Harvard University’s affiliated cancer hospital, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, announced it will retract six studies and correct 31 others after a blogger exposed dozens of papers by several authors of having manipulated scientific images.
The president and CEO of the institute, Dr. Laurie Glimcher, has four papers being investigated that molecular biologist and blogger Sholto David alleges helped build her career.
“No doubt Laurie built her career on papers like this one, in Nature Immunology (2003), which includes some impressive contributions to art, but perhaps not to science,” David wrote in his blog For Better Science, in which he explains how multiple scientific images were manipulated.
The investigation of the scientists who hold faculty positions at Harvard Medical School comes at a time when the embattled university’s former president, Claudine Gay, resigned after multiple allegations of plagiarism.
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David’s blog shows multiple images that he claims were Photoshopped or copied and pasted to manipulate data papers published between 1999 and 2017.
Research image included in Clinical Cancer Research (2012) that blogger Sholto David says is manipulated.
“In 2012 this epic fail was published, Irene gained ethical approval to aspirate bone marrow from cancer patients and healthy volunteers, but Figure 1 includes three obvious duplications,” David wrote about a paper coauthored by Ghobrial.
“Wouldn’t the volunteers be furious after undergoing such an invasive procedure?” he added. “Can the data from a paper like this ever be rehabilitated?”
Conservative activist Christopher Rufo who along with others broke the story of Gay’s plagiarism told The Daily Wire said more accusations are to come.
“There is an enormous amount of fraud, plagiarism, and falsification in elite academia,” he said. “What we’re seeing with Claudine Gay and the Harvard teaching hospital is only the beginning. It’s time for Americans to stop subsidizing this madness.”
Requests for retractions and corrections on some of the papers have been sent to the journals they were published in, according to the Wall Street Journal.
“The presence of image discrepancies in a paper is not evidence of an author’s intent to deceive,” Barrett Rollins, Dana-Farber’s research integrity officer and chief science officer emeritus, told CNN on Monday.
“That conclusion can only be drawn after a careful, fact-based examination which is an integral part of our response,” he added. “Our experience is that errors are often unintentional and do not rise to the level of misconduct.”
The institute has not determined if the scientists have committed misconduct. The institute is currently conducting a review of more than 50 papers written by three additional researchers: program director of the Jerome Lipper Multiple Myeloma Center, Dr. Kenneth Anderson, Director of the Clinical Investigator Research Program, Dr. Irene Ghobrial, and Chief Operating Officer, Dr. William Hahn.
Harvard University did not respond to a request for comment.