disputed papers. However, two Iranian news websites have published a response attributed to Majid Shahravi (see http://www.tabnak.ir/fa/pages/?cid=65586 and http://alef.ir/1388/content/view/54040). That statement refutes any plagiarism and defends the originality of the paper in Engineering with Computers1, based on the fact that it had passed peer review and had cited the 2002 Korean paper2.

References
Daneshjou, K. & Shahravi, M. Eng. Comp. 25, 191-206 (2009).
Lee, W. , Lee, H.-J. & Shin, H. J. Phys. D 35, 2676-2686 (2002).
Quan, X. et al. in Fifth Asia–Pacific Conference on Shock and Impact Loads on Structures (eds Jones, N. & Brebbia, C. A) (WIT Press, 2003); available at http://hsrlab.gatech.edu/AUTODYN/papers/paper152.pdf.
Yaziv, D. , Mayseless, M. & Reifen, Y. in Proc. 19th Int. Symp. Ballistics (ed. Crewther, I. R.) (Technomic Publishing Company, 2001); available at http://hsrlab.gatech.edu/AUTODYN/papers/paper111.pdf.
Sauer, S. , Hiermaier, S. & Scheffer, U. Paper given at 10th International Symposium on Interaction of the Effects of Munitions with Structures, San Diego, California, 7–11 May 2001; available at http://hsrlab.gatech.edu/AUTODYN/papers/paper126.pdf.
Quan, X. & Birnbaum, N. in Proc. 18th Int. Symp. Ballistics (ed. Reinecke, W. G.) (Technomic Publishing Company, 1999); available at http://hsrlab.gatech.edu/AUTODYN/papers/paper092.pdf.
Segletes, S. B. Int. J. Impact Eng. 32, 1403-1439 (2006).
Daneshjou, K. & Shahravi, M. J. Mech. Sci. Tech. 22, 2076-2089 (2008).
Daneshjou, K. & Shahravi, M. J. Mech. 25, 117-128 (2009).
Daneshjou, K. & Shahravi, M. Mech. Aerosp. Eng. J. 3, 69-86 (2008).
Ziari, H. , Behbahani, H. & Khabiri, M. M. Transport XXI, 207-212 (2006).
Forbes, G. Transportation Research Circular Issue Number: E C019 B-6/1 (Transportation Research Board ISSN, 2000); available at http://www.urbanstreet.info/2nd_sym_proceedings/Volume 1/Ec019_b6.pdf.
Jiang, B. & Claramunt, C. Paper given at 5th AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science, Palma, Spain, 25–27 April 2002; available at http://www2.hig.se/~bjg/s6_Jiang.pdf.
Jiang, B. & Claramunt, C. GeoInformatica 8, 157-171 (2004).

 

[ramonmercado]

Fraud is not proven yet but it looks dodgy.

Row at US journal widens
Three papers caught up in journal probe of review process.
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/091009/ ... 9.985.html
Elie Dolgin


Lynn Margulis.Javier PedreiraA dispute between the editorial board of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and an academy member has put the fate of three studies in question. In the wake of rows over a controversial paper published by the journal online in August — but not in print — two additional papers linked to the same academy member are now in limbo.

Last month, PNAS editor-in-chief Randy Schekman wrote to academy member Lynn Margulis, a cell biologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, asking for "a satisfactory explanation for [her] apparent selective communication of reviews" for a paper she ushered through the peer-review process. Schekman made the demand after a report in Scientific American cited Margulis as saying that she obtained "6 or 7" reviews before netting "2 or 3" favourable ones that recommended publication.

The paper in question, by Donald Williamson, a retired zoologist at the University of Liverpool, UK, claims that the transition of caterpillars into butterflies can be explained by ancient butterflies inadvertently mating with velvet worms1 . This controversial idea is supported by Margulis, who is a strong proponent of the hypothesis that new species form by symbiotic mergers between unrelated organisms. She denies any wrongdoing and stands by the work.

