Officials at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute are taking action to retract at least six published research papers and correct 31 others due to allegations of data manipulation.
The investigation was prompted by a blog post by British molecular biologist Sholto David, MD, who identified almost 60 papers published between 1997 and 2017 that contained image manipulation and other errors. Some of the papers were authored by Dana-Farber’s chief executive officer, Laurie Glimcher, MD, and chief operating officer, William Hahn, MD, covering topics such as multiple myeloma and immune cells.
David, a researcher focusing on research integrity, pointed out numerous errors and irregularities, including the duplication and modification of images across multiple experiments to represent different days within the same experiment.
He compared the manipulation to tactics used by “hapless Chinese papermills” and concluded that “a swathe of research coming out of [Dana-Farber] authored by the most senior researchers and managers appears to be hopelessly corrupt with errors that are obvious from just a cursory reading the papers.”
“Imagine what mistakes might be found in the raw data if anyone was allowed to look!” he wrote.
Barrett Rollins, MD, PhD, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s research integrity officer, declined to comment on whether the errors represent scientific misconduct, according to STAT. Rollins told ScienceInsider that the “presence of image discrepancies in a paper is not evidence of an author’s intent to deceive.”
The emergence of new artificial intelligence tools is enabling data sleuths, like David, to identify data manipulation and errors more easily.
This investigation closely follows two other inquiries into the published work of Harvard University’s former president, Claudine Gay, and Stanford University’s former president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, which resulted in both of them resigning from their positions.
Sharon Worcester, MA, is an award-winning medical journalist based in Birmingham, Alabama, writing for Medscape, MDedge, and other affiliate sites. She currently covers oncology, but she has also written on a variety of other medical specialties and healthcare topics. She can be reached at sworcester@mdedge.com or on Twitter: @SW_MedReporter.