Bungles, Lies
& Fraud.
Office
of Research Integrity of PHS -
1. In 1984 Robert Gallo announced his sole discovery of HIV virus, when credit should have have been shared with French researcher Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute. In 1983 Luc Montagnier, of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and colleagues reported the lymphadenopathy retrovirus, LAV, to possibly be the virus responsible for AIDS. A year later, after Montagnier had inadvertently mislabeled samples of a more aggressive strain of the LAV virus - called LAI (the code for the patient it had come from) - to Rabert Gallo of the NIH. Gallo claimed that a retrovirus he called IIIB was the causative virus of AIDS. Subsequently, sequencing data revealed that IIIB was virtually identical to LAI, which suggested that Montagnier was likely the true scientific trailblazer (but the exact truth may never be known).
2. Cold Fusion - Stanley Pons & Martin Fleischmann announced in March 1989 they had achieved nuclear fusion by an electrolytic method under laboratory conditions at room temperature. Never repeated - error in measuring?
3. In 1989 cardiology data is falsified by NIH funded Harvard cardiologist, John Darsee.
4. August 1990 Hubble telescope mirror flawed - required a correction mission by NASA Shuttle astronauts in 1993.
5. June 1999 Victor Nonov of Lawrence Berkeley Labs reports creation of heaviest 'new' element (Ununoctium 118). Summer of 2002 retraction announced when follow-up experiments failed to duplicate the element's synthesis, and reanalysis of the original data could not confirm its decay sequence.
6. Summer of 2002 - Hendrick Schon of Bell Labs made up data on superconductivity & organic electronics; over 12 papers had to be retracted.
7. Fall 2004 - The Genesis satellite mission was launched in August 2001 on a journey to capture samples from the the Sun. Samples of solar wind particles, [Solar wind is a stream of highly charged particles that are emitted by the sun] were collected on ultra-pure wafers of gold, sapphire, silicon and diamond, and were to be returned for analysis by Earth-bound scientists. On Sep 08, 2004 the satellites parashutes failed to open and it crashed into the Utah desert. The capsule was lost and it held billions of charged atoms, a total haul no bigger than a few grains of salt, that were harvested from solar wind on the five collecting disks during the 884-day, $260 million mission.
8. Obesity research Eric Poehlman fabricated 17 applications for federal grants and in March of 2005 was barred for life from seeking federal funds and his name was added to the Public Health Service Office of Research Integrity List of Misconduct. In late March the name of Gary Kammer, of Wake Forest U., was added to the list after he admitted fabricating research findings and making up 2 families pedigrees, protein kinase values, and their properties. Kammer is barred from receiving federal fund until 2008.
9. Research reported in May 2005 by a team led by Hwang Woo Suk, a South Korean scientist, raised expectations that Human stem cells derived from embryos cloned from the skin cells of individuals with a disease or injury could be readily obtained for therapeutic use. By the end of the year, however, the report had been discredited, and the results of his other stem-cell work had fallen under scrutiny.
10. A University of Pennsylvania postdoc, extensively manipulated data in three published papers according to an Office of Research Integrity (ORI - list) announcement released last month (July 2007). Kristin Roovers, was working on cell cycle dynamics in the lab of Morris Birnbaum at the U. Penn School of Medicine and had faked 19 panels of Western blot data, which appeared on 11 figures in 3 studies published between 2001 and 2003.
11. A former Asst. Prof at Harvard & Brigham and Women's Hospital admitted to falsifying data in a sleep apnea study the Office of Research Integrity reported the first week of April 2009.
12.
July
2009: two scientists,
J. Thomas & J. Contreras of UAB, falsified data on 16
papers & $23 mil in grants over 8 years falsely reporting they
performed double kidney removals on rhesus macaques in experiments
testing two immune suppressing drugs, which allowed animals to live
& inflate effectiveness of the drugs. Both have resigned and
agreed to a 10 year ban on funding.
13. June
2011: a former post-doc, Philippe
Bois, in biochemistry at St. Jude Children's Hospital, used
misleading data for one image in a 2005 J. Cell Biology &
completely faked another image in M&CB article published that
same year.
14. Aug 5, 2011: The ORI announced that Sheng Wang, a former Asst. Prof. BU School of Medicine fabricated data published in two 2009 papers in the journals Onogene and Molecular Endocrinology. Wang is ineligible for federal funding for 2 years.
15.
April of 2012: The Office of Research Integrity found that Peter
J. Francis, an associate professor at the Casey Eye
Institute of Oregon Health & Science University, fabricated data
on two grant applications that he submitted to the National
Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Eye Institute (NEI). He
discussed pilot experiments in which he injected retinal pigment
cells derived from Rhesus monkey embryonic stem cells (ECS) into
rats with retinal degeneration to improve their vision. He claimed
that the rats then grew new retinal cells with no noticeable side
effects. Upon investigation by the ORI,
Francis admitted that the experiments had never actually
been done and agreed to have his research supervised for 2 years, in
addition to
other restrictions.
16. Feb. 2015: Dong-Pyou Han,
ISU research professor pleads guilty to felony
charges* of making false
statement on a $1.4 million NIH grant in Iowa Federal Court.
17. July 2015: Plant biologist Olivier
Voinnet of Swiss federal Institute of Technology was found
guilty of research misconduct for willful misrepresentation of data.
18. November 2015: The office of Research
Intergrity (ORI) found that former Duke University cancer researcher
Anil Potti fabricated data on 6 grant applications & 9
now-retracted publications.
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