But Williamson's claims met with scepticism from many scientists after the paper was published online. "If you know the literature on insect metamorphosis and insect development, you would know right away that this is absolutely ridiculous," says Fred Nijhout, an insect developmental biologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

Publication hold-up
In last month's letter to Margulis, Schekman says that Williamson's study would not be printed, and that another paper, co-authored by Margulis and already accepted for publication, would not move forward until his concerns were addressed. That paper, led by Øystein Brorson of the Vestfold Hospital in Tønsberg, Norway, and co-authored by Margulis, describes a novel antibiotic treatment for Lyme disease, which is caused by primitive, spiral-shaped bacteria called spirochaetes — one of Margulis's areas of expertise.

Brorson says that he submitted page-proof corrections on 31 August and that the paper was slated for publication on 7 September. The new treatment, he claims, is 800 times more effective than doxycycline, the existing drug of choice against the disease. "It is very important to get this paper published," he wrote in an e-mail to Nature.

“Of course I'm not withdrawing any of these papers at all.”
Lynn Margulis
University of Massachusetts
Now another paper put forward by Margulis is also being challenged, Nature has learnt. The paper, by John Hall, a computational biologist based in New York City who is an adjunct professor in the same department as Margulis, argues that genes from spirochaetes contributed to the genomes of advanced organisms, further supporting the theory of trans-species mergers.

The paper was accepted by three anonymous reviewers, but was questioned by a member of the academy's board who found fault with Hall's method of comparing gene sequences. In a letter on 4 September, Schekman urged Margulis to withdraw Hall's paper.

"Of course I'm not withdrawing any of these papers at all," Margulis says.

Schekman declined to comment, citing the confidentiality of the review process. "We are working with Dr Margulis and our conversations are ongoing," says PNAS spokesman Jonathan Lifland. "We don't want to respond to any questions or complaints she has through the media."

Communication breakdown
Like Williamson's paper, Hall's study was 'communicated' to PNAS by Margulis through a system called 'Track I' that allows academy members to bring papers written by non-members to the journal's attention and then choose the reviewers. Last month, the journal announced that it would eliminate this option with effect from July 2010 — a decision not driven by Margulis's submissions, says Lifland. "It was bad timing."

Meanwhile, Margulis has replied to Schekman's complaints. In a 5 October letter, obtained by Nature, Margulis details the eight people she asked to review Williamson's manuscript. Three scientists submitted formal reviews and three researchers declined to evaluate the paper — two because they were unavailable, one because he felt the topic was outside his expertise. Two amateur-naturalists also offered their comments, although Margulis didn't originally include these critiques because she felt they would be disqualified from the PNAS review process owing to the reviewers' lack of formal credentials.

Margulis says she regrets the omissions, but stands by her decision to ask non-academics to share their views. "My modus operandi is to ask competent people, whether or not they have a PhD," she says.

Hall is preparing his own response to Schekman regarding the board member's critiques, which he says are misguided. "I don't think this guy has done his homework," Hall says. "I'm still very hopeful that [the paper] will be published." The journal's editorial board evaluates all PNAS submissions before final acceptance, regardless of the submission route.

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," says Martin McMenamin, a palaeontologist–geologist at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, who reviewed Williamson's paper and recommended publication. "But I'm willing to lower that bar," he says, because evolutionary biologists are an "entrenched group" who can be reluctant to "consider alternate ideas".

"We will win one way or another because this is science," Margulis wrote in an e-mail. "I followed all the rules and submitted more reviews than I needed, and if they definitively reject these papers I will make it very clear to the reading public (because they make it clear in their anonymous letters) that, as usual, they don't like my ideas."

References
Williamson, D. I. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA doi: 10.1073/pnas.0908357106 (2009).

 

[ramonmercado]

Immunologist faked data
http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/56192/
Posted by Katherine Bagley
[Entry posted at 1st December 2009 08:16 PM GMT]


An immunologist duplicated images and falsified data in a study on regulating factors of autoimmune disease published in Nature Medicine in 2006, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) reported.


