DFCI Review of Scientific Studies for Alleged Data Falsification

Written by Amie Dahnke on . Posted in Current News

Boston-based Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI), an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, acknowledged on Jan. 23 that it would seek retractions for six research papers and corrections for an additional 31.

The retractions and corrections come after Sholto David, a British molecular biologist, called out many of DFCI’s top brass, including CEO Dr. Laurie Glimcher and Chief Operating Officer Dr. William Hahn, alleging they had published papers that duplicated or manipulated data.
The investigation comes less than a month after Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, resigned amid pressures resulting from plagiarism allegations.
Officials at DFCI have reported that the review process for some of the studies in question began over a year ago. The institute’s research integrity officer told news outlets that while not all 57 claims are being reviewed, several complaints are serious and credible enough to warrant investigation.

Mr. David also implicated other top DFCI researchers, including Senior Vice President for Experimental Medicine Dr. Irene Ghobrial and Harvard Medical School professor Dr. Kenneth Anderson, in data falsification. According to STAT News, of the studies Mr. David flagged, Dr. Glimcher co-authored four, Dr. Ghobrial 14, Dr. Anderson 29, and Dr. Hahn 17. Drs. Ghobrial and Anderson co-authored seven papers. In 19 of the studies, one of the top four DFCI researchers was the senior author, meaning they served as the study’s supervisor. Dr. Glimcher was the senior author of one study.

“A swathe of research coming out of DFCI authored by the most senior researchers and managers appears to be hopelessly corrupt with errors that are obvious from just a cursory reading the [sic] papers,” Mr. David wrote.

In an interview with Nature, Mr. David said he flagged 58 papers. When presented with the claims, DFCI claimed that data were collected at other institutions for 16 or 17 of the studies. DFCI disputes three of the papers Mr. David flagged, according to the interview.

In many cases, Mr. David found images in papers that were duplicated, stretched, obscured, or spliced together in a way that indicated purposeful attempts to mislead readers.

“The level of data forgery is pathetically amateurish and excessive,” Mr. David wrote in his blog, “For Better Science.” “Billions of dollars were burned for this cancerous trash science, but it made many academic careers, some got very rich, and entire dynasties established themselves at Dana Farber.”

The papers in question focused on immune cells and cancers like multiple myeloma. Some of the papers have been cited as many as 3,000 times; many have been published in top journals like Cell and Nature.

One of the most common issues Mr. David found within the DFCI researchers’ work centered around the results of western blots. The western blot is a test method used to detect proteins. Mr. David found these blots were often copied and pasted across different experiments, giving the impression that a specific protein had been identified. In other instances, the blot image has been copied and stretched or rotated via Photoshop.

In one study, Mr. David found an image of mice from the first day of an experiment seemingly duplicated on Day 16 later in the experiment.

Mr. David’s “detective” work is aided by AI technology, which allows him to pore over studies, analyzing images to detect such anomalies. Forums like PubPeer allow individuals like him to connect with researchers about potential issues with studies. Mr. David has published 2,000 comments on PubPeer. He typically focuses his time on studies from China, which has different research standards than the United States. He turned his attention to the DFCI after stumbling upon irregularities within some of the work of their scientists, The New York Times reported.

The Epoch Times has attempted to contact DFCI’s research integrity officer for comment.

Source: Epoch Times

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