Image: FlickrCreativeCommons/Julo

According to ORI's statement, released this fall, Zhong-Bin Deng, then a postdoc at the Medical College of Georgia, manipulated data to show that the autoimmune regulator (AIRE) gene controls the growth and maturation of invariant natural killer T cells, or iNKT. iNKT cells are thought to be a driver of autoimmune diseases that affect the endocrine system. The research was supported by funds from the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

In the paper, which was cited three times, according to ISI, figure 1a showed that the number of iNKT cells is lower in AIRE-deficient mice than in those with normal or elevated AIRE levels. But an investigative committee at the Medical College of Georgia found that Deng substituted flow cytometry plots of AIRE-saturated thymus and liver tissue for those with normal levels of AIRE. The researcher also substituted plots for AIRE-deficient bone marrow tissue with those for tissue with normal AIRE levels. Figure 2 in the supplementary materials contained duplicated flow cytometry plots in four different graphs, representing four cases of falsified data.

Deng claimed he observed that the number of iNKT cells was indeed reduced in AIRE-deficient mice in earlier experiments, "but wanted to have the best pictures for the manuscript submission," a spokesman for the ORI wrote in an email to The Scientist. He added that Deng said he had created the falsified figures for an internal review, but was not able to see they were included in the final manuscript after he was removed as first author during the submission process.

The paper was accepted by Nature Medicine on May 3, 2006 and appeared in the June 2006 issue. Soon after its publication, a researcher in the same field of immunology as the study's authors, but who didn't work directly with them, approached the journal about the identical flow cytometry plots in separate figures. "The authors didn't really have an explanation for the duplication (which also involved cutting and pasting, making it less acceptable that it had been a clerical error)," Juan Carlos Lopez, the chief editor of Nature Medicine, wrote in an email to The Scientist. "[But] they stood by the data and claimed to have the correct results on file."

"We didn't realize there was a problem until we got a notice from the journal to go back and check the raw data," said Qing-Sheng Mi, now at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Michigan, and the study's lead author. At that point, Deng admitted to substituting the figures and resigned from his position at the Medical College of Georgia.

The journal retracted the paper in September 2006, stating that the "number of figures affected means that the appropriate response is to retract this paper," but that the original data supported the study's conclusions.

The university then conducted a formal investigation of the incident. Frank Treiber, Vice President for Research at the medical college sent the investigation's final report to the ORI in February 2007. "This type of behavior directly contradicts [the Medical College of Georgia's] mission... and is not tolerated at this institution," the college said in a statement to The Scientist.

"This is obviously bad, but at least they did not doctor up all the data," said Luc Van Kaer, an immunologist at Vanderbilt University who cited Deng's study after its retraction. Since the retraction, two papers published by other groups in the Journal of Autoimmunity and European Journal of Immunology have further demonstrated the role of AIRE in iNKT cell development and autoimmune diseases, he said.

Since leaving the Medical College of Georgia, Deng has continued his immunology research at the University of Alabama -- Birmingham and has published studies in the Journal of Immunology, Diabetes, Hepatology, the American Journal of Pathology, and the International Journal of Cancer.

According to the terms of Deng's voluntary settlement agreement with the ORI, any institution that receives US Public Health Service funding for research he conducts in the next two years must submit a supervisory plan for the immunologist's activities to the ORI. The research team must also provide proof to the ORI that his research was monitored and accurately reported in any of the project's publications. Deng is also prohibited from serving on Public Health Service advisory committees and acting as a peer reviewer.

Deng did not reply to email and phone requests for comment.

 

[ramonmercado]

Beard of The Prophet! Theres something rotten in Iranian science.

Plagiarism scandal grows in Iran
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/091209/ ... 2704a.html
Investigation finds more cases of duplication in publications co-authored by ministers and senior officials.

Declan Butler

EXCLUSIVE

Nature has uncovered further instances of apparent plagiarism in papers co-authored by government ministers and senior officials in Iran. The spate of new examples raises questions about whether such incidents are symptomatic of conditions also common in other developing countries — such as difficulties with English or pressure to acquire academic credentials as a prerequisite for promotion — or whether they are also linked specifically to the Iranian regime, where growth of a merit-based university culture has been undermined by political appointments and purges of reform-minded scientists (see page 699).


Research papers co-authored by Hamid Behbahani contain text from other works.A. KENARE/AFP/GETTYAn earlier probe1,2 revealed extensive plagiarism in a paper co-authored by transport minster Hamid Behbahani and four papers co-authored by science minister Kamran Daneshjou. The revelations received wide coverage in the Iranian media and blogosphere. Scientists inside and outside the country have called for investigations, as well as for stronger ethical oversight in Iran's research institutions.

Daneshjou, a mechanical engineer at the Iran University of Science & Technology (IUST) in Tehran, was head of the interior-ministry office that oversaw this year's disputed election that kept President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in power. In October, the Iranian parliament's commission for science and education held an informal inquiry into the four Daneshjou papers. Although it made no official conclusion, it effectively cleared Daneshjou after his co-author, IUST colleague Majid Shahravi, took responsibility for the papers' contents in the Iranian media — although both Shahravi and some members of the commission also maintain that the papers contained originality. Three of the four papers have now been retracted by the journals in question — the fourth was in an Iranian journal.

The paper3 by Behbahani, an IUST researcher who supervised Ahmadinejad's PhD, has not been investigated, although it seems to be almost entirely put together from three earlier articles by different authors2. It was retracted by the journal Transport in October.

Behbahani has publicly said that the paper did not constitute plagiarism because only parts of the article were identical to earlier work. He challenged the allegations of plagiarism, calling them a "media attack, far from fairness and integrity" and "an illegitimate accusation".

Nature has now uncovered yet more instances of apparent plagiarism in papers from Behbahani and some of his co-authors.

One paper4 on asphalt-road resistance — by Behbahani's Transport co-authors Hassan Ziari, a deputy minister of roads and transportation whom Daneshjou recently appointed as head of Payame Noor University in Tehran, and Mohammed Khabiri, then a PhD student at the IUST — contains many sections that are identical to a 2005 paper5 by scientists in Pakistan.

And two 2008 papers6,7 on strengthening asphalt roads, co-authored by Behbahani and Ziari with PhD student Shams Noubakhat, also contain duplicated material. The first6 includes multiple passages from three earlier papers8,9,10 and the second7 is also largely taken from three other papers10,11,12.

One scientist familiar with the field, who asked to remain anonymous, says that he has difficulty making sense of the first paper's results, and that some data in it6 are identical to those in one of the earlier papers by different researchers8. "That the two sets of results could be identical is improbable," he says. Behbahani and Ziari did not respond to requests for comment. Muhammad Atif Ramay, managing editor of the Journal of Applied Sciences Research in which both papers were published, says that the journal has withdrawn the articles from its website pending further investigation.

Also in question is a 2008 paper on modelling pollution in Iran13, which is co-authored by one of the 37 members of the Iranian Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution, Mohammad Ali Kaynejad, an environmental engineer at Sahand University of Technology in Tabriz, Iran. The paper almost entirely duplicates a 2001 conference paper14 on modelling pollution in Hungary.

The Iranian paper acknowledges the original source of the model, although the authors wrote that it was "tested via the simulation of a photochemical oxidant episode that took place in Tabriz, Iran in 2007". But Alison Tomlin, an environmental modeller at the University of Leeds, UK, and a co-author on the Hungary model, says that the Iranian paper contains "no new results" and "is definitely a copy". It includes computer simulations purportedly of Iranian data, but they match the Hungary figures — and the background map outlines Hungary, not Iran.

The first author of the Iranian paper, Esmaeil Fatehifar, an environmental engineer at Sahand University of Technology, places the responsibility on another member of the team. "He said these are measured data about Tabriz Petrochemical Complex," he says. "I thought he was right and accepted it." Fatehifar says he intends to cancel the team member's PhD plans. He adds that Kaynejad had "not seen that paper" even though his name is on it. Kaynejad did not respond to Nature's interview requests.

Questions have also been raised over work co-authored by Ali Reza Ali-Ahmadi, education minister in the previous government of Ahmadinejad. A 2006 paper15 on supply networks co-authored by him includes many sentences and paragraphs that are identical to those in three earlier papers16,17,18. Mika Ojala at Tampere University of Technology in Finland, a co-author on one of the earlier studies, says that in his opinion this is not coincidence. Ali-Ahmadi could not be reached for comment. Babak Amiri, an IUST researcher and a co-author on the paper, says that a draft version of the paper was accidentally submitted before it was checked by himself or Ali-Ahmadi. "I apologize for this big mistake," he says.

ADVERTISEMENT


Nature has also learned that the US National Academy of Sciences earlier this year removed a chapter from a 2003 book19 on a US–Iranian workshop. Ironically, the chapter, authored by Hassan Zohoor, secretary of the Academy of Sciences of the Islamic Republic of Iran, was called 'The impact of moral values on the promotion of science'. It was withdrawn because it substantially duplicated a 1999 paper20 by Douglas Allchin, a historian and philosopher now at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

Zohoor says that he never saw Allchin's paper, and that he only prepared a draft of the paper, leaving others in his office to "develop it and add the literature review". Zohoor says that the explanation of the staff member involved — that the copying happened "quite accidentally and as a mere negligence" — is inadequate, and that he intends to write to Allchin to apologize. "In my entire life I've never copied anyone else's work," says Zohoor.

See Editorial, page 699.

References
Butler, D. Nature doi:10.1038/news.2009.945 (2009).
Butler, D. Nature 461, 578-579 (2009). | Article | PubMed | ChemPort |
Ziari, H., Behbahani, H. & Khabiri, M. M. Transport XXI, 207-212 (2006).
Ziari, H. & Khabiri, M. M. J. Eng. Appl. Sci. 2, 33-37 (2007).
Kamal, M. A., Shazib, F. & Yasin, B. J. East. Asia Soc. Transport. Stud. 6, 1329-1343 (2005).
Behbahani, H., Ziari, H. & Noubakhat, S. J. Appl. Sci. Res. 4, 96-102 (2008).
Behbahani, H., Ziari, H. & Noubakhat, S. J. Appl. Sci. Res. 4, 282-286 (2008).
Awwad, M. T. & Shbeeb, L. Am. J. Appl. Sci. 4, 390-396 (2007). | Article | ChemPort |
Lucena, M. C. C., Soares, S. A. & Soares, J. B. Mater. Res. 7, 529-534 (2004). | ChemPort |
Emery, S. J. & O'Connell, J. in Proc. 7th Conf. Asphalt Pavements for Southern Africa 29 August–2 September 1999, Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe (CAPSA, 1999).
Hofsink, W., Kong Kam Wa, N. Y. & Dickinson, M. N. in Proc. 8th Conf. on Asphalt Pavements for Southern Africa 12–16 September 2004, Sun City, South Africa (CAPSA, 2004).
Hanyu, A., Ueno, S., Kasahara, A. & Saito, K. J. East. Asia Soc. Transport. Stud. 6, 1153-1167 (2005).
Fatehifar, E., Alizadeh Osalu, A., Kaynejad, M. A. & Elkamel, A. in Proc. 3rd IASME/WSEAS Int. Conf. Energy & Environment 23–25 February 2008, Univ. Cambridge, 330-335 (2008).
Lagzi, A. S. et al. in Air Pollution Modelling and Simulation (ed. Sportisse, B.) 264-273 (Springer, 2002).
Aliahmadi, A. R., Jafari, M. & Amiri, B. in Proc. 2nd National Conf. Logistics & Supply Chain 20–21 November 2006, Tehran (2006).
Hallikas, J., Karvonen, I., Pulkkinen, U., Virolainen, V.-M. & Tuominen, M. Int. J. Prod. Econ. 90, 47-58 (2004). | Article
Ojala, M. & Hallikas, J. Int. J. Prod. Econ. 104, 201-213 (2006). | Article
Harland, C., Brenchley, R. & Walker, H. J. Purchasing Supply Management 9, 51-62 (2003). | Article
The Experiences and Challenges of Science and Ethics: Proceedings of an American-Iranian Workshop (NAS, 2003).
Allchin, D. Sci. Educ. 8, 1-12 (1999). | Article

 

[ramonmercado]

Lancet urges China to tackle scientific fraud
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8448731.stm
By Doreen Walton
BBC News

scientist
China's scientific contribution has grown significantly in the past decade

The British medical journal the Lancet has urged China's authorities to do more to tackle scientific fraud.

Recently, dozens of papers were found to be faked. "China's government must assume stronger leadership in scientific integrity," the Lancet says.

China ranks second behind the United States in the number of academic papers published every year.

Following a wave of scandals in 2006, China's government announced reforms aimed at preventing misconduct.

Richard Horton, editor in chief of the Lancet, believes the authorities have not gone far enough and the pressure on academics to publish papers for degrees and job promotions creates problems.

"In China, unfortunately, there are great incentives to commit fraud," he said.

"The measures haven't got to the root cause which are these conditions which encourage scientists to lie.

"When you make prestigious jobs and large amounts of money closely tied to publication, that creates conditions for fraud."

If science in China cannot be trusted in certain areas, that undermines China's economic growth
Dr Richard Horton
The Lancet

Last December, two teams of researchers at Jinggangshan University in central China were found to have falsified 70 papers published in 2007.

"It's very tricky. The problem has existed for a long time," says Dr Lu Yiyi, Associate Fellow at Chatham House's China programme.

She believes universities need to teach about the importance of honesty but that the government will have a very difficult job stamping out fraud.

"There weren't strict rules established in the first place so a large number of people went though the system and got their professorship.

"If you apply stricter rules retroactively then their past work would be vulnerable to criticism," said Dr Lu.

China wants to become a research superpower and its influence is booming economically and scientifically.

Dr Horton said it is vital China's government takes action.

"Science in any country is a major source of economic growth," he said.

"The concern is if science in China cannot be trusted in certain areas that undermines China's economic growth."

 

[ramonmercado]

Accused scientist dies
http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/57197/

A researcher who was suspected of fabricating data, and who hired actors to lie at his misconduct trial in New York in 2004, was found dead last week. An autopsy failed to pinpoint a cause of death, the Buffalo News reports. Former University of Buffalo psychologist William Fals-Stewart was accused of fudging the number of volunteers in addiction studies, but was cleared of the charges following the actors' testimony in 2004, according to ScienceInsider. Fals-Stewart then sued the school for $4 million, claiming the suit damaged his reputation. As a result, the state attorney general investigated the case further, and discovered the false testimony last month.

 

[RabidReader]

Former University of Buffalo psychologist William Fals-Stewart was accused of fudging the number of volunteers in addiction studies, [...]

With a name like that, who can blame him?

 

[ramonmercado]

Scientist Steven Eaton jailed for falsifying drug test results
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-e ... e-22186220

Eaton had been selectively reporting research data since 2003

A scientist who faked research data for experimental anti-cancer drugs has been jailed for three months for falsifying test results.

Steven Eaton, from Cambridgeshire, has become the first person in the UK to be jailed under scientific safety laws.

Eaton, 47, was working at the Edinburgh branch of US pharmaceutical firm Aptuit in 2009 when he came up with the scam.

If it had been successful, cancer patients who took the drug could have been harmed, the court was told.

Edinburgh Sheriff Court heard how Eaton had manipulated the results of an experiment so it was deemed successful when it had actually failed.

Stopped work
When bosses at his firm scrutinised his work, they noticed that it was fraudulent.

They stopped work on the project that Eaton was involved in, and reported him to watchdogs at the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency.

Investigators there discovered that Eaton had been selectively reporting research data since 2003.

Continue reading the main story
“
Start Quote

He is unlikely to ever undertake this type of work ever again”

Jim Stephenson
Defence solicitor
Defence solicitor advocate Jim Stephenson said his client had given up working as a scientist.

He said: "He is unlikely to ever undertake this type of work ever again."

The story emerged after Eaton was convicted last month under legislation called the 1999 Good Laboratory Practice Regulations.

Sentence had been deferred so that the court could obtain reports about Eaton's character.

Sheriff Michael O'Grady said: "I feel that my sentencing powers in this are wholly inadequate. You failed to test the drugs properly - you could have caused cancer patients unquestionable harm.

"Why someone who is as highly educated and as experienced as you would embark on such a course of conduct is inexplicable."

Speaking after the case, Gerald Heddell, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency's director of inspection, enforcement and standards, said he welcomed the conviction.

He added: "This conviction sends a message that we will not hesitate to prosecute those whose actions have the potential to harm public health."

 

[ramonmercado]

Professor resigns after falsified AIDS vaccine study wins $19mn grant
Published time: December 28, 2013 01:27
http://rt.com/usa/professor-faked-aids- ... rants-895/

An Iowa State University professor has resigned after admitting that he falsified AIDS research. The academic claimed he had discovered that rabbit blood could be used as a vaccine for the virus.

Dr. Dong-Pyou Han was an assistant professor in biomedical sciences at ISU when he spiked rabbit blood with human blood to make it appear as if an AIDS vaccine was working better than it truly was. Those results helped Han’s research team, and ISU, earn $19 million in research grants from the National Institutes of Health, officials told the Des Moines Register.

Dr. James Bradac, one of the heads of the AIDS vaccine grants at the National Institutes of Health, said the human blood came from donors whose bodies had produced antibodies to HIV, the virus that can cause AIDS.

“This positive result was striking, and it caught everybody’s attention,” Bradac said. “It’s difficult to pull something like this off and not be detected. This went on for several years and wasn’t detected until January 2013.”

Han’s boss, Dr. Michael Cho, a biomedical professor who serves as head of the ISU team, told investigators that the team received approximately $10 million of the $19 million prize after announcing the “exciting results,” which turned out to be falsified. Approximately $4 million of the grant money has yet to be paid out, and officials said they had not made a decision as to whether it would be.

Dr. Han, who is thought to have hid his deception from the rest of the team, was identified as the suspect in August and resigned in October.

“A large amount of what they were focusing on was flushed down the toilet because of this one guy,” Bradac told the Des Moines Register. He added that it would be unusual for a university to refund grant money, though he refused to speculate on this particular case.

Han’s findings were first questioned when other universities discovered they were unable to replicate his results when conducting the experiment in the same way.

“At Iowa state’s request, the research samples in question were examined by researchers at another university; they confirmed samples had been spiked,” said ISU spokesman John McCarroll.

The government announced its findings in a Federal Register report on Monday. The conclusion indicates that investigators found out the results were forged based on an inquiry by the university and a “detailed admission” from Dr. Han earlier this year. Han has agreed to avoid any contracting or subcontracting work with a government agency for three years, and has promised not to serve in any type of “advisory capacity” to the US Public Health Service.

 

[ramonmercado]

Eminent scientist Lewis Wolpert sorry for using others' work
Leading biologist and author regrets 'careless' inclusion of unattributed work in his acclaimed 2011 book on ageing
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/j ... thers-work
Nicola Davis
The Observer, Sunday 19 January 2014

Professor Lewis Wolpert

Professor Lewis Wolpert says he takes 'full responsibility' for the inclusion of unattributed passages in his book. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod

Professor Lewis Wolpert, the eminent developmental biologist and author, has admitted incorporating unattributed text from a variety of sources in his recent popular science books.

Published by Faber and Faber in 2011, You're Looking Very Well was described as exploring "the scientific and social implications of our ageing population in an engaging, witty and frank investigation tackling every aspect, from ageism to euthanasia to anti-ageing cream".

It has been found, however, to contain more than 20 passages that have been taken directly from academic papers, websites and Wikipedia with no indication that they were penned by any author other than Wolpert himself. The book has now been withdrawn from sale.

A champion of the popularisation of science, Wolpert, a fellow of the Royal Society, is a former chairman of the society's committee on the public understanding of science. He has written on issues such as the origins of belief, embryonic development and depression, from which he himself has suffered.

Wolpert has faced a previous claim of lifting paragraphs from other people's work. An investigation last April into a review copy of his forthcoming book Why Can't a Woman Be More Like a Man? also found passages taken from uncredited sources, leading to publication being suspended shortly before its release date. The book was rescheduled for release in May this year.

In an email statement issued by Faber and Faber, Wolpert said: "I acknowledge that I have been guilty of including some unattributed material in my last book to be published, You're Looking Very Well (2011) and in the initial version of my yet unpublished book Why Can't a Woman Be More Like a Man?. This lack of attribution was totally inadvertent and due to carelessness on my part. It in no way reflects on my publishers, Faber and Faber, and I take full responsibility. When downloading material from the internet as part of my research, and coming back to it after a gap of maybe weeks or sometimes months, I simply did not recall that I had not written these passages myself. It is my sincere hope that no damage was done to any individual by the inclusion of any of these passages.

"I am grateful to the journalist who drew these lapses to my attention, and would like to stress that I would never ever knowingly claim someone else's material as my own."

In response to the findings, Faber and Faber have confirmed that You're Looking Very Well has now been withdrawn from sale. Despite suggesting that Wolpert's age might be a contributing factor to instances of "borrowed" text found in Why Can't a Woman be More Like a Man? when first alerted to the situation last April, Faber declined to issue further comment regarding You're Looking Very Well when contacted last week.

Fellow biologist Professor Jim Smith, director of the National Institute of Medical Research, said: "Lewis Wolpert is one of the most distinguished scientists of his generation, who has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of developmental biology and to the public understanding of science. He is now in his mid-80s, with a history of ill health, and I am disappointed that his publishers appear to have not provided him with enough support to have prevented mistakes like these."

Last year primatologist Jane Goodall came under fire for taking passages of her book, Seeds of Hope, from a variety of sources, including Wikipedia, while in 2012 science writer Jonah Lehrer fell from grace amid accusations of plagiarism andmade-up quotes.

Wolpert's 2011 work received widespread acclaim, with the sociologist Laurie Taylor describing it in an article for the Rationalist Association as "a detailed and resolutely empirical tour of everything there is to be known about effects of ageing". But several passages came straight from academic papers.

Examples include descriptions of how the elderly are viewed in today's society. Wolpert writes: "Yet [elderly people in the United States today are not treated with the respect and reverence to which they were accustomed earlier in history. The gerontologist David Hackett Fischer notes that literature from seventeenth-and eighteenth-century colonial America stressed deference and respect for the elderly. He maintains that the elderly were] viewed with [a feeling of deep respect and reverence], which contrasts with more modern views. Today the elderly [have become virtual outcasts of society, many living on the fringe, often in retirement communities or in nursing homes. In modern industrial] societies [emphasis and value are placed on youth, with advertising geared towards and glamorising the young. To the extent that advertising acknowledges the elderly individual at all, it attempts to make him or her appear younger. The elderly are victims of mistaken beliefs and irrational attitudes] promoted [largely through the various mass media]."

However, the words within the square brackets can be found in two consecutive paragraphs of an academic paper entitled The Elderly in Modern Society: A Cultural Psychological Reading, by Alan Pope, published in 1999. "The words that the author used were indeed my own original work which was published several years previously in a journal called Janus Head,"

Dr Pope said: "I have no idea how the circumstance might have arisen whereby these words were used without proper attribution."

Several passages in the book appear to have been taken, near-verbatim, from the paper Evolutionary Theories of Aging and Longevity by Leonid Gavrilov and Natalia S Gavrilova, published in the journal The Scientific World in 2002. Commenting by email on the findings, the authors were sympathetic to the much-respected scientist, stating: "We are glad that some excerpts from our article are published in this book. We would be even more happy if our paper is referenced, or included in the 'further reading section' of the book."

You're Looking Very Well does include a chapter entitled Further Reading; however, Wolpert omits to mention the many websites and academic papers, including those by Pope, Gavrilov and Gavrilova. Nor are they credited in footnotes or within the